Demolished Sydney: from the Garden Palace to the Rural Bank

Demolished Sydney looks at the often lamentable reasons for a building’s destruction.

The Garden Palace, erected in 1879, emulated London’s Crystal Palace.

Demolition and rebuilding follow each other in an inevitable cycle in the history of cities, so that most modern urban centres are constructed over the invisible remains of centuries of earlier life. This is particularly true of cities that have been continuously inhabited and rebuilt on the same footprint, such as Naples. In this remarkable case, little or nothing of the original structure survives, yet the street plan of the classical city centre remains intact, as buildings have been successively torn down and built on the same spot.

Rome is very different, an example of what happens when a city is virtually abandoned and falls into ruins. Although the new Rome, from the Renaissance onwards, eventually covered vast areas of the ancient one, much of the centre was left as ruins. In other and less dramatic cases, once-prosperous cities cease to grow at a certain point in their history and, without falling into ruins, simply remain largely as they were during their heyday.

Australia is unusual in the world — indeed unique among inhabited continents — in having had no permanent buildings before the arrival of the British at the end of the 18th century. The result is that many, probably most, houses and other structures in Australia were built where there had never been anything before. There is always a sense of thinness and a kind of melancholy about new settlements with such shallow roots in the land.

This is not true of the centre of Sydney, however, which has already been built and rebuilt several times over more than two centuries.

And Sydney illustrates another principle, which is that rapidly expanding cities are particularly subject to the cycle of demolition and reconstruction as they outgrow modest beginnings and require — and can afford — larger and grander edifices.

This is broadly the subject of Demolished Sydney, which concentrates on a small selection of buildings of very different natures — in one case a street — and explores the circumstances and reasons for their demolition. We discover in the process a number of different motivations for and attitudes towards demolition, and we follow the emergence and gradual success of arguments for conservation.

One of the first cases we encounter illustrates all of these things in a particularly concise way. The Commissariat Buildings were erected between 1809 and 1812, and 130 years later were the oldest surviving convict buildings in NSW. The more prominent of the two was on the waterfront on what is now the site of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Pyrmont incinerator, designed by Walter Burley Griffin in 1937 and demolished in 1992.

They were demolished in 1939 as part of a plan for the redesign of Circular Quay, though the intervention of the war delayed their completion until 1952, when the new Maritime Services Board building was built, and 1958, when the Cahill Expressway was erected.

Today it seems almost incredible that anyone could ever have entertained the idea of putting an elevated expressway and railway line right across the front of Circular Quay, in effect blocking the view of the main gateway to Sydney from the harbour. And yet the postwar years, as we see in the hideous developments of many once handsome country towns, were a time of almost wilful revelling in ugliness.

But there was something even more interesting. Although voices were already raised in favour of preserving the Commissariat Buildings, there were others who saw their destruction not only as a means to an end but as a good in itself. A former lord mayor of Sydney, Archibald Howie, was keen for them to razed as soon as possible, asserting that “the fact that each stone used in their construction bears the initials of a convict is a very good reason why we should forget about them”.

Today, needless to say, any building bearing a convict’s mason marks would almost certainly be considered worthy of preservation. But it is striking to find that as late as the 1930s there were still people who lived in horror of the convict taint and wanted all memory of a shameful history to be eradicated and buried.

The Garden Palace is an entirely different proposition, at once the most spectacular and the most short-lived of all.

It was erected in the Domain in 1879 for the Sydney International Exhibition, an antipodean sequel to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and the first of these new worldwide art, trade and industry shows to be held in the British Empire.

Emulating London’s Crystal Palace, Sydney put up an immensely ambitious glass building in only nine months, but instead of London’s cast-iron and glass structure, Sydney’s version was framed in timber. The building was nonetheless very impressive and contemporary views of it from Sydney Harbour show how it dominated the promontory and the whole city skyline.

After the exhibition the building, although intended to be temporary, continued to be used for government offices and, more perilously, to store government archives, land titles, works of art and indigenous artefacts. But then fire broke out, for reasons that remain unexplained, at dawn on September 22, 1882, and in only a few hours the building was completely destroyed.

A contemporary lithograph shows the view from Macquarie Street, with the Garden Palace engulfed in a firestorm. Even the statue of Queen Victoria, presiding over the centre of the building under the dome, melted and only a few small fragments were left behind.

Different again was the case of Bennelong Point, now the site of the Sydney Opera House. In the earliest days of the colony, a cottage was built there for Bennelong, the Aborigine who acted as a go-between with the native population. Later the point was occupied by Fort Macquarie, a small fortress guarding the entrance to Sydney Cove, designed by Francis Greenway in 1812.

