SOLD

Despite this being more of a rant, I must confess, I had never thought until I returned to Sydney, that I would ever believe capitalism to be at the root of some great cosmic evil. Though for the mere price of AUD$35 Million, it appears that the deal has been sealed and the fate of Sydney’s last public sandstone assets given away to Singaporeans for ninety-nine years. I will not attempt to presume but if James Barnet did not turn in his grave when the Crystal Boudoir Burlesque show opened at the General Post Office, then he surely will be tossing and turning today, knowing that his jewels of civic pride are now to be privatised.

CommentaryHugo Chan20 September 2015architecture, policy, heritage, privatisation, sydney

With Age Comes Wisdom // Adaptation & Reuse

Not unlike one of my early posts in March (Tear it Apart), I was once again struck by the apparent waste and visual destruction at another construction site near my home in Kensington. This however was very visually different, for two terrace houses stood, hollowed out but nonetheless appeared to be retained in the future low-rise apartment complex known as The Stables.

SustainabilityHugo Chan23 May 2014architecture, sustainability, design, adaptive reuse, recycling, sydney

Sin in Suburbia

Sydney is a beautiful city. Of this I have no doubts. Indeed this city has been blessed with an endless expanse of blue skies and golden shorelines running from its northern shores to its southern reaches. But for me, this city also has a dark secret. Within a city of 3.6 million people, is a metropolitan area over twice the size of Hong Kong, a city of 7 million people. The desire for backyards, for individual homes and for large gardens is in my opinion this city’s single largest problem to achieving sustainability. There is great sin in developing suburbia.

Sustainability, ArchitectsHugo Chan1 May 2014architecture, sydney, hongkong, design, sustainability, suburbia

Setting an Example to Follow // One Bligh Street

A stone’s throw away from Sydney’s iconic monuments, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, is a seemingly unremarkable elliptical tower known simply by its address: One Bligh Street. Completed in 2011 by Architectus and Ingenhoven Architekten, this structure is certainly more than what it seems, having been praised as “Australia’s first ‘green skyscraper’” (Philip, 2012).

Sustainability, ArchitectsHugo Chan26 April 2014architecture, design, ingenhoven, sustainability, sydney

Sense and Sensibility // Public Transport Infrastructure

It is a truth, universally acknowledged that anyone who lives in Sydney, inevitably criticises the failure of its public transport. Only in 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that major auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers had identified Sydney as “forth worst major city in the world for transport and infrastructure” (Munro, 2012). The report, known as Cities of Opportunity did however, reprieve the city by naming it the most sustainable (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2012) and how this can be the case when Sydney also has some of the worst performing buildings and urban sprawl is beyond me. Nonetheless for me, the report’s findings begged an investigation of urban sustainability and its relationship to transport infrastructure.

A Green Light for Central Park

Arguably one of the most innovative residential-commercial projects to go up in Sydney recently, I want to focus today on Central Park’s two key elements of its sustainable significance: The Green Wall and The Heliostat. Neither of these ideas are particularly new, the heliostat’s reflection into an atrium going as far back as Foster’s HSBC Building in the mid-1980s, though certainly no green wall as yet can match One Central Park’s scale.

SustainabilityHugo Chan4 April 2014architecture, design, sustain, sydney, centralpark

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