What is Circular Quay? Reading the contributions of Peter John Cantrill and Ken Maher to this edition of Architecture Bulletin, we see it as an accumulation of urban and architectural choices made and not made by design professionals, as well as government agencies and private undertaking. Seen in historical perspective, all these choices are still but sketches. None of the ideas recalled in these contributions have lost their relevance for the choices available to us and the decisions we continue to make today. We continue to draft and redraft this place, and we will go on doing so. No opportunity is fully lost—not the shape of the quay, nor the elevation of the rail line, the connectivity of the street grid, the typology of the wharves, the topology of The Rocks. Nor even the materiality of the Sydney Opera House. The implicit risk is that we can continue to make bad choices or worsen historic errors. Our responsibility is therefore to continue to revisit and reassess all the choices made over the decades, so as to make better ones in the future.
Architecture as cover up
The poorest choices available to us seem to be above all urban ones: running the rail line overhead instead of underground, the overlaying of the Cahill Expressway, the aborted attempts to remake The Rocks as towers and podiums. There is occasionally the (misplaced) expectation that good architectural treatment can compensate for bad urban decisions; that the willingness of architects to take up an ‘opportunity of a lifetime’ can always be relied upon to paper over the failure of more powerful agencies to reach more appropriate decisions. This is illustrated in the passage Cantrill quotes of Norman Selfe interrogating John Sulman on the latter’s refusal to accept elevating the rail line: ‘would it not be compensated for by the handsome view you would get of a good building from the water?’ We should not allow ourselves to be drafted into the service of poor urban decision-making by the promise of architectural licence around the edges.
Unsquaring the circle
Many architects have been tempted to regard Circular Quay as a ‘water square’, a harbourside analogue of the finest café-ringed squares of Europe such as Rome’s Piazza Navona, the Grand-Place in Brussels or Rynek Glowny in Krakow. This reading has its apotheosis in the colonnade of East Circular Quay and what Glenn Harper has here called its ‘gatling of retail’. It is possible for Sydney locals to be too cynical about this colonnade and to forget that locals in those cities often have feelings toward their old squares that are just as mixed. It is more important to understand the limitations of this metaphor. Harper recalls that one of the key distinctions between Jørn Utzon’s competition-winning scheme and the runners-up was its treatment of the ground plane, which Utzon lifted up into a stepped podium in response not merely to the urban context of Circular Quay, but also to the specificities of the wider topography of the harbour. Harper draws attention to the irony that subsequent private developments surrounding the cove continue to capitalise on their proximity to the Sydney Opera House, while failing to respond to the wider topography of the harbour in similar fashion. Part of the public backlash during the construction of East Circular Quay was the perceived lack of connection between Circular Quay and the Tarpeian Way, demonstrating that this kind of sensibility to landscape is widely felt, and not just by other, envious architects.
This responsiveness to landscape is part of what makes the Sirius building – with its stepped, additive forms – more appropriate to the tumble-down nature of the Rocks than the tower-and-podium schemes proposed for the area in 1970. It will become intrinsic to how we judge the current generation of skyscrapers rising behind Alfred Street. And it highlights the limitations of the urban square concept. Yes, Circular Quay is an urban space and benefits from a sense of containment. But there is a point at which framing the space turns into separating it from its full harbour context; a point at which providing a front to the square means turning one’s back to the rest of the city, as Sulman recognised.
The extreme opposite reading—Circular Quay as only landscape—is provided in Jon Hazelwood and Sharon Wright’s extended counterfactual history of Port Jackson as Eora National Park. The appeal of such thought experiments shows how much we crave the legibility of the natural history and topography as inherent to our sense of place. We want to be reminded of them, even as we pile new skyscrapers upon old.
Materiality provides meaning
Just as we desire to preserve the legibility of our natural context, we also want to maintain the clarity of our cultural history and stories. Harper’s recollection of Utzon considering the stone for the Sydney Opera House is followed by Danièle, Siân and Michael Hromek’s depth of feeling for the granite uprooted from Yuin Country to clad monuments across Sydney. It demonstrates that materiality offers not only relation to a project’s immediate place as architects often use it, but relation to culture and wider networks of human activity as well. It makes it tempting to ask whether a place like Circular Quay might have a coordinated materiality strategy, and whether it even should. Would such a strategy cause monotony? Or could it indeed encourage more complex and meaningful connections to the surrounding street grid, to the wider landscape, to the greater Sydney region?
A test case for other places
Circular Quay is a narrow focus for a publication responsible to an entire state membership. But what it provides for other places across NSW is a well-documented history of urban and architectural decision making; an unusual concentration of state-changing major infrastructure projects; a surfeit of institutions and government agencies with overlapping responsibilities and uncoordinated execution of them; and a cross section of sometimes diametrically opposed ideas regarding topography, urban form and materiality, both implemented and unimplemented. Some aspect of the history of Circular Quay provides a test case for the issues arising on any other urban site in NSW. As long as we continue to read it as a history of decisions made, good or bad, that will continue to be unmade and remade into the future.
This article was originally published as a conclusion to Lost Sydney (2018), Architecture Bulletin 75(2).