 | RADARURBANITY What of the west? The NSW Goverment Architect’s Office has a series of strategies underway to help
revitalise Sydney’s west. Christopher Procter outlines the plans and asks how architects might learn to
work in an environment that is traditionally ignored.
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Images from SydneyCentral, the winning design in the Parramatta Road Urban
Design Competition, by Choi Ropiha, McGregor + Partners, Stanisic Associates Architects, VIM Design, The Revolution, King & Campbell, Hill PDA and TTM Consulting.
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Concept design by Hassell for new and upgraded stations for the
proposed Parramatta to Chatswood Rail Link. Hassell is now undertaking the detailed design for five underground stations between Epping and the proposed UTS station at Ku-ring-gai.
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NSW Government Architect Chris Johnson
arrived in the west of Sydney in 1995 at
Homebush Bay, already wondering how
settlement there ought to be improved. What
mattered to him was to render settlement
west of Sydney authentically. Is the west
part of Sydney? Is the west a single
homogeneous tract? Are architects equipped
to work where investment is wanting?
But if you think that the musings of
architects alone will cause real improvement
west of Sydney, think again. The works
recently mooted by the NSW government
are major infrastructure projects and their
impact has the potential to be dramatic.
An understanding of what drives the
western hinterland of Sydney has eluded
many architects bent on showcase
architecture – a sort of decorative
modernism, which has usually meant
pursuing some strain of minimalism,
beautifully photographed. It is unusual for
these single buildings to cause any lasting
change beyond their own boundaries. So, if
architects are indeed so blinded, and at the
mercy of their industry and its commerce,
from where will major structural
improvement to the west emerge?
The NSW government has in train an
initiative to revitalise Parramatta, a
Parramatta to Chatswood Rail Link, the $1
billion Western Sydney Orbital, the fanciful
Very Fast Train between Canberra and
Sydney, the Parramatta Road Design
Competition, and the probable relocation of
some 50,000 square metres of government
departments to Parramatta.
The thrust is two-fold. The first is to
redress ways of seeing Sydney’s western
hinterland. The argument forcibly put by
Penrith Councillor Clair O’Neill, of the
Western Sydney Regional Organisation of
Councils, is that the western suburbs belong
to the regions still further west – they look
toward the Blue Mountains, not east to the
city and Bondi.
“Don’t show me pictures of Venice or
Rome or Berlin because none of these
places have the characteristics that can
allow architecture to be effectively
reproduced,” O’Neill said in September
when she was joined by Chris Johnson, Paul
Keating, and RAIA NSW President Richard
Francis-Jones in a debate about whether
architects can contribute to the development
of the west.
O’Neill describes a region that is an
urban, rural and natural landscape, not
merely a suburban one. Most of it has never
been affected by the hand of an architect.
And on the occasions when architects have
been active, they have tended toward the
one-off statement building. Outcomes have
been both positive and negative, but, in the
main, architects have had marginal effect.
The initiatives of the NSW state
government provide an opportunity for
architects to now have a big impact. There
is an emerging acceptance that the west
has its own local identity distinct from
Sydney, and that the infrastructure and
housing markets there have long been
removed from the domain of architects.
The second part of the government’s
strategy is the mooted infrastructure
projects themselves. These are all publicly
funded in part or in full. In a project like
the Hassell-designed Parramatta to
Chatswood rail line, flamboyance can be
read as a gesture of hope. Indeed, the
theme of the Hassell scheme is
“connecting to the future”.
“Can Sydney be more than just the
harbour?” This is the headline of the
winning SydneyCentral design for the
Parramatta Road Design Competition. The
design embraces Parramatta Road’s
prevailing uses – showrooms, traffic, offices
and so on. But it rearranges these into
hybrid buildings: multiple uses and conflated
activities replace the existing separated,
singular and exclusive buildings. The
designers use architecture and
infrastructure to change the way we
perceive the centre of metropolitan Sydney
westward from the city proper to the linear
Parramatta Road.
At the other end of the market, Johnson
also uses prevailing building types. He wants
suppliers of housing to use architects in the
production of project homes and apartment
buildings. He sees no reason why architects,
alone in the building industry, should
produce works that are unique and
incapable of repetition. The very tools of an
architect’s trade are modular, repetitive and
mass-produced. Some architects might deny
it, but the odds are that their very mind is
modular, repetitive and mass-produced too.
They just refuse to let their pretence to
artistry be undermined.
Of course the contribution of architects
can have the effect of pushing up property
values. Should this put buildings beyond the
reach of the very consumers needing to be
served, then the exercise would be wasted.
Johnson approaches this cycle
innovatively. He knows that real, lasting
change will be created by yoking the
building industry to the architectural
industry, not by each acting in parallel,
linear separation. He wants to put the
systemisation of architecture and the
cyclic interest in project homes together
with the evidence that home owners are
increasingly demanding a say in the design
of their homes.
Borrowing from internet shopping and
from architectural systemisation, Johnson
has produced a “mix and match” shopping
cart for project home and apartment
delivery. The party yet to be convinced of the
value of this idea is the building industry
itself. Why change to another model when,
in their view, things are working fine? But
Johnson’s project home need not dumbdown
a house and thereby spook architects;
nor need it push up prices and threaten
the providers.
This is an exciting and game direction in
which to lead settlement patterns. It is also
an inflection of things attempted by others in
the past. It is reminiscent of John
Entenza’s efforts to involve Eames and
Neutra in California after World War II, and
of Pettit & Sevitt in Australia. This strategy
accepts that consumers have the
intelligence to determine their
environment, and that increasingly they
will demand it. It is also about ways of
seeing. Whether working on housing or
transport infrastructure, the architect who
moves west is enjoined to design for
urban, rural and/or natural areas. This kind
of environment has received little
architectural attention, and scant press,
although it is where the majority of
Australians live.
In NSW, the opportunity created by the
state government presents a challenge to
builders and architects to shift their
working habits. Indeed, the professional
habits in which architects take comfort –
confident in the safety of their repetition –
will be of little use when working in cities
out west. If this burst of government
activity can successfully involve architects,
it will doubtless equip those architects
with a resourcefulness to work anywhere.
Christopher Procter is an architect and a
principal of Project
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