Category Archives: walking

sydney: back to circular quay

When I left off last time, I was walking off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, hoping the scaffolded building I could see (far left of the photo) wasn’t the AMP Building.

The little sandstone-looking building is the Fours Seasons Hotel, which I thought might have appeared in the Sydney Modern book. It doesn’t.

I couldn’t find out much about this building other than it was built in 1982.

Once you get off the bridge, there are a zillion lanes of traffic, and you can take the Cahill Walk back to Circular Quay through The Rocks.

Signs along the way tell about how the expressway was built and how much the area has changed.

Construction on the Cahill Expressway started in 1954, and it was built to divert through traffic away from the CBD. This road doesn’t sound like it has many fans. This article says it’s been described as “doggedly symmetrical, profoundly deadpan, severing the city from the water on a permanent basis, as well as “an eyesore, an unnecessary barrier between the city centre and the harbour foreshore and an inappropriate structure to have at the city’s point of entry”.

It says it is “extremely functional though rather ugly, and in a more environmentally and aesthetically conscious era would never have been allowed to be built”.

Ouch!

According to the signs, the construction took place across much of the “historic heart” of the city and resulted in many houses in The Rocks being demolished.

As you come off the walk, you can stand in the spot that was once Little Essex Street (and before that, Brown Bear Lane), which was demolished in 1954, and see what it would have looked like in 1902.

I made it back to Circular Quay and commenced my search for the AMP Building.

It was built in 1962, designed by Peddle Thorp and Walker. When it was completed, at 115 metres, it because Australia’s tallest building, breaking the height limit restrictions set in 1912. Sydney Modern says it used the precedent of Melbourne’s ICI House to do this. I’m not sure how that went down. Maybe it was “Melbourne broke their height limits so why can’t we, and we can make ours taller so we’ll win at tall buildings”.

I believe (at least in Melbourne’s case) it had something to do with the percentage of the area of the site the building was actually going to cover. So maybe that’s the precedent. For this building, a significant proportion of the site was to be public open space. It’s now a public transport space, which makes it congested and tricky to get around, but open space was the original intention.

I like my answer better.

According to the Cahill Expressway signs, the expressway “modernised the Circular Quay skyline, encouraging the construction of new skyscrapers”, and AMP house was obviously one of them.

As I had reluctantly suspected, it was indeed the scaffolded building.

This is what I saw when I got to 33 Alfred Street.

AMP Building (Peddle Thorp and Walker, 1962)

There’s boards underneath that provide some history of the building and explain what’s happening in the redevelopment (or, as they call it, re-sculpting).

Fortunately, the Tom Bass sculpture is still visible.

This sculpture depicts the goddess of Peace and Plenty, the male figure of Labour and a woman with a child. The AMP’s motto Amicus certus in re uncerta means “a certain friend in uncertain times”. This basic idea is a feature of other AMP buildings, including the one in Hobart.

According to Sydney Modern, the AMP Building is distinct because of its curved facade, “a feature which, along with its height, caused a surprising amount of controversy”.

It also had a roof-top observation deck that was closed when taller buildings came along.

Here’s what it used to look like, and what I’d been hoping to see.

Photo: Gareth Evans. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.

Two out of two misses wasn’t a good start to the day!

I wandered around Circular Quay a bit longer and made the obligatory bridge photo.

I noticed markers on the ground denoting the line of the foreshore prior to settlement and development of the area, reminding me that in the context of this place and its original inhabitants, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, what I was looking at was a minuscule faction of its history.

I could try and visualise what the AMP building might have looked like. It seems so small now. It’s hard to imagine it was once the tallest building here.

Circular Quay looking back at the AMP Building

As I was deciding what to do next, I came across another Tom Bass sculpture on the side of a building, best seen from the adjacent set of steps.

Sydney Modern tells me this was originally on the side of the ICI building that was previously on the site.

