Chris Minns: Building a future that is ‘quintessentially Sydney’

A city like Sydney should have the confidence to grow and the Sydney Opera House is a good example of how change doesn’t need to be scary or ugly, NSW Premier Chris Minns writes.

If we tried to build the Sydney Opera House today, there’s a very good chance it would never happen.

Firstly, it would be almost impossible to knock down the old Tram Depot site at Bennelong Point, because of heritage concerns.

Inevitably, it would then face a loud campaign in parts of the media, complaining about concert noise, or the weird cockatoo design, or its impact on someone’s harbour view.

And if by some miracle we got past these obstacles, it would have to run the gauntlet of our planning system, which could hold things up for years, if not decades.

At last year’s Daily Telegraph Bradfield Oration, I questioned whether this was the kind of city we wanted to live in – where we could no longer imagine, much less construct Sydney’s greatest building, and for what’s its worth, my favourite piece of architecture in the world.

Or worse, where thousands of young people were leaving town, because they could no longer see a future for themselves here.

Premier Chris Minns says Sydney should have the confidence to grow and change. Picture: NewsWire / John Appleyard

In that speech, I made the point that Sydney isn’t a museum.

A city like Sydney – a great city – should have the confidence to grow and change with the times. Most importantly, we need to build enough homes for our kids and our grandkids – so they could start their own families here.

There’s no doubt that change like this can be intimidating. But as the Opera House showed us, it doesn’t have to be scary or ugly. As we deal with the housing crisis, it’s possible to build with purpose and speed, while still encouraging beauty and style in our planning system.

That is why, as part of my speech last year, I announced that we would be developing a ‘pattern book’ of common building designs, where top architects could produce the next generation of iconic Sydney homes.

That includes the next great Sydney terrace house and the next great Sydney apartment block. When builders choose a template from this pattern book, they will get much faster approval in the planning system, because we know they’re going with quality.

For the past year, our architects have been sketching out their designs and putting the first book together.

The Sydney Opera House shows change isn’t ugly or scary.

Their brief was to come up with something quintessentially Sydney – something that feels at home in our climate and culture. For instance, when people arrive to our city for the first time, they often remark on the brightness of our southern sky.

Australians love that light and we want our homes filled with it.

Equally, anyone who’s lived through a Sydney summer knows there’s no better air conditioning than a northeasterly sea breeze when it arrives. So that was our challenged to our architects: to imagine how our city might look in the future, while remembering what makes us such a special place.

We can’t wait to reveal this future face of our city to all Sydneysiders. I encourage everyone to have a look at these designs, and if you’re a builder, to consider how you could use them going forward.

This is your city. It’s your future.

And we want everyone to be a part of this next exciting chapter.

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Originally published as Chris Minns: Building a future that is ‘quintessentially Sydney’