Sydney's Hinge

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2000 by Peter Davey

The first urban park to be created in Sydney for 100 years is a splendid amenity which is simultaneously a major new green link, and provides important and varied recreational facilities in the heart of the city.

Sydney is surely one of the most blessed cities on earth. It may have started as part of a penal colony, but history, geography and a benign climate made it one of the outstanding civic artefacts of the twentieth century (well, the centre at least -- the western suburbs are endless and could be anywhere in the new worlds).

The city was founded on a promontory sticking out into the magnificent natural harbour. By accidents of fate (and some pretty clever nineteenth-century planning), a huge part of the peninsula is green. Botanical gardens sweep south from the Opera House point, then join the Domain (the site of the continent's first farm) from which greenness moves round to Hyde Park, the big Beaux Arts formal axis of the city centre on the ridge of the promontory. An abominable American-style motorway chews through the middle of what was intended to be continuous green, but at least it has the grace to disappear into a tunnel under part of the Botanics, so the great concept is not entirely compromised.

The great green swath has recently been greatly enhanced by Lawrence Nield, as architect, and Elizabeth Mossop, landscape designer. The critical link between the Domain and the Beaux Arts axis was a rather ratty bit of green called Cook and Phillip Park (after the commander of the first British ship to make landfall, and the first Governor of New South Wales). Now, it has been ordered and made not only into the pivot of the green sequence, but a strange and very surprising public amenity.

College Street runs roughly north-south along Hyde Park. At its northern end is St Mary's Cathedral by William Wilkinson Wardell, and about halfway down is the James Barnet's Australian Museum. Wardell's Catholic cathedral is having the spires its architect intended (which is why it looks rather weird in these photographs). Barnet's museum is a solemn neo-Renaissance Victorian palace of learning which satisfactorily terminates the axis.

Between the two is the Cook and Phillip, which slopes down from the Hyde Park Ridge towards Yurong Creek and Woolloomooloo (formerly working class, but now pretty posh, as the descendants of its original inhabitants have moved out to the comfort of the western suburbs). Cook and Phillip is made to emphasize the relationship of the two monumental buildings, and to connect the green parts of the town as terraces which move down the slope eastwards in gentle sequence, preserving the magnificent existing trees. Its essence is derived from a single bold move. A long pool runs parallel to College Street, accentuating the axis between the monuments. Water lilies, reeds and sometimes, on hot days and nights, mists articulate the change between the heavily trafficked street and the park. Alongside that long pond is another which reflects the trees of the park, rather than the cathedral.

Below is more water -- several swimming pools, one 50m long for serious work, and the others, much less formal, for fun with lots of waves, hydrotherapy and similar aquatic delights. In the centre of a world city, this is an amazing resource: it can be used for very little cash from five o'clock in the morning to late in the evening. (One of the pleasures of sauntering down College Street in the evening is to glance down into the underground halls and see the strange and lively activity of a completely different world.) Though partly underground, the pool halls are filled with daylight because of the ingenious section.

At the north end of the composition, in front of the cathedral is a new parvis which is intended to be a place of congregation and recreation. In the complex, there are cafes, netball and badminton pitches, a playground for nippers, and an avenue for the elderly to dream in (which also connects the lower part of town with the ridge and is used by thousands of commuters a day). Nield says that what has been created 'is not a repeat of a nineteenth-century park. It is not a romanticized bit of the country brought into the city [as are the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Domain). We have challenged the old view of parkland as a passive space and turned it into an active place'. Perhaps he is right -- time will tell. It is the first new park in Sydney for 100 years. At the moment, it wonderfully adds to the manifold pleasures of the city.

Architect

Lawrence Nield & Partners, Australia (Joint Venture with Spackman & Mossop)

Design director

Lawrence Nield

Project architects

Bill Dowser, Kim Humphreys, Jane Williams

Project team

Victor Buryseck, Leanne Hodyl, Leny Lembo, Terry Roland, Derek Mah, Alvaro Gonzalos

Project team interiors

Malinda Dark, Damien Mulvihill

Landscape architect

Spackman & Mossop

Artists

Anita Glesta (park water garden sculpture)

Phillips Playford (leisure pool sculptures)

Wendy Sharpe (pool murals)

Photographs