Smaller than Melbourne’s ICI building, this was a glass curtain wall building designed by Bates Smart & McCutcheon (who also designed the one in Melbourne), constructed in 1957 and demolished in 1996.

Here’s a picture of the statue in situ. Information on Sydney’s ICI house seems to be a bit lacking because almost every search comes up with the Melbourne building. But here’s an archive photo of it being built.

By now I’d seen enough of Circular Quay and wondered if I wanted to find some more of the buildings in Sydney Modern and its partner, Sydney Inter-War 1915-1940. While I’d covered the Melbourne Mid-Century Modern tour in two days, these two tours were more logistically difficult.

For a start, I don’t know Sydney as well as I know Melbourne and have been known more than once to head off in the opposite direction to where I’m supposed to be. I’m not sure why, but Sydney has this disorienting affect on me. It’s probably something to do with how their horse races run the wrong way.

And there are two tours that overlap in a lot of places and Sydney’s big and I can never find anything . . . and I only went into the CBD for one thing, and I hadn’t seen it yet.

It was time to find what I’d come to see!

sydney: circular quay meandering

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On my recent Sydney trip, along with the Randwick Art Deco Walk brochure and the Brutalist Sydney Map, I had with me the Footpath Guides Sydney Architectural Walking Guides. I have their Melbourne Mid Century 1950-1970 book and on one of my Melbourne trips I followed the route suggested in that book and photographed all 25 buildings. This had involved a couple of early morning starts staying in Melbourne CBD.

I decided I wasn’t going to do the full walks set out in either the Sydney Inter-war (1915-1940) or Sydney Modern (1950-1990) books but would pick out places that interested me. There was only one building that was on my “I must see this or the whole trip is ruined” list. I was going to find the others if I got the chance because I’d planned to spend most of the week in and around Randwick rather than in the CBD.

The Sydney Modern book mentioned the Sirius apartment building and the AMP building, both of which were around the Circular Quay area. I’d heard of both of them, so I made that my first stop on my CBD day. Circular Quay is a convenient light rail ride from either Randwick or Kensington so I had no trouble getting there.

The first structure that caught my eye (apart from the gargantuan cruise ship) was the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Circular Quay (W.H. Withers & W.D.H. Baxter, 1952)

It was previously the Maritime Services Board building and replaced a much older building. It was planned in 1939 but was delayed because of shortages of labour and materials during the war. Work restarted in 1946 but further delays meant it wasn’t completed until 1952, by which time its design as considered somewhat dated.

The entrances are framed with pink Rob Roy granite, which came from quarries in Sodwalls, near Lithgow. The carved sandstone decorations under the clock tower (you can’t see them here) include a ship’s propeller, wheel and anchor signifying respectively the “driving force, guiding force and stability” of the Maritime Services Board.

Also, what visit to Circular Quay would be complete without a photo of the Sydney Opera House?

I wasn’t there to see either of those structures! Circular Quay was packed with unmasked people and I didn’t want to stay there, so my search for Sirius began. It’s on Cumberland Street, which would be easy for anyone who isn’t as geographically challenged as I am to get to from Circular Quay.

According to Sydney Modern, the NSW Housing Commission built the Sirius apartment complex over the period 1975-1980 to re-house public tenants who were displaced during redevelopment of The Rocks. It included a total of 79 apartments of various sizes, and catered for 250 aged and family residents.

Its architect was Tao Gofers, who was a Housing Commission architect at the time. He originally wanted to paint it white, but they ran out of money so (I think, thankfully) that never happened.

A “rare and fine example” of Brutalist architecture (according to the NSW Heritage Council), Sirius looked like this:

Sirius (image by Katherine Lu. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)

I knew it was in danger.

If I hadn’t already known, the bomb symbol next to the words “UNDER THREAT Demolition is imminent” in Sydney Modern (published in 2017) was difficult to miss.

The NSW government had announced in 2014 it would be selling the site to be redeveloped into luxury apartments. I hadn’t followed the story very closely but this was obviously very distressing for the residents of the complex, along with the broader community. They formed the Save Our Sirius Foundation to fight to save the complex.

