The Death of Public Architecture

The killing off of the position of Government Architect in New South Wales is simultaneously a symptom of the current malaise and a dire warning of what lies ahead. We already experience widespread trashing of the public estate, justified as a necessary measure to balance the New South Wales budget. At $35 million for a ninety-nine-year lease on the Lands and Education Department buildings in Bridge Street, this will take forever. A pub at Drummoyne, for comparison, sold for $34 million at the time of the Bridge Street deal!

This needs to be seen against the background of the death of the office of Government Architect after two centuries of invaluable service. In the US, the first Architect of the Capitol, with responsibility for Washington DC, was appointed by George Washington in 1793. The current AOC, Stephen Hallet, was appointed by Barack Obama. Architecture matters in Washington; much less so here in Australia, it would appear. George Washington also established the venerated Army Corps of Engineers. In Australia, Lachlan Macquarie established the Government Architect. Francis Greenway, an irascible talented architect condemned to death for forgery, later commuted to transportation to Sydney, was appointed Civil Architect in 1816. There have been twenty-three since. In the US, there is a strong respect for traditional institutions such as the AOC, something not shared in Australia. The death of the institution of Government Architect might seem a matter of minor public concern were it not a symptom what is wrong in the body politic of New South Wales. I mean the wholesale sell-off and trashing of the public estate for little visible public gain, to advantage banks and property developers.

This brings me to my subject, the exhibition at the State Library, “Imagine a City”, on the enormous contribution by the government since 1816 to framing a civilised society. What began initially as a chaotic penal colony was transformed into a far more ambitious project under the visionary direction of Lachlan Macquarie, who arrived in 1809. One wishes his ambition and vision were guiding the development of Sydney today. At no time before has Sydney grown at such a pace, or so comprehensively wherever you look.

Coinciding with the demise of the Government Architect, the “Imagine a City” exhibition is more a requiem than a celebration. The twenty-third Government Architect, Peter Poulet, has been stripped of essential staff, his role limited to providing advice, so he lacks the means to carry out his function in full measure.

A single telling example stands as a warning: our public civic heritage, the buildings that give Sydney its meaning, are the result of 200 years of work by the Government Architect. The critical resources required to conserve what remains in public ownership have gone—permanently. The team of forty stonemasons, heritage roofers and scaffolders, established in 1977 at Alexandria, who maintained and performed safety checks on some 650 state-owned schools, hospitals, courts, fire stations, railway stations, museums, parks and galleries in Sydney and regional New South Wales, was dismissed in 2015. The break-up of this group of skilled stonemasons, many of whom had to be recruited from England, Portugal, Italy and Lebanon, is one further instance of the political vandalism being practised by the Baird government. What is less well understood is the loss of the Alexandria stockpile of yellowblock, known as “yellow gold”. The stockpile is essential for the maintenance of existing heritage buildings, which attended the loss the stonemasons’ skills, and further endangers New South Wales’s architectural heritage.

Between 1816 and 1822, Greenway designed some eighty-two works. Less than a quarter survive today. Their simple classical grandeur, proportions and scale are astonishing. Greenway’s contribution to Sydney represents a great architectural treasure. Even a sophisticated French artist such as the nineteenth-century visitor Jacques Arago was astonished:

majestic mansions, houses of extraordinary taste and elegance, [and] fountains ornamented with sculptures worthy of the chisel of our best artists … the principal buildings exhibit themselves in a very original manner … and have their places supplied by structures of hewn stone, ornamented with pleasing sculptures and embellished by balconies … You would imagine that our best architects had deserted Europe, and repaired to New Holland.

Greenway’s architecture is the most visible reminder of Macquarie’s ambition to raise up fallen humanity. The existence of such impressive architecture says much about how crucial a role is played by imagination and vision in leadership, if society is to encourage what is best in human nature and assist humanity to redeem itself by offering a second chance.

