 | PORTICO Tonkin Zulaikha Greer’s addition to the Scots Church Assembly Building constructs a lively encounter between old and new, offering an articulate challenge to current conservation orthodoxy.
REVIEW Laura Harding
PHOTOGRAPHY Michael Nicholson, Patrick Bingham-Hall, Brett Boardman
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Detail of the York
Street facade, showing
the transition between
the “old” and “new”
fabric. The massing of
the new work follows
the light wells and
verticality of the
original building.
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The competition-winning
proposal for
the Scots Church
assembly building,
1927.
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Scots Church
and Assembly Hall
c. 1931. Five floors had
been completed when
construction was halted.
Image courtesy of the
State Records Office of
New South Wales.
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Three-dimensional
study of the conversion,
which fills the volume
of the initial design,
but within the
contemporary sloping
height plane.
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An interior view of a
standard double-height
apartment.
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A new
apartment in the existing
heritage building.
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The northern facade
overlooking Lang Park. The
changing pattern of orange
solar blinds animates the
facades.
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Sketch of the
carefully worked facade.
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Oblique view of the
striking York Street
elevation. The stepped form
responds to the City of
Sydney’s receding height
plane, with a series of “sky
follies” meandering above
and between the towers.
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The debate surrounding the relationship between
contemporary architecture and heritage fabric has
been passionately contested over many decades, but
has, in recent times, been marked by the negotiation
of a comfortable architectural truce. It is now quite
acceptable to propose a forthright contemporary
addition if it formally defers to its heritage
neighbour. “Old” and “new” are at liberty to revel in
their own time and tectonic if the moment of their
meeting is orchestrated with deft, clinical precision
– pared down to the barest of minimums and
articulated by a wary and respectful distance.
Opportunity for such politely staged segregation
in the contemporary addition to Scots Church,
Sydney, was limited. Rosenthal, Rutledge and
Beattie’s Presbyterian assembly hall and church
offices were themselves substantially incomplete.
The result of an architectural competition held in
1927, overseen by the Institute of Architects and
adjudicated by Norman Weekes (the City Engineer
responsible for the 1920s design of Hyde Park),
Mr O. Beattie’s Neo-Gothic proposal was ultimately
intended to fill the envelope delineated by the city’s
150-foot height limit in a monumental expression of
“the universal character and inherent nobility of
Presbyterianism and the material consummation of
the church’s pioneer efforts in this new world of
Australia”.1 Only the first five floors and the
assembly hall had been completed when
construction work was abandoned following the
onset of the Great Depression.
Despite its evident rigour, the Scots Church
assembly building was marked by contradictions – it
displayed an eccentric simultaneity of ecclesiastical
and commercial expression, and an authoritative
self-confidence that was at odds with its incomplete
and fragmentary nature. The assembly hall is the
original building’s most curious and notable feature.
Buried within the centre of the building, its
elliptical form grazes the York Street facade but is
essentially hidden within its taut, orthogonal skin.
The only hint of its presence is offered on the
Margaret Lane frontage, where it momentarily swells
beyond the predominant structural line before
sweeping back into the building where it is
anchored in the thickness of the plan.
Tonkin Zulaikha Greer’s recent addition was
also a competition-winning scheme – the result of
a limited competition conducted as part of the City
of Sydney’s Design Excellence programme. The
contemporary brief called for the completion of the
building with a volume equivalent to that of the
original proposal. The new works needed to
accommodate a change in use from commercial to
residential and also address current planning codes,
which included a sloping height plane that brutally
pitched at 45 degrees from north to south along the site. The
angled height plane is the city’s rather blunt method
of preserving solar access to its important open
spaces – and Wynyard Park is located immediately
to the south of the Scots Church site.
Tim Greer of TZG credits the City of Sydney’s
competition process with broadening the discussion
and scope of important city projects at a critical
moment – the commencement of the design and
documentation process. The competition system is
valuable in that it gives the city a voice as the
“client” and lends the winning proposal a level of
support and acknowledgment that helps to steel it
for the fierce battles that inevitably accompany
commercially challenging projects of this type.
Despite this, the responsibility for defending the
integrity of the project still falls all too heavily on
the architect and, as such, the architecture itself
must be focused, shrewd and selective.
TZG’s new volume is highly respectful and
keenly curatorial in its response to the massing of
the original building. Eschewing the introduction of
a politely prosaic setback that would allow “new” to hover deferentially above “old”, the formal
massing of the building is drawn from the alignment
of the existing base and enmeshed with that of the
original, characterizing the new work as the
completion of a unified architectural project, as
opposed to an aloof, objectified addition. The York
Street elevation is particularly striking – the
dignified verticality of the structural rhythm is
carefully referenced in the new volume and the
three original light wells are remade as deep cuts
that retain the building’s formal intent as a cluster of
articulated city towers. On the northernmost tower,
where the lateral wall of the predominant housing
module is revealed as a comparatively solid
elevation, a tracery of linear seaming in the zinc
panels visually extends the compositional
patterning of the base, terminating at a level that
marks the city’s original 150-foot height limit.