In 2016 the NSW Heritage Minister refused to have Sirius listed as a heritage site, apparently because its heritage value was outweighed by its financial value to the government. The NSW Land & Environment Court didn’t agree.

By the end of 2017, however, Myra Demetriou was the only resident left at Sirius, and she moved out in February 2018 after the government finally put the complex up for sale. Myra passed away in 2021.

I’d heard there were plans to redevelop it into fancy boutique apartments rather than demolishing it but I hadn’t realised the work was actually underway until I (eventually) got there.

That was disappointing, and I’m sad I never got to see it as it was.

Because I’d taken the long way round, by the time I found Sirius, I’d walked under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Continuing along Cumberland Street, past the bridge climb office, I found a random lift that went up to the bridge itself. I didn’t know you could walk on the bridge, so I went up to have a look.

The bridge construction started in 1924 and was completed in 1932. I found the bridge plaque, which mentions the firm Dorman Long and Company, who were the contractors for design and construction. My great grandfather worked for that company in the 1920s and my mother says he was involved in the bridge design. I have no reason to disbelieve this. He was a structural engineer who specialised in bridges. He moved to Tasmania in 1925, so his involvement must have been only at the very early stages. (Or he wasn’t involved at all and it’s just a family urban legend!)

I decided not to take the lift to the top of the pylon. The view was pretty good from where I was.

Sydney Opera House from the Harbour Bridge

I didn’t want to go all the way across the bridge because I had other things to see. I’d been able to see a scaffold-clad building from the bridge and desperately hoped it wasn’t the AMP building which was also on my list to see . . .

I found this cool building on the way back. I have no idea what it is.

Coming off the bridge back down to The Rocks is the Cahill Walk, which accompanies the Cahill Expressway. I wondered if I was going to find myself in this Jeffrey Smart painting, but that’s further around the expressway.

I could see just one part of Siruis that hadn’t been covered over by the redevelopment work.

The lone block made me think of Myra’s story, and what it might have been like for her to be the last person living in the complex.

There was a cool view of the skyline.

Postscript for Sirius: I was at the Art Gallery of NSW later in the week and found a book about the struggle to save Sirius in the bookshop. It tells the history of the complex, from the Green Bans placed on The Rocks in the 1970s until the 2017 court ruling.

Sirius by John Dunn, Ben Peake & Amiera Piscopo

randwick art deco part 3

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Continuing on the Randwick Art Deco Walk, today’s photos are from the last section of the walk including Alison Road, Bradley Street and Cook Street.

6 Botany Street. “Possible conversion from an old cottage (“Goodwood”) to a block of Art Deco Flats”

randwick art deco part 2: belmore road

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Continuing on the Randwick Art Deco Walk, today’s photos are from around Belmore Road, which is the main business area of Randwick.

64-68 Belmore Road (corner of Waratah Street)

Alkoomie (c.1927) Corner Silver Street & Belmore Road

35-43 Belmore Road, listed as the “Asteroid Building” from 1939

randwick art deco (part 1)

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I recently spent a week in Randwick, NSW. I’d never been there before but discovered, thanks to Randwick City Council, that it has a lot of art deco architecture.

In the 1920s-1940s, there was a massive increase in residential building across Greater Sydney, including Randwick, to accommodate the population boom between the world wars. It figures that, as the art deco style was popular in that period, there are a lot of buildings of that style in the area.

The Ritz Cinema Randwick, a cream art deco bulding — The Ritz Cinema (1937), St Pauls Street

Randwick City Council held an exhibition of photos by resident Alan Lloyd, who had documented a lot of the buildings, in 2013. This became two walking tours of Randwick and Coogee, which were so popular they developed self-guided versions for each suburb.

I’d found the Randwick one a few years ago but hadn’t realised there was a Coogee one as well!

