The Betrayal of Barangaroo

The city has been viewed as an arena for consumerism. Political and commercial expediency has shifted the emphasis of urban development from meeting the broad social needs of the community to meeting the circumscribed needs of individuals. The pursuit of this narrow objective has sapped the city of its vitality.
—Richard Rogers, Cities for a Small Planet, 1997

New York in 2014 saw the advent of new super-high apartment towers climbing to staggering heights upwards of 540 metres with views across Manhattan’s Central Park. Such luxury apartments sell for US$100 million in a niche market serving super-rich foreign investors who are understandably nameless. The neighbourhood in which they are located was dubbed “Mistress Row”. Artistic niceties are irrelevant; the properties are effectively safe-deposit boxes in the sky.

What happens in New York will surely happen in Sydney—that is what it means to be a global city. It is impossible to quarantine a person, much less a city, from global threats. James Packer’s luxury two-storey penthouse on Barangaroo tower is expected to sell for as much as A$100 million, in line with New York prices. That is not the last of it: the three residential towers in the recent Modification 8 designed by Renzo Piano to shock and awe the locals, are only marginally less high than the 275 metres of the hotel-casino. Once the farmyard gate opens it is impossible to close, and there will be no assurance of a low-cost housing cross-subsidy as in New York.

Barangaroo, as it is called now, was launched early in 2005, five months before Bob Carr stepped down as premier. The international architectural design competition Carr set up was to develop twenty-two hectares of priceless waterfront land, formerly known as wharves three to eight, on Sydney’s western edge. It was known as the “Hungry Mile” because of its brutal stevedoring past. The international design competition was the second since the Sydney Opera House in 1957.

The designs of Lippmann–Rogers and Thalis–Berkemeier–Irwin stood out as meritorious. Former prime minister Paul Keating, the chairman of the competition jury, made it obvious he favoured the Lippmann–Rogers scheme and six months later the Thalis team were out of it. Thalis had completed a masters degree in Architecture Urbaine at Paris Belleville, and later co-authored Public Sydney in 2013.

An opinionated amateur, Keating nevertheless sought to control Barangaroo even after he quit its design review panel in March 2011. His main, if dubious, accomplishment was the introduction of a faux headland approximating the supposed pre-settlement outline constructed of 10,000 sandstone blocks. Sydney already has eighteen natural headlands and does not need another costing $177 million plus.

The commercial office towers to meet a suggested gross floor area of 330,000 square metres were of modest scale and were concentrated in the South Barangaroo precinct. The towers stepped down to lower medium-density housing in the middle precinct that merged with public parkland on the north. The competition conditions stipulated that public parkland should occupy at least half the site.

The Lippmann–Rogers scheme envisaged a Venice-like development of canals connecting it to the harbour at its back; the Thalis proposal was restrained and introduced a triangular wedge of high-rise towers at the south end reducing in height towards the north that pull back from the straight foreshore edge and merge into public parkland. Both were excellent: Lippmann suggested a sandy harbour beach for bathing; Thalis a series of slim towers to minimise visual impact on views through to Darling Harbour from the city. Both offered attractive low-key, civilised solutions, but both set a collision course with the commercial objective of a self-funding development at minimum cost to the government.

The Barangaroo Delivery Authority was established to administer the project. Henceforth, approvals became the exclusive province of the New South Wales Planning Department under the direction of the minister, thereby exempting Barangaroo from interference from Sydney City Council exercising its planning powers.

In the years since 2005 Lend Lease has exploited a succession of concept master plan submissions increasing the gross floor area of the buildings to 681,000 square metresin the most recent plan. This was done by turning the competition cross-section on its head. In Modification 8, the proposal, instead of towers stepping down to the north, step up from 205 metres to a 275-metre climax at the hotel-casino. Moving the hotel onto land was achieved at the expense of north precinct foreshore parkland that was intended “for the people of Sydney”.

It is almost impossible to make sense of what has happened. Even professionals find the documents baffling. Since Carr, there have been five state premiers, constant radical alterations in the plans accompanied by innumerable small adjustments over a ten-year period, with a further four years yet to run before the hotel-casino opens in 2019. Barangaroo lies hidden beneath an impervious shell that ensures no one is privy to or fully understands the financial details of what has gone down between politicians and developer.

