 | SHIPWRECK LOOKOUT Neeson Murcutt Architects’ highly refined viewing apparatus at Homebush Bay.
REVIEW Philip Thalis PHOTOGRAPHY Brett Boardman
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The approach to the
brick platforms of
Shipwreck Lookout.
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The project’s viewing
apparatus includes three
stainless steel mirrors.
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One
of the two steel platforms for
viewing the shipwreck.
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Looking from the wrecked
pontoons toward the brick
platform with mirrors and
telescope.
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Looking across
the brick platform and seat,
with Homebush Bay beyond.
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The crisply defined platform and seat atop a tumble of recycled bricks.
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The precision of the
bricks platform contrasts
with the rough mound
of recycled brick.
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That nebulous domain around Homebush Bay, now
known as Sydney Olympic Park (SOP), is again in
transition. The pre-eminent venue for the 2000
Olympic Games, the area is embarking on a process
of transformation to become an integral and
integrated part of metropolitan Sydney. Indeed
Sydney Olympic Park is one of the city’s greatest
opportunities for coordinated urban projects.
Sydney Olympic Park primarily consists of two
complementary parts: an urban core set within
extensive parklands. Both parts are under the
control of the Sydney Olympic Park Authority
(SOPA). The core, currently a grand and empty
“Sports Canberra” dictated by SOCOG for the
staging of the Games, is to be revitalized by an
ambitious programme of urbanization. Structured
around the main Olympic elements such as the
railway station and central boulevard, the public
domain is being intensified, and significant
development proposed.
At 425 hectares in area, the parklands are among
the largest and most strategic in metropolitan
Sydney. Homebush Bay’s decades of environmental
degradation have been overlaid in recent times by
regenerative best practice. The jumble of history,
topography, waterways, ecology and habitat, former
uses, restricted access and built elements makes the
parklands at SOP fragmented and disconnected. The
juxtaposition of discrete and disparate spaces brings
to mind a landscape version of Venturi’s notions of
spatial ambiguity, circumstantial distortion and
violent superadjacency, or the bricolage of Rowe’s
Collage City. Successive park plans over the last
decade have made little attempt to give a legible
order to the place, eschewing opportunities for a
unifying plan such as that of Centennial Park.
Accordingly Sydney Olympic Park has devolved as
a scattered pattern of autonomous and largely
unrelated pieces – something of an environmental
and landscape zoo.
Two new projects have recently been completed
by SOPA, further adding to the parklands’
heterogenous inventory. The new Brickpit Ring, by
Durbach Block Architects and landscape architect
Sue Barnsley, is extraordinary in its boldness and
scale. Shipwreck Lookout, by Neeson Murcutt
Architects and the subject of this review, is tiny,
but it is not modest in intent. Both projects are
generated in response to site interpretation and
place making.
Neeson Murcutt’s project is programmatically
simple: a path and three elevated platforms, with an
emphasis on accessibility, which allows visitors to
the part to better view the five shipwrecks clustered
at the head of Homebush Bay. Part of the progressive
dumping during the postwar era that partially
infilled the bay, the nondescript shipwrecks are
now heritage listed.
A bill of quantities for the project would be
unusually succinct – one telescope, three stainless
mirrors on steel extension arms, two galvanized
steel gangways, galvanized steel edging, a couple of
seats, a concrete slab and a pile of bricks. Landscape
elements consist of native ground covers, a gravel
path and an inscribed cast iron threshold. In
working with this apparently simple array of
elements the architects also had to negotiate a
complex web of disability access codes,
environmental protection and public safety
considerations.
Two attributes stand out – the use of brick and
the project as an apparatus for viewing.
Bricks are central to the project. The main
platform uses new and recycled commons to make a
gently inclined plane, which incorporates an angled
seat in diagonally cut bricks. Both the platform and
seat subtly inflect to the location of the shipwrecks,
to the vista up the bay, and to partially exclude the
intrusive new development nearby. The crisply
defined platform sits on a tumbled mound of
recycled bricks, which occupies the tidal zone and
thus limits the spread of the mangroves along the
foreshore. The project monumentalizes the
dimension and mass of the brick.