20230119-the-spot-the-ritz-interior-04 — The Ritz interior

My goal for the week was to find all 20 buildings on the Randwick walk and photograph them.

It was easier said than done, mainly because, due to my early morning starts, I ended up with a lot of uneven light. And there were photos I definitely could have used a tripod for.

I also missed one because the walk brochure didn’t give the actual address of the building I was looking for and I got distracted by a more modern building . . .

Don Juan Avenue. Not what I was looking for but I like it.

It took me three days to find all the buildings, and I discovered some other cool buildings along the way. So this is going to be a series of several posts of my week in Randwick and other places around Sydney. (I also wrote a travel blog about my week in Sydney at my personal blog.)

Today’s photos are the first six buildings from the art deco walk, which starts at St Pauls Road at an area called The Spot, which is a small shopping centre with a lot of cafes and restaurants.

Salvios Shop (pre-1925), 34 St Pauls Street

Gower Galtees (1940), 8-10 Coogee Bay Road

wandering at utas

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The University of Tasmania’s Sandy Bay campus has been the main base of the university since 1961, following moves that started in the 1940s to provide a larger campus for the rapidly growing university.

It now houses a wonderful collection of modernist buildings constructed during this period. It’s a beautiful campus, not far from the city, set between nearby Mt Nelson and the River Derwent, with views to kunanyi/Mt Wellington.

This site gives some of the history of the early buildings on the campus, and you can see some more early photos of some of the buildings I love photographing, including Chemistry, Humanities, and the Morris Miller Library here.

This post by Tasmanian Modernism photographer Thomas Ryan provides some background on the glass curtain walls that feature on many of the university buildings, as well as some more contemporary photos of these structures.

While the university sought to consolidate its presence in Sandy Bay in 1960s, it has now announced its intention to vacate this campus and move into the city, where some of its specialist faculties such as the medical school (near the hospital for obvious reasons) are already located.

This hasn’t been a popular decision, and there’s a strong community of opposition to the university’s move into the CBD and its plan to abandon the campus and turn it into housing, details of which I don’t have space to go into here.

I love the campus and I find an almost inexhaustible supply of photo opportunities every time I visit.

On my most recent trip, I took my 50mm lens and wandered round the campus looking for little details I don’t always see. What struck me as I walked was the overwhelming tranquility of this place, the green spaces, the trees and the birds. These are things that, working in a city, I don’t have easy access to. While there are green spaces in town, the constant traffic noise eats into the serenity they try to provide. It’s not the same thing at all, and being here in this space made me think of how much I would love to have an office in an environment like this. I think it would benefit my mental health as well as my capacity to think deeply and creatively.

But my mission was not to contemplate the potential loss of this beautiful environment, much as I disagree with the plan. I was here to walk and explore. To look at buildings from different angles and find things I’d not seen before.

Here’s some of what I saw.

I also learned that the sculpture in the fish pond was by Stephen Walker.

I can forgive myself for not knowing this when I was actually attending the university because I didn’t know who he was or how much he had contributed to public art in Tasmania. But I’m not sure what my excuse is now . . .

50 in 50: week 7

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open house hobart 2020: part 4

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When we last saw Robyn, our entertaining and informative guide of the “What Style is That?” walking tour that was part of our Open House Hobart experience, we were in the car park of the Treasury building in Franklin Square, looking at the Reserve Bank building across the road. You can read about how we got there in part 3.

Some sandstone things on one of the Treasury staircases

Lil Sis and I visited the Treasury complex last year as part of Open House. It wasn’t open this year so we were glad to have been able to look through it then. Today’s visit looked at the outside of the buildings and the many different features and eras of the structures that make up the complex.

Robyn told the story we heard last year about the four columns out the front of the main entrance, which were originally going to be eight because John Franklin was obsessed with columns, but this was never done because of public outcry about the cost of eight columns. (Also, you have to ask yourself, where would the all fit?) Robyn mentioned that the Jane Franklin building in Lenah Valley had similar columns and that there had been suggestions that perhaps this is where the missing Treasury columns had ended up. She also said that she was 100 per cent confident that they weren’t, and you’ll have to ask her yourself how she knows this.