Enter Richard Rogers, knighted in 1991 for his contributions to architecture and made a life peer in 1996 and adviser to several British prime ministers on environmental matters. His Reith Lectures are published in his book Cities for a Small Planet. Rogers became involved when he was approached by a talented local architect, Ed Lippmann, who suggested they work on a design together. Rogers, born in Florence in 1933 of British parents, is best known for his striking original design with Renzo Piano of the Centre Georges Pompidou in the Les Halles market district of Paris in 1971. The Lloyd’s of London headquarters in 1986 helped cement his reputation.

After the competition, Rogers’s London firm was appointed master planner for Barangaroo. Rogers is a rule-breaker accustomed to getting his way. No other individual could have cut through French bureaucratic resistance to such a radical scheme of colour-coded exposed ducts and vents, external lifts and an escalator across a flexible climbing frame of deep trusses in Paris—admittedly he was backed by former President Georges Pompidou.

He again demonstrated his flare for the unexpected by proposing a 213-metre five-star hotel (now the Crown 275-metre hotel-resort tower) and locating it outside the site cartilage in the 2010 non-complying concept plan. It was not merely outside—“Big Red” would stand on a narrow 150-metre-long pier in Darling Harbour. How it would work in practical hotel operational terms—guest arrivals, limousine and taxi drop-offs, luggage and parking and hotel services—was never explained.

In June 2010 Lend Lease reduced the pier length from 150 to eighty-five metres, but increased the gross floor area by 120,000 square metres. It also requested an increase in the building heights of Block 4c to 250 metres, Block 4a to 175 metres, and Block C to 209 metres. The hotel was pulled back to 159 metres, and the foreshore promenade was reduced from sixty to twenty-seven metres. By December 2010, the approved floor space of 388,300 square metres had increased a further 26 per cent above the February 2007 area.

Lend Lease insisted that a harbour location was essential in order to ensure guests enjoyed unobstructed views of the Opera House. The developer was refused permission to build above 180 metres. Any exemption to permit Sydney’s largest hotel to be 230 metres high would require the government to waive its planning rules.

The idea may have been a “loaded dog” calculated to produce maximum public outrage. That was the instantaneous effect of such deliberate usurpation of Sydney Harbour for private use. Or, it may equally have been a mad miscalculation on the part of Lend Lease. Whatever the truth, it sparked intense acrimonious debate before it was abandoned in August 2011.

On his arrival in Sydney in 1810, to his dismay, Lachlan Macquarie discovered that people built according to their fancy. On George Street houses were built on the roadway. Macquarie set about correcting this abuse by ordering a standard street width of sixty-six feet (the length of a cricket pitch) with no buildings closer than twenty feet to the roadway reservation.

Local Government and Shires Association president, Genia McCaffery, pointed out:

One of the key tenets of the Sydney Harbour Regional Environmental Plan is no building over the harbour. How can you expect orderly development from private developers when the government does not comply with its own controls?

Rogers countered:

Barangaroo is the city’s gateway. We have proposed a landmark building rising above a [150-metre-long] public pier … it will be made of steel and wood with struts and rigging, a contemporary interpretation of a three-masted schooner, designed to sit lightly in the water.

The office tower by Lippmann and Rogers at 8 Chifley Square in the CBD gives some idea of what the hotel might have looked like.

Further amendments followed which did little to quell public anger, an 11,000-signature petition was submitted to parliament, and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore resigned from the Barangaroo Delivery Authority, which forced the incoming O’Farrell government to establish an eight-week review chaired by Meredith Sussex and Shelley Penn from Melbourne in May 2011. The brakes had been applied, if only momentarily, to the runaway development wagon.

Frank Sartor, a former planning minister in the Carr Labor government, condemned the plan:

The hotel is a categorical planning mistake. The city does not need that sort of nonsense; you can go to Dubai if you want that. I thought Barangaroo was meant to be more about class than brass.

Rogers had ignored a two-century-old planning statute. Unbowed, he said he had “no reservations going where no private property developer has been allowed to develop before”.

One of the first orders of business facing Lend Lease was completion of the commercial office towers in the Barangaroo South precinct. Their size was unprecedented for Sydney. They also ignored the concept of a high spine of towers running north-south that sloped down either side, reversing the logic of having the highest towers southernmost to prevent overshadowing. The largest of Rogers’s three office towers, C3, now had a 2500-square-metre floor plate, 250 metres height, and total floor area of 115,291 square metres. Each tower radiated out in a fan towards the water from a single point. It was thought this would lessen the impact and widen view corridors towards the harbour, but it did the opposite by turning the two northern towers sideways on the view axis, a result most noticeable to apartment residents on Kent Street.