The northern facade is constrained by the inset
alignment of the existing structure, which prevents
it from adopting the subtle articulation of the central
three bays and achieving the lean verticality of the
York Street side. On its southern faces, the new
work valiantly battles the strictures of the height
plane – pleating and folding the building’s facades
to enliven the ponderously even stepping imposed
by the commercial imperative to fill the envelope.
A series of folded interstitial roofs or “sky follies” playfully meander above and between the towers –
contemporary “grotesquerie” that culminates at the
northern edge of the building, where they hover
beyond the facade in a manner that Greer attributes
to “that Sydney tradition of doing anything to catch
a glimpse of the harbour”.
Moments of resistance that anticipated the
subversion of the architectural intent during the
construction process were strategically embedded
in the building, providing idiosyncrasies that have
enabled TZG to retain an extraordinary amount of
variation in apartment types and layouts. Fewer
than half of the 148 apartments resemble the
standard module, with elements such as the pleated
southern facades and existing heritage elements
used opportunistically to induce particularity and
complexity throughout the project. The standard
apartment type is deftly worked to maximize its
efficiency. Reminiscent of the Corbusian unite
module, each has a lower living level and a bedroom
mezzanine, spatially unified by a double-height
atrium and wintergarden that imbues each with the
vertical disposition of the gothic base. Thoughtful
but spare detailing offers moments of raw tactility –
plasterboard is peeled back to reveal the fretted
ceiling structure and define the dining space,
castellated steel stair risers respond to the shifted
alignment of the kitchen joinery below, while a
linear floor grille at the bedroom/bathroom
threshold provides unexpected glimpses between
levels. Such elements offset the jarring remnants of
site battles lost – including the clumsy imposition
of airconditioning elements in the bedroom spaces
that openly flout the building’s integrated natural
ventilation and cooling strategies.
The deliberate formal control of the new work is
contrasted with a more ambivalent and provocative
material sensibility that allows the fabric of the
addition to engage with contemporary
environmental demands. An intensively worked
facade unit offers each apartment a high degree of
environmental operability. Thin louvred panels and
a secondary layer of bi-folding doors with integrated
sashes permit controlled natural ventilation without
exposing the interiors to the acoustic intrusion of
the city’s traffic snarls. Alternatively, a large sliding
door set within red, tapered aluminium reveals can
be retracted to draw dramatic urban vistas and the
unimpeded life of the city directly into the domestic
realm. The shifting calibration of vibrant, orange
solar blinds forms a variable mosaic that records the
intermittent traces of human occupation and use on
the building’s facade.
With its addition to Scots Church, TZG has
constructed a lively, shifting discourse between
halves of an architectural whole separated by more
than three quarters of a century. The provocative
addition resists the imposition of a singular
ideological response to the original building, deftly
alternating between moments of considered
conservation and deliberate disparity. This approach
neatly negotiates the contradictory character of the
original building itself and opens the work to
contemporary environmental and programmatic
agendas. More broadly, the project proposes that
“old” and “new” be allowed to breach their
customary distance and tentative dialogue – so that
each may engage in a more vital and spirited
interrogation of the other. One hopes that they are
increasingly given the opportunity to do so.
LAURA HARDING WORKS WITH SYDNEY-BASED PRACTICE HILL
THALIS ARCHITECTURE + URBAN PROJECTS. SHE WISHES TO
THANK PHILIP THALIS FOR HIS THOUGHTFUL COMMENTARY
REGARDING THE ORIGINAL SCOTS CHURCH BUILDING, WHICH
INFORMED THIS REVIEW.
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PORTICO,
THE SCOTS CHURCH
CONVERSION,
SYDNEY
Architect Tonkin
Zulaikha Greer
Architects—project
team Tim Greer, Paul
Rolfe, Wolfgang
Ripberger, Trevor
Williams, Georgia Webb,
Ruth Leiminer, Yannick
Goldsmith, Kon
Vourtzoumis,
Roger Sullivan, Brian
Zulaikha, John
Chesterman, Angela
Rheinlaender, David
Jackson, Michael
Bennett, Jan Ly, Helen
Hughes, Trina Day,
Bettina Siegmund.
Project manager,
quantity surveyor and
builder Westpoint
Constructions. Engineer
Van der meer Bonser.
Heritage consultant
Brian McDonald and
Associates.
Environmental and
mechanical consultant
Hyder Consultants.
Acoustic consultant
PKA Acoustic
Consulting. Electrical
consultant Donnelley
Simpson Cleary.
Hydraulic consultant
DCH Hydraulics.
Lift consultant Norman
Disney Young. Planning
and BCA consultant
City Plan Services.
Fire engineer Defire.
Surveyor Rygate & Co.
ENDNOTE
1. Competition Adjudicators
Report, 1928, from Scots
Church and Assembly Hall
Conservation Study by John
Graham & Associates, 1992.
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