Another sandstone thing at Treasury. Note the vermiculated sandstone quoins in the background. Quoin is a fancy architectural term for corner.

Across the road from Treasury in Murray Street is the former Hobart Savings Bank, which is notoriously known as the red awnings building.

Former Hobart Savings Bank, 24A Murray Street

This bank was founded by the Quakers as a bank that former convicts and other people who had been rejected by the big banks could access. Robyn said that in a big financial crash in the 1890s, this was the only bank that was unscathed because all of the others had made huge risky investments and lost most of their depositors’ funds. This benefited the people who had been scorned by society as they now had all the money and could go out and buy property and start to set their families up.

Up close & personal with the red awnings

We were lucky enough to have a brief tour of this building after the walking tour. It’s now a private residence and is quite amazing inside but I can’t show you any photos as the owner has requested that we don’t publish any photos from the inside.

As we walked down Murray Street, Robyn showed as another example of how front walls are designed for the upper class, with their perfect sandstone blocks but when it comes to the sides, anything goes because that’s what the less well-regarded members of society see as they go around to the side entrance.

So the walls are uneven with odd shaped bits of stone shoved in to fit whatever space there was. I never knew this and had never paid any attention before. But now I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it.

We ended our tour at Parliament House, which I rightly identified as Georgian. (There, see, I learned something.) It was built in 1835 as the customs house. I mentioned that I understood that it wasn’t big enough for its purpose as Parliament House. Robyn said that this was indeed the case, and that the original plans had larger wings on either side, which had been crossed off (in red pen, no less) the design, leaving us with a building that isn’t fit for purpose. Perhaps one day I will elaborate on my plans for fixing this but I don’t think Hobart is ready for that yet.

It was a fabulous tour and I am so grateful to Open House Hobart and to Robyn for giving us this opportunity. It has opened my eyes to a lot of things I didn’t know about our older buildings and I am interested to find out more. I’m still not going to convert to the cult of sandstone and I can’t tell my Corinthian column from my Doric or my Tuscan ones (sorry, Robyn, my brain just isn’t equipped for this). But I will certainly look at some of these places in a different light as I walk past, especially ones with inappropriate porches! (You can go on Robyn’s tour next year and ask her about those.)

open house hobart 2020: part 3

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I had to split this post into two because it’s way too long!

After our Open House Hobart tour of Blue Magnolia, Lil Sis and I made our way briskly to the waterfront, where we were due to meet Robyn Everist, our guide for the “What Style is That?” walking tour. I’d never met Robyn before but I went on one of the walking tours that run out of the company she used to own, Hobart Walking Tours, a few years ago. Robyn now spends her time researching the history of Hobart’s architecture, a subject very close to my heart, so I was looking forward to this tour immensely.

I know bugger all about architectural styles, unless it’s modernism (and even then I’m never really sure), and even less about the features of buildings. If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll probably know I’m not a huge fan of fancy, ornate bits stuck on buildings (there is a reason I’m called straightlinesgirl and it has nothing to do with my technical drawing skills, or lack thereof). If you point out a Colonial Classical Federation Georgian Revival building to me, I’ll probably nod politely and start photographing the 60s glass curtain wall across the road. Sorry not sorry.

However, I am here to learn, and I was very interested to find out more about the buildings that I normally dismiss as colonial sandstone relics that would look better with a bit of concrete and steel over the front.

I was not disappointed. Robyn is a fantastic guide; very well informed and extremely entertaining about a subject that could be as dull as River Yarra water. I mean who really cares about whether a column is Tuscan, Ionic or Doric? It’s a column, right? What even is the point of them? It holds up a building. Or a porch. Or nothing at all.

