John de Manincor invited by SMH to comment on new office Tower

Along with five other Sydney Architects, John was invited by the Sydney Morning Herald to comment on the first building application for the Barangaroo site by Rogers Stirk Harbour, read the article here. The published piece is an extract from the submission below.

“The presence of international architects in Sydney is by no means a bad thing for our City, the question is which ones when.

The industrial revolution gave us the mass production and mass boredom of the modernist tower, arguably culminating in the mechanised aesthetics of the Lloyds suite of buildings in London by Richard Rogers and the HSBC tower in HK (Foster and Partners). New advances in technology allow far greater potential in terms of formal and spatial possibilities – we must surely be at point as a profession and a society where we can think beyond the box. This proposal sadly sees the roll out of the machine AGAIN!?!

The repeats the aesthetics of any number of the RSH office towers we have seen in the past: the machine with a splash of primary colour. RSH’s reputation and that of the practices likely to document the project in Sydney suggest this will be an elegantly detailed building, yet formally it’s clumsy. The lift towers to the north (signature Rogers) help disguise the enormous expanses of glass to the south (carefully avoided in the published images). It is form follows function where function has been limited to a utilitarian brief; make me money! The sustainability agenda is laudable: a machine for production of power and water.

The wider city has been forgotten. The users of this building are not only the thousands of people that will occupy it, but also the millions of people who will experience it in the round. In this regard it is a missed opportunity for Sydney.

An office design by RSH is a no-risk option. A bigger risk for Sydney is the widely publicised hotel in the harbour which deploys a similar (if not same) aesthetic. If, and only if, the Government agrees let Lend Lease build in the harbour, the architectural response needs to take far greater risks – the city deserves it.”