Sydney’s newest building promises the lot: vertical villages for architectural interest, breakout places for workers to socialise, a garden on the roof of the 43rd storey gazing over the harbour and more bike parking than anywhere this side of Amsterdam.
The developer, Lend Lease, promotes it as ”a concept for office buildings of the future”, a minimum six star-rated environmentally friendly tower that promises the ”greenest business address in arguably the world’s greenest business district”, and a ”game-changer that starts where other buildings leave off”.
And C4, as it is known, comes with high-level credentials, designed by the British Pritzker Prize winner, Richard Rogers, and his partner Ivan Harbour along with Australian Ken Maher, a winner of the highest award given by the Australian Institute of Architects, the gold medal.
Lend Lease promises that Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners will also design two ”sibling” towers to the north and south of C4, so the development application lodged this week gives the first real glimpses of how Barangaroo will look a few years from now.
Despite the building’s architectural pedigree, and a promise that it will be carbon neutral, the green-tinged lord mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, is not impressed.
”It hasn’t changed our position at all; it’s still too big,” Cr Moore said. It is not the height of the 180-metre tower that the City objects to, it is the width Lend Lease needs for the big floorplates its finance company tenants demand.
C4, the first of three planned Barangaroo office towers, will have floors of 2500 square metres compared with 1800-2000 square metres in Grosvenor Place, 1300-1700 in Chifley Tower and 1400-1600 in Governor Macquarie Tower.
To get them, the long sides of the rectangular building run 85 metres east to west, 30 metres longer than most other office towers and, if you believe the city planners, big enough to block winter sun to the building’s south.
To let in more sun, the City wants the top third of all three towers tapered. Lend Lease has declined, adding to the growing list of disputes mainly about size, in what is becoming an increasingly frantic and impenetrable planning process.
Lend Lease has applied to build C4 under the existing concept plan for Barangaroo even though it has already requested that plan be varied to allow it to build bigger and in the water.
While the company has the right to apply under the existing plan, critics say that it is doing things back to front and the only logical planning process is to resolve the concept plan first before deciding what goes in it.
It is not Lend Lease’s only application under the existing plan.
This week the Planning Minister, Tony Kelly, approved the company’s request to dig a vast hole for parking 880 cars, even though the plan that will determine what can go on top of it has not been approved.
Because the site was polluted by the gasworks once located there, Lend Lease will have to build an impermeable wall around its hole to keep out polluted groundwater. A Greens MP, David Shoebridge, and other critics say that pollution on the site should be fixed as part of an overall plan and that digging will shatter sandstone, risking the flow of polluted water into the harbour.
Whether these gripes from critics have any substance appears certain to become an issue for the Land and Environment Court.
The president of the Barangaroo Action Group, Ian Campbell, is ready to move.
”The most likely next development is a legal challenge to the excavation and to the concept plan,” he said.
And as lawyers prepare to debate the legality of the project, architects have already begun to argue about the aesthetic appeal of Barangaroo’s first tower.
The Architects’ verdicts
Ed Lippmann, Lippmann Partnership
It sets a benchmark of quality design. Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners is very well qualified. We’ve worked with them for 10 years. It’s very dynamic, legible architecture, which is what one would expect from Rogers’ office. The idea is to connect Kent Street and Wynyard down to the harbour and, because of the orientation of the building, there will be these view corridors between C4 and the future office buildings.
Forty storeys is not that tall compared to other city buildings, and the strategy of tall towers is a good idea. Fewer buildings that are taller is better than a lot of squat buildings - that is consistent with urban planning trends worldwide. It will … create a very vibrant pedestrian precinct and protect the rest of Barangaroo as a green precinct. The alternative is to encourage vast low-rise sprawling developments. That is not a good idea. The debate is very good. East Circular Quay was a bad example of what can happen, so discussion before the event is a good thing.
Tony Caro, Tony Caro Architecture
It’s a typically accomplished Richard Rogers building. For many years he’s been a pre-eminent architect on the world stage, with his signature buildings like Lloyds of London, and it continues that high-tech modern design philosophy he’s renowned for. When the original competition brief was written it was mandated that half the site would be a park, and there’s also extensive public space within the urban precinct to the south of the site. What that inevitably means is you’re going to have tall buildings. My limited understanding is that the gross floor space ratio over the entire 22-hectare site is going to be in the order of 3:1. Most central Sydney development is over 10:1. So by that measure it isn’t too dense; in fact it’s way less dense compared to other city development.
Chris Johnson, former government architect, member of the Barangaroo design excellence review panel
The approach that Richard Rogers and team use is to externalise the structure and the way a building is put together. That leads to a much more interesting building than a simple glass skin with nothing else. It’s looking an incredibly interesting building. Putting the lifts in three rises on the outside of the building gives it another dynamic in terms of breaking down the form of what’s a fairly long building, in an interesting way. The way that it relates to the podium at the base of the building is also pretty good.
Phillip Cox, Cox Architects
The scale of the building is totally incompatible with the delicate scales of King Street Wharf and Macquarie Complex which observe the balance between the waterfront and the CBD. The building completely overshadows the public domain of King Street Wharf in winter during the lunch period. Curiously, this building has its lift cores on the northern side yet it claims to be environmentally sensitive. The pedestrian domain and the creation of an urban typology of sheltered walks and promenades seem not to exist. The treatment of facades appears not to address varying orientation such as the western sun penetration. Bulk is still the main problem. And painted yellow steel doesn’t quite ring true on Sydney Harbour - it’s more attuned to the northern skies.
Stephen Buzacott, Buzacott Architects and author of the NSW branch of the Australian Institute of Architects submission on Barangaroo
It’s a startling representation of the proposed first office building in south Barangaroo. Not only is it portrayed with no context, it’s part of a plan that’s yet to be approved. It’s a breathtaking display of what the AIA fears, the lack of appropriate context on which to judge this development. The planning process has been dysfunctional. We’re not worried about height, it’s the bulk of the buildings that is the main issue, in that location on the harbour. High-rise on the water at Barangaroo is going to overshadow the very waterfront it is meant to be celebrating - that is the context.
John de Manincor, De Manincor Russell Architecture Workshop and Sydney editor of Architectural Review Australia
An office design by RSH is a no-risk option. A bigger risk for Sydney is the widely publicised hotel in the harbour, which deploys a similar (if not the same) aesthetic. If, and only if, the government agrees to let Lend Lease build in the harbour, the architectural response needs to take far greater risks - the city deserves it. The proposal repeats the aesthetics of any number of RSH office towers: the machine aesthetic with a splash of primary colour. RSH’s reputation and that of the practices likely to document the project suggest this will be an elegantly detailed building, yet formally it’s clumsy. The lift towers to the north (signature Rogers) help disguise the enormous expanses of glass to the south (carefully avoided in published images). It is form follows function where function is limited to a utilitarian brief: make me money! The sustainability agenda is laudable: a machine for production of power and water. The wider city has been forgotten. The users are not only the thousands of people that will occupy it, but also the millions of people who will experience it in the round. In this regard it is a missed opportunity for Sydney.