We only had hour for the tour, which, as with any great guide, extended to at least 90 minutes. Robyn explained so many features of the buildings we looked at that my head was spinning by the end. Actually, my head was spinning by the time we got to Dutch Anglo something at City Hall. I don’t think I’m an aural learner. I need to read stuff to take it in after I’ve heard it and, fortuitously Robyn had that covered with a summary we could download from her website.

The round cut out bits here are an example of the Dutch-Anglo something that is also found on City Hall. This one is in Murray Street.

We started out at the IXL buildings at 25 Hunter Street, where I learned what a pediment is. This is a word I forgot as soon as Robyn said it and I couldn’t for the life of me remember it for this post. I knew it started with P and that if you put im- in front of it, it meant something else. But could I think of the word? Absolutely not. I ended up having to go and look it up in my trusty* Rice’s Language of Buildings.

Robyn explained that this building was in the Colonial Georgian style, which covers the period 1788 to 1840 in Australia. She describes the style as being like a Volvo: Boxy but good. As far as sandstone goes, it’s not a bad style. It’s symmetrical, and very plain, with none of that fancy nonsense that some of the later sandstone buildings have. My straight-lines brain approves.

We then made our way to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, which is a fascinating complex of buildings. The 1902 building on Davey Street, I hadn’t realised was built for Australia’s Federation in 1901 and the deal was that if the building was constructed before 1901 the Tasmanian Government would have to pay for it; after that it would be a Federation building and the Commonwealth would pay. Well played, Tasmania, by the looks of it. Robyn explained how this building and others in Hobart, because they were built by people with very British outlooks on life, were designed in very British styles that had exactly zero reference to life in Australia. I wondered if that was a reason why I don’t feel any particular attachment to any of those older buildings.

As we walked, Robyn observed how there are buildings where the architects have tossed the rule books out the window when they designed them. For example, the style was for buildings to reflect the people who used them. So the ground floors would be highly decorated with grand entrances to be used by the upper classes; the middle floors, accessed by middle classes, were less ornate and the top floors, which were where the servant class had to go, were plain and unadorned, with the entrances for those people round the back. All designed, she said, so that people knew their place. So when thinking about the building, it helps to know what its purpose was as that will explain a lot of the design features.

One story that I particularly loved, among the many, was the story of the CML building on the corner of Macquarie and Elizabeth Street. CML wanted all its buildings to look the same, as you do, and its buildings were made of granite, which no one in Tasmania could afford. So they developed this solution where they would get some crushed up pink stone material from Brisbane, mix it up with concrete, make it onto tilers to stick to the building, which would be made much more cheaply from Besser blocks and no one would know the difference. The ultimate in keeping up appearances.

Here’s one I prepared earlier: the view up Macquarie Street showing the GPO, CML and Reserve Bank buildings

One building I have always liked is the Reserve Bank building a bit further up Macquarie Street. It was built in the 1970s by the Government, and at the time there was no money around to construct a building that would look like the elaborate buildings of other financial institutions that stood on this street. Think Treasury for starters (we’ll get there in the next post). So, said, Robyn, the people of Hobart would not have appreciated big bucks going towards a replica Treasury building on the site and accepted the need for a cheap, quick building instead. Steel and concrete. Bang, done.

I do love these buildings, at least from the outside. The less said about the money-saving open plan designs inside the better.

The beautiful Reserve Bank building on Macquarie Street

However, I have, for a long time, wondered how a building like this has been tolerated in a streetscape of ornate sandstone when other brutalist structures standing close to sandstone landscapes were detested and deemed not to fit and ultimately demolished. Why is this one okay? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they hate it and it doesn’t fit and should be demolished. I did also read somewhere that it wasn’t actually concrete, it had a sandstone finish but I can’t remember where I found that.

A magnificent feature of this building is the “Antarctic Tableau” sculpture by Stephen Walker. I wasn’t aware that Stephen had had a keen interest in Antarctica and had actually travelled there as part of the Antarctic Division’s art program.