Neeson Murcutt’s use of recycled brick
resonates at a number of levels: the huge State
Brickworks operated nearby for over 70 years,
extracting the underlying clay deposits to leave
huge craters; the bricks were loaded onto barges
for distribution at roughly this point, and dumped
building materials were used to infill Homebush
Bay in the postwar era, in effect creating this site.
The architects evoke the ubiquitous use of bricks
across the suburban landscape.
The project carefully orchestrates processes
viewing. The approach sequence – from the
enclosure of the mangroves to the expanse of
Homebush Bay – gradually reveals the site and its
artefacts, allowing the discovery of the various
wrecks along the way. The architects use optical
aids for viewing the wrecks, some of which are in
the foreground and some more distant. Deployed on
the brick platform, the industrial-scaled mirrors and
the steel telescope are displayed, as the architects
make explicit, as “the quintessential apparatus of
the scenic lookout”.
In this small project Neeson Murcutt connect
with many of the best strands of Sydney
architecture from the postwar era. These
architectural values include an emphasis on the
relation to place, the scenography and experience
of the site, the importance of the ground plane, the
careful assimilation of the object in the landscape,
the intrinsic expression of structure and material,
and environmental responsiveness. These
approaches fuse a certain directness of means with
an ideological diffidence.
The project blends the particular skills and
interests of Rachel Neeson and Nick Murcutt, who
have now formalized what was previously a looser
working collaboration. Over fifteen years of
practice, Murcutt has explored operable pavilion
forms in natural settings with increasing
confidence. Neeson, whose undergraduate thesis
was on Sydney Bedrock, has recently undertaken
postgraduate study and teaching in Barcelona, and
won the Byera Hadley Scholarship with a topic on
tourism and public space. These experiences have
accentuated her understanding of the city and
cultural places over time, the urban art object, and
strengthened an intellectual rigour and attitude to
interpretation. Both have also taught extensively at
various architecture schools over the last decade,
investigating design intent and testing critical
capabilities.
One senses that this is an important project in
the clarification of Neeson and Murcutt’s
architectural intentions – a design thesis in
microcosm. As many small young practices would
attest, it is also a very welcome contrast to their
staple of domestic projects. It will be interesting to
follow their making of increasingly mature and
complex projects, of course depending on the scope
of future commissions. SOPA is to be commended
for promoting such an evocative cultural project,
one which is, disappointingly, a rare opportunity
in Sydney in recent times.
The success of the Shipwreck Lookout
demonstrates the architect’s discipline. The design
is generated from the site’s themes in an authentic
manner, rather than by extraneous stylistic concepts
or a priori agendas. The architects have created a
new place, enriched by association and deepened
meaning. A playfulness is expressed by tectonic
means – the aesthetic is the result, not the focus
of the design. Here there is no weak analogy or
arbitrary operation as a point of departure. The
project celebrates the essential, not the superfluous;
understatement, not overstatement; form, not shape.
It avoids the gratuity of the self-proclaimed avant
garde, having instead a confidently contemporary
expression and engagement.
As the Spanish architect Alejandro de la Sota
noted, “Themes simplify and offer us possibilities.
Architecture does not require that we have recourse
to it; it will appear all by itself.”
PHILIP THALIS IS A FRACTIONAL LECTURER IN ARCHITECTURE
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY, AND PRINCIPAL
OF HILL THALIS ARCHITECTURE + URBAN PROJECTS.
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Architect Neeson Murcutt Architects— project team Rachel Neeson, Nicholas Murcutt, Andrew Burns.
Client Sydney Olympic Park Authority—Barbara Schaffer. Optic specialist John Cooper. Engineer Patterson Britton.
Contractor ESD Land Management.
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