By the 1880s, the construction of more elaborate harbour fortifications made Fort Macquarie redundant, and it fell into disrepair before being demolished in 1901 to make way for a tram shed in the boom time of Sydney’s trams — already there were commentators welcoming the destruction of the obsolete to make way for the new — but the tram sheds themselves were knocked down in 1958, when fashion turned to cars and the trams were shut down. And finally the Opera House became the definitive occupant of the site.

More ambiguous cases include the State Office Block, built in 1967 and demolished in 1997 — a reminder of the extraordinarily short life of skyscrapers, seldom built to last a century, but in this case knocked down within a generation.

The impressive art deco Rural Bank building, which was demolished in 1982.

What a sobering contrast with Georgian structures such as St James’ Church (1824), the Mint (1816) or Hyde Park Barracks (1819), now almost all two centuries old and still going strong. In comparison to these solidly built edifices, the glass and concrete towers that symbolise the modern city are showy but disposable junk architecture.

The State Office Block was a charmless shoebox, nicknamed the Black Stump, that took the place of several handsome earlier structures in stone, but it was an attempt to deal both with the climate conditions of Sydney and with the administrative requirements of the state government. I have fond memories of the National Film Theatre’s seasons of films by great contemporary directors — Wajda, Ozu, Kurosawa — which were held there when I was still at school. But in the end the government sold it to developers and the site is now occupied by Renzo Piano’s Aurora Place, certainly a more original piece of architecture.

A less happy succession occurred in the case of the Rural Bank, an impressive art deco structure in Martin Place, built in 1936 and torn down in 1982, to be replaced by the grandiose but vacuous and already dated State Bank building.

In this case there was a concerted, perhaps unprecedented campaign to save the original building, accompanied by advertisements, posters and lists of eminent signatories. In the event, nothing could stop the greed of the developers, but the defeated campaign galvanised a new interest in preserving the city’s remaining art deco heritage.

More complex — and an example of the unexpected ramifications of urban redevelopment — is the story of St Stephen’s Presbyterian Church, today in Macquarie Street. The earlier building, erected in 1857, was in Philip Street, on what is now the site of the Reserve Bank building.

It initially fell foul of the plans to build Martin Place by extending the space in front of the GPO up the hill to Macquarie Street, which entailed cutting a path across several perpendicular streets on the way.

The original idea was conceived in 1891 but it was not finished until 1935. The relocation of St Stephen’s to Macquarie Street, however, entailed the demolition in 1933 of the handsome Burdekin House (1841), which would presumably be protected today. Not only was it allowed to be razed but enthusiasts, with the bit between their teeth, saw no reason to stop there.

A couple of years later, in 1937, the Macquarie Street Replanning Committee wanted to demolish the Hyde Park Barracks and the Mint building as well; there was an outcry against the proposal and it was suggested they be converted to museums.

In the end, the outbreak of war halted redevelopment plans, and afterwards, with the establishment of the National Trust in 1945, there seemed finally to be a new recognition of the historical value of old buildings.

Three industrial buildings are included: the Pyrmont incinerator, designed by Walter Burley Griffin in 1937 and demolished in 1992; the Colonial Sugar Refinery, built in 1887 and knocked down in 1996; and the Pyrmont Power Station (1904-93): all were difficult sites to recycle but were replaced by mediocre commercial apartment developments.

The Kent Brewery, which lasted longer than any of them (1835-2008), although also converted to residential use, represents a far more intelligent combination of quality architecture and partial conservation.

Workers at the Kent Brewery; Hotel Australia facade on Martin Place and Castlereagh Street (c 1936).

In a very few cases, the result of redevelopment has been an improvement; in many, buildings of sound construction and with significant historical associations have been replaced with characterless commercial architecture, destined to be knocked down and redeveloped in its turn within a generation or so. The logic is an extraordinarily wasteful and ecologically disastrous one, based on the optimistic assumption that there will always be money for rebuilding.

One of the last examples, Rowe Street, illustrates a related principle: not so much the loss of architectural quality as of a living cultural fabric. This little street was once filled with shops and cafes run by individuals with distinct and often memorable personalities.

That culture has been erased and the shops that have taken their place in the city are branches of consumer chains, installed in shopping malls where empty and identical concrete boxes have been expensively fitted out with the ersatz character of commercial branding.

Demolished Sydney

Museum of Sydney, until April 17