High Point - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, June, 2001 by Amanda Forster

A residential tower boldly set in one of Sydney's inner suburbs surprisingly achieves human scale and intimacy by ingenious use of geometry while making an important urban statement that acts as a landmark in the city.

If you take a ferry from Circular Quay out into Sydney harbour and look back south towards the city, one tower seems to have become detached from the CBD and to have moved east behind the Opera House. Tall, slender and white, it seems much more elegant than the usually rather dull commercial towers in the business district, which gain their picturesque qualities from proximity to each other and the topography of the rising site overlaid with its Georgian grid. If you have binoculars or a telescope, it quickly becomes clear that the solitary tower is quite different from the others. It stands against the skyline on the ridge above Woolloomooloo, and seems to be almost frilly externally, with curving balconies setting up a detailed and animated contrapuntal pattern up the shaft, terminating in a generous wide cap at the top. Clearly, even from a distance, it is a residential building, with quite a different scale to the other towers.

Horizon Apartments has been created because of a quirk in local planning rules. Most of the suburbs round the ridge take their scale from the Victorian and early twentieth-century suburban terraces that line the streets, but one site in Darlinghurst was exempt from local height restrictions because it had been owned by ABC, a branch of the commonwealth (federal) government. Harry Seidler & Associates argued that a tower would be less of an obstruction to views than a building half the height and twice the footprint. The area and duration of shadows cast by a thin building would be much less than those of a lower one of similar volume. So the tall solution was accepted and the site's plot ratio of 4:l has allowed the tower to have 43 storeys, flanked by a pair of terraces of flats formed as town houses. The terraces overlook a rectangular garden that contains swimming pool and tennis court and which has no wall of buildings to the north so it can be open to the view and the sun (which shines from the north bel ow the equator). Under pool and planting is a multi-level car park for 500 vehicles which takes up the dramatic difference in level between north and south sides of the site.

The tower has two penthouses, under which are 18 three bedroom flats on six floors, then the middle of the tower is taken up with two bedroom units; the lowest five floors (above the double-height atrium) mainly contain single bedroom 'studio apartments' which look out over garden and view to the north. Views are the main determinants in the plan form of the tower, which opens in an arc to west, north and east. North-west, there is the huge hump of the Sydney Harbour Bridge with the dramatic CBD skyline emerging to its left. Then there is the Opera House, followed by the great sweep of the harbour with its inlets and islands, and right round to the north-east are the distant Heads, where harbour meets the Tasman Sea. As height increases, views become more panoramic, so balconies change orientation in the top quarter of the tower where the larger units are.

In the middle 24 floors, units have curved balconies that open off the living areas. Living and bedroom space is the same in each flat, so that they are interchangeable in plan. This allows balconies to move left to right on alternate floors, so providing choice of views, shade for the floor below, and creating the frilly effect which gives the tower its human scale. Bigger apartments on the upper floors have rather different arrangements, but the principle of shifting balconies from floor to floor remains the same. All living areas and main bedrooms have full-height glass walls, while secondary bedrooms and kitchens have strip windows. All glass is shaded either by a balcony above, or in some places by awnings.

Construction is reinforced concrete with prestressed concrete floors. Finishes in the flats are straightforward and simple to allow owners to make their own impact. The entrance hall is tiled in black marble and is dominated by a dramatic striped Op-art work by New York artist Sol Lewitt. Here is the only instance of applied colour in an otherwise highly controlled complex where materials and colours are reduced to a minimum. But a great deal of ingenuity has gone into exploring the potential of the unique site and creating a remarkable variety of dwelling types to avoid what, in less imaginative hands, might have been a dull and standardized residential tower, of which there are so many in these latitudes.

Architect

Harry Seidler & Associates, Sydney

Design

Harry Seidler

Associate

Peter Hirst

Project team

G. Williams, H. Shiraishi, L. Chapman, R. Freiverts

Structural engineer

Brucchle Gilchrist & Evans

Mechanical engineer

Addicoat Hogarth Wilson