Inside the new jewel in Sydney’s Crown: Chris Wilkinson, Wilkinson Eyre Architects
When One Barangaroo tops out in the middle of this year, it will be the tallest building in Sydney. But it’s what inside that counts.
When One Barangaroo, also known as the Crown Sydney tower, currently under construction on the western edge of the city’s CBD, tops out in the middle of this year it will be the tallest building in Sydney, standing at 275m. But it’s possible the tower’s lofty status will be very short lived: Sydney is heading up.
Late last year the NSW planning minister, Rob Stokes, and the city’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, agreed in principle to remove a 40-year cap on building heights in the city’s CBD. Under the new strategy, developers will be able to build towers up to 330m tall if they are exclusively for commercial use. The current height limit is 275m.
One Barangaroo is a mix of hotel (James Packer’s Crown casino and resort), residences, retail and hospitality. When it opens in 2021, the 71-storey building will give the city 349 new hotel rooms and suites, 82 private apartments, 14 bars and restaurants and three luxury retail stores. Because the new height limits on high rise are for commercial buildings only, the tower will retain its prestigious position as Sydney’s tallest residential building, if not the tallest in general, for some time to come.
Height matters when it comes to selling luxury apartments — the panoramic views are one of the main selling points of the One Barangaroo residences, where prices start at a staggering $9.5 million for a two-bedroom apartment. James Packer has already purchased an apartment for $60 million in the tower, and four separate buyers have paid $40 million apiece for residences in the complex. At press time, more than $450 million worth of apartments in the $2.4 billion development have already been sold.
And height also matters to the architects of the building: the London-based Wilkinson Eyre Architects, which has made a name for itself designing skyscrapers in London and Toronto as well as Guangzhou and Wuhan in China. The award-winning firm, which was founded as Chris Wilkinson Architects in 1983 (it was later renamed Wilkinson Eyre after Jim Eyre joined in 1987), has also designed the Gardens by the Bay complex in Singapore, the restoration of the Battersea Power Station in London and the Dyson Campus in Malmesbury, among other projects. It was appointed by Crown in 2013 after an international competition for the design for its Sydney tower.
“I think that Sydney is such a great city and it’s got real ambition,” Wilkinson says. “And I think that inevitably you have two choices with a big, populous city: either you expand out, or you go up. You need to densify the centre and get the infrastructure in place, such as metro systems etc, in order to do that, which is exactly what’s happening in Sydney now. The city is spread out so much I think it’s right to go a bit taller.”
Speaking to WISH on a recent visit to Sydney to check on the construction progress of the tower, Wilkinson is the first to acknowledge that tall buildings are rarely built without controversy. “Everyone has an opinion about them,” he says. “And you know, tall doesn’t always mean better. Designing a tall building presents specific challenges beyond just fitting the requirements that the developer wants into the building. They also present a sort of sculptural kind of challenge, I suppose.”
The height of One Barangaroo and its dominance of the Sydney skyline is not the only aspect of the development that divided public opinion — and with the raising of the height limits even that gripe might seem redundant in the not too distant future. Rather, it’s the siting of the development that makes it one of the most controversial buildings to go up in Sydney in decades.
In 2006, Sydney-based Hill Thalis Architecture, in conjunction with Paul Berkemeier Architects and Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture, won an international design competition for the reuse of the former shipyards that nominated that the entire foreshore be public land as one of its defining characteristics. The Hill Thalis design was in keeping with the brief set out the year before by the NSW government, led by Bob Carr, which stipulated that the redevelopment would be in the public interest, have a minimum of 50 per cent parkland and include a 14km foreshore walk.
Packer’s casino is going up on space that was originally designated as a public park. As a compromise, an “internal” park, which many predict will spend much of the day in shadow, will now be located behind the 275m tower. Then there were the objections, and subsequent legal battle, to the operation of a casino on the site. Ultimately Crown’s preferred design and siting prevailed.
Given the tower’s prime position, its design called for something extraordinary, says Wilkinson. The now 75-year-old architect, whose career before he established his own practice included stints with Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Michael Hopkins, says he knew the site well before his firm won the design competition. “There was this big slab of concrete where the container port had been, which is quite extraordinary in the centre of the town — to have this big flat expanse of concrete,” he recalls. “I walked around, I went up to Observatory Hill and I looked over and I could really see the city with fresh eyes. Seeing the CBD, with all the square towers that were going up on one side of the Rocks, and Barangaroo starting to take shape and extending the city’s grid to the west… it just seemed natural to me that the site, the Crown one, is actually a sort of marker for the northwest corner of the CBD.”
It therefore “needed something special,” he says. “It’s slightly out of line with the other buildings and it’s very much on the waterfront. And it just seemed to me that was something to celebrate — this beautiful site on the waterfront. And it was with that in mind, the idea that we should try for a sculptural building… we talked about an inhabited sculpture, which is easier said than done.”
Wilkinson’s inspiration for his “inhabited” sculpture was actually a much smaller sculptural work he collaborated on with his wife, artist Diana Edmunds, for a project in the Scottish border town of Gretna. That project, envisioned to be approximately 30m high, never eventuated, but the principle behind it formed the basis for the winning design for One Barangaroo.
“We talked about it as three petals, joined together, that twisted as they rise up,” says Wilkinson. The first petal peels off, spreading outward to form the main hotel room accommodation, with the remaining two twisting together toward the sky. The idea was to create a sculptural form that will rise up on the skyline like an inhabited artwork, with differing levels of transparency. The only thing the brief required was that we put the emphasis on the east side so that you had the views of the bridge and the Opera House — and that the building sat on a podium. Once we had the shape, the next stage was the difficult one of translating that into a building and that will actually provide the accommodation asked for.”
The success of a building — and a precinct — such as this comes down to how people use it, says Wilkinson. And the initial controversy is nothing that he isn’t used to. “It always happens at the beginning because basically people don’t like change,” he says. “They like the status quo, whether it’s good or bad. We designed a building in Liverpool and if I read the press in Liverpool when we started I would have been in tears. But then the building starts to take shape and mostly people will then work around to it, because it’s suddenly there and fitting into its context.”
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