Of the twenty-two Government Architects since Greenway, not all were talented, but mixed among them are such illustrious names as Mortimer Lewis, Edmund Blacket, James Barnet, Walter Liberty Vernon and George McRae. They designed many of the outstanding public buildings we cherish today that set Sydney up and many a country town besides. Their monuments spread across the face of New South Wales in numerous schools, hospitals, courthouses and jails, the visible symbols of law and order. Not everything they designed was built. One recalls James Barnet’s gorgeously resplendent but unrealised State Library design with regret, the new Parliamentary Buildings for Sydney by Walter Vernon in 1897, and Michael Dysart’s futuristic 1962 design for a Museum of Arts and Sciences, the Powerhouse Museum.

With the prosperity that followed the end of the Second World War, the Government Architect’s office was kept busy supplying primary and secondary schools, notably the doughnut high schools of the 1960s. Its contribution to public education included new college and university buildings such as Fisher Library, school dental clinics, psychiatric facilities and centres for the mentally handicapped. The range of building types expanded to meet the needs of an increasingly complex society. Not every­thing went as planned: the thin Binishell concrete libraries constructed by pouring concrete over an inflated membrane settled and cracked and had to be demolished.

Between 1865 and 1890, the Government Architect designed 169 post-and-telegraph offices connecting New South Wales with the world via the phenomena of cheap postage, universal timekeeping and telephony. At W.L. Vernon’s retirement it was said he left a monument in nearly every town. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Government Architect constructed the framework for a civilised European society.

Before the Sydney Opera House in 1973, the General Post Office was Sydney’s unchallenged centrepiece. Much has changed since. These days Sydney is a crowded forest of office and apartment towers—each desperate to be different, yet alike in their desperation—that shut out the sunlight.

The architectural drawings in the “Imagine a City” exhibition highlight the importance of drawing, a skill unfortunately now lost. The watercolour renderings offer a brilliant record of stylistic change. The fact that architects were once capable of such accomplished drawings will come as a revelation to many visitors. Few architects can draw today. Drawing is a lost skill, a remnant from the Renaissance, when painters and sculptors also did architecture. Nowadays architects pretend they are artists. But computers have made drawing obsolete, with disastrous results, since drawing is absolutely intertwined with design. The Italian word for drawing, disegno, also meant “to design”. It is not surprising that architecture produced from computers is little more than graphic design.

From this perspective, the “Imagine a City” exhibition could not be more timely. It reminds us what truly responsible and effective government is about. It also highlights the folly of selling off the public estate and its finest heritage assets to be redeveloped according to the commercial imperatives of private corporations. A good government, acting in the public interest, does not deliberately pillage and trash the public estate, but that is what is happening in New South Wales. Responsible governments add to the public estate and deliver essential properly targeted services, backed by inspiring public architecture.

It is tempting, under current circumstances, to compare Mike Baird with Lachlan Macquarie. The difference in approach could not be more stark. Macquarie lacked funds so he improvised by using convict labour to build what was needed. Baird has taxing powers, GST money from the federal government, yet, from a much stronger position, he resorts to selling off the state’s valuable heritage to private developer corporations.

Kenneth Clark once suggested that civilisation consists of books and stone buildings. Macquarie, judged by his behaviour, understood this. If stone proved too expensive, he settled on brick, giving Sydney a suite of sweetly proportioned Georgian buildings that are remarkable in their simple geometrical perfection and integrity. They survive as permanent reminders of Macquarie’s high-minded ambition to create, not the hell-hole described by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, but an industrious society of free men. About which, Prince Charles memorably remarked, “The only thing the British did wrong was to send convicts.”

For Baird, civilisation would appear to consist of football stadiums and harbourside casinos for high-rollers. What has he given us? A casino-hotel that overshadows and despoils Sydney harbour; three monster office towers that shut the harbour off from the city, that no one would voluntarily wish to work in so enormous and dehumanising are the floor plates; redevelopments that cater to the financial whims of favoured developers but which lacking essential services; and in prospect at Waterloo, a housing development with a density of 70,000 people per square kilometre.

The truth is that there was more enlightenment, more vision, in 1816 than there is today in 2016. The death of the Government Architect’s office, along with public architecture, is just one more ugly warning signal.