Each office floor is equivalent to thirteen houses. Grosvenor Place in 1988 was the first mega-tower. It was the result of merging two towers into one with a combined floor plate area of 2000 metres. Harry Seidler reduced the visual impact by wrapping two quadrant shapes around the core. The curved facades hide the enormous size of Grosvenor, a lesson lost on Rogers, whose rectangular round-ended towers appear more massive than they might. His three towers are at the extreme limit for natural daylight and outside views.

In February 2012 James Packer arrived and took control of the troubled hotel by waving a $1 billion blandishment at Barry O’Farrell. O’Farrell obliged and quickly rallied to the Packer cause. Packer’s company Crown already owned casinos in Macau and Melbourne, but he wanted a licence to operate a second casino in Sydney. The first licence was held by Echo Entertainment which operated the Star Casino across the water. Its monopoly was due to expire in November 2019.

For the Packer hotel to be viable, the O’Farrell government needed to grant Crown a restricted gaming licence beginning once Star’s ended. By October 2012 Packer had what he needed and in May 2013 he announced that the London firm Wilkinson Eyre Architects were the winners of a limited architectural design competition. Instead of Richard Rogers’s three-masted schooner, the replacement was compared to shells and molluscs to better relate it to the original inhabitants’ food source. James Packer pronounced his phallic erection an iconic landmark and compared it to the Sydney Opera House in a blare of publicity. Paul Keating joined in and compared the slinky twisting glass sheath to a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi. Others were less effusive.

Sydney Harbour is the city’s raison d’être. Architecture, with the notable exceptions of the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, has done little to improve on nature. The Sydney Opera House has increasingly become the measure against which new buildings are judged. Few people would suggest building a 275-metre-high casino next to Florence’s famous Duomo, St Petersburg’s Winter Palace, or London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. But James Packer is no Mohed Altrad, the Assyrian-born desert Bedouin who became a scaffolding tycoon in France and was elected world entrepreneur for 2015 in June.

The Sydney Opera House stands sixty-seven metres above sea level, the Harbour Bridge opposite, 134 metres. They serve as yardsticks and a measure of what is acceptable beside the harbour and structures surrounding it. At 275 metres the proposed Wilkinson Eyre hotel-casino is more than four times the height of the Opera House and violates the scale of buildings in the landscape. The prioritisation of money and celebrity is suggestive of a society that has lost all connection with meaningful values and social capital. Reacting to criticism, Chris Wilkinson conceded, “Of course it is controversial but most major new interventions are. Since it is likely to be built, we are just going to have to wait a few years, before we have the discussion on who is right.”

The choice of Barangaroo as the name of the East Darling Harbour development after Bennelong’s second wife contains an unsuspected irony. It could not be less fitting—Barangaroo was repeatedly beaten by Bennelong, which it is thought precipitated her premature death. Thus, Barangaroo is linked to the Opera House on many levels; husband and wife on either side of the steel curtain of the Harbour Bridge conjures up an unconscious, if ignoble, comparison. Each project was launched by a Labor premier (Joe Cahill and Bob Carr), each was the result of an international architectural competition. Each has generated heated debate and controversy and involved political manipulation. There, the similarities end. Chris Wilkinson would have people believe his casino-hotel is as elevated an architectural achievement, and a suitable counter-weight, to Jørn Utzon’s Opera House.

Barangaroo was violently opposed to European settlement. Lend Lease appropriated her name for its $12 billion project whose standout symbol and monument is a gambling casino-hotel exclusively privileging visiting Asian gamblers which Lend Lease hopes will become a new Sydney “iconic landmark”. Were she alive today, Barangaroo would surely be deeply aggrieved at finding herself betrayed yet again. Not only Barangaroo: the city, the people, the waters of the harbour which will lose its sunshine, its sparkle and colour—we are all betrayed to some degree.

The real value of the site is in excess of $6.6 billion. New South Wales citizens would be justified in thinking the payment of $500 million over ten years is not a fair exchange. Two Pritzker Prize architects, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, were engaged to hide from public notice the embarrassing reality and the ultimate emptiness of civic art betrayed by greed.