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Sydney was primed to embrace a series of glittering visions offered by the architecture profession over decades starting around this time. According to one account, the “move to skyscrapers may have been American-influenced but was, to a large extent, architect-led, with the Royal Australian Institute of Architects [RAIA] acting as prime mover in bringing skyscrapers to Sydney …”
Modernist architects had some powerful symbols at their disposal. Historian Jennifer Taylor wrote that the “glazed building had particular appeal as it symbolised American prosperity … [there was] an imagery of modern efficiency that these buildings were seen to represent.” Lever House, New York, 1951, “provided an accessible model for a tall, freestanding curtain-wall building.” While town planners and traffic engineers highlighted congestion and escalating land values to promote decentralisation, architects deployed aesthetics for centralisation. Large-scale modern structures were only viable in high rent zones like CBDs. British architecture critic J M Richards called the skyscraper a “child of … steel-frame building construction, the electric lift, high city land-values …”
One emerging advocate of modernist architecture was Harry Seidler, a member of the RAIA’s Acts and Regulations Committee, who invited his mentor and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to address the RAIA’s 1954 convention in Sydney. Linked to the convention, Gropius delivered a speech to the ABC and along with Seidler contributed an article to the Sydney Morning Herald. Subjects like the economics of industrial or office location did not feature in their arguments for modernist architecture, which focused on culture and aesthetics. The Herald became a forum for architects and other agitators against Sydney’s building restrictions, particularly the 150-foot building height limit dating from 1912. Jennifer Taylor maintained “there [was] little doubt that the introduction of the glazed office building to Australia resulted from aesthetic preference rather than economic advantage.”
While City of Sydney Council’s political leadership opposed the height restriction, officers like City Engineer R D Stevenson and his predecessor A H Garnsey supported the NSW Government’s post-war County of Cumberland Scheme program of decentralisation and a restrictive Floor Space Index to block CBD skyscrapers. Nevertheless, in 1956 the state government decided to lift the limit. Premier Joe Cahill singled out the role played by “architects and others [who] complained about it.” By this time the County of Cumberland Scheme had already stalled and Sydney’s bias to over-centralisation persisted. In those conditions, Cahill’s decision and related factors catalysed emerging capital markets behind the explosive office building booms – followed by an equally spectacular bust – which transformed the CBD between the late 1950s and early 1970s. The new Height of Buildings Advisory Committee (HOBAC), says writer Geoffrey Moorhouse, manipulated floor-space ratios “so generously from the norm that Sydney’s ratios ever since have been about twice what is permitted in European cities.”
Writing on central cities in the 1970s, Australian academic Ian Alexander drew extensively on the work of urban geographer Larry Bourne, who identified a “process of intensification of land use through redevelopment” in the form of “space-intensive activities [that] were constantly replacing space-extensive activities, since it is ‘generally uneconomic’ to replace an existing structure ‘with anything but a more intensive use’.” This “phenomenon can be attributed to the high prices that most central-area sites command: non-intensive uses become an increasingly poor investment.” Amongst “activities high in the rent-paying hierarchy”, office development was the most intensive. Sydney’s office booms played out consistently with this process. For urban policy academic Pauline McGuirk, they were “fuelled by the CBD’s transition from a general-purpose city centre to a specialist financial and business centre.” Maurice Daly, author of the classic Sydney boom, Sydney bust (1982), described the now vanished general-purpose CBD in these terms:
The CBD of the 1950s comprised buildings accommodating: the storage and distributional roles associated with the port; offices associated with these activities; the banking, insurance and manufacturing headquarters which combined with the government functions in organising the economy; the small scale manufacturing concerns traditionally located in the centre; and the retailing, entertainment and specialist professional services which catered to a metropolitan population.
While proponents of modernist design claimed it was more functional − “form follows function” − the effect on urban environments like CBDs was to narrow the range of functions. In the traditional Core-Frame model of the CBD with descending grades of economic activity radiating in concentric circles away from a Peak Land Value Intersection, built forms and street lines were conditioned by their purpose in a particular functional zone. They were commonly part of “limit-height budget blocks that pushed out to the building line, presenting a planar wall to the street.”
After the booms, however, finance-driven towers made their own surroundings. Architects and designers Francesca Morrison and Krystyna Luzcak wrote about “the superimposition of a new physical and spatial concept … based on the idea of elements sitting freely in space… street walls of buildings began to give way to single towers set in plazas or on low podiums.” For Jennifer Taylor, the freestanding, glazed building “was conceptually and physically distinct from its setting … context was inconsequential.” Morrison and Luczak explain that “Sydney’s street pattern and block size did not accommodate them as easily as Manhattan’s grid,” so large-scale lot amalgamation was usually a precondition for high-rise projects. In the case of the AMP Building at Circular Quay, “55 percent coverage of the large site [was] made up of consolidated lots.”
How to make use of the residual spaces between freestanding towers emerged as a perennial CBD problem. Taylor writes that within the typical FSR envelope, “the cost of building to a greater height was offset by the greater prestige of office space on the upper floors hence, there was an economic incentive to build high which, as a by-product, resulted in larger areas of public space to be landscaped at ground level.” Inevitably, though, simple attention to visual amenity was not enough to activate urban spaces without ample provision for pedestrian usage. Since freestanding towers now had the status of financial assets, the often-vexing problem of residual space could potentially detract from their value. So drab made-over passageways were eventually succeeded by distinct leisure destinations.
The ultimate solution was achieved by Harry Seidler’s Australia Square project, which, according to architecture writer Henry Margalit, “became a key precedent for the departure from the street-enclosing building.” Historian John Freeland felt “the urban vision was Seidler’s, founded on his contention that Sydney’s historic street network played little role in fostering a mixed urbanity of work and leisure.” The dual office tower and plaza project was designed for tenants in the corporate, finance and professional sectors. An impressive array of amenities was essential to overcome an unfavourable location in the CBD’s Core-Frame morphology, that is, away from the traditional office core centred on Martin Place. A slender “circular tower of fifty storeys” located on George Street was the standout feature, providing most of the office space, “with the remainder taken up in an elevated thirteen-storey linear block enclosing the plaza to the east”, fronting Pitt Street. The plaza’s shopping arcade has been described as “the ‘gourmet circle’, a ring of better than usual take-away food and beverage facilities” opening out to “a scattering of tables, chairs and sun umbrellas.” According to Taylor
… the successful sociability of the plaza spaces come from the locational geography of the site. It is, in effect, a broad pathway connecting two concentrated population zones of the central business district. So Australia Square is a desirable route. It is also a resting place for the high-rise denizens, when they emerge to feed and socialise. So Australia Square is a desirable destination.
Taylor refers to “Seidler’s wish to avoid vehicular conduits with their snarling traffic racket rebounding off the channel-defining walls.” Over time structural segregation of pedestrians and motor traffic became a prized objective of CBD developers and architects. To enhance the ground plane around their futuristic skyscrapers, property owners (typically, at that time, insurance companies) and architects engineered a new urban logic, entrenching a distinction between walking-for-purpose and walking-for-leisure. This early transitional period saw the inception of a contest for space between the CBD’s traditional daytime population and office tower developers, now cultivating a generation of white-collar lingerers. Emerging inter-spatial leisure destinations were naturally geared for the tastes and means of upscale professionals.
Developments based on the tower-and-plaza template emerged across various zones of the CBD. This disruption of the Core-Frame system’s gradation of functions led Stretton to complain that the district “just gets more offices; and inside them, not much further diversification of activity, but more and more of the same activities, and people not more but less diversified than before.” Put another way, Stretton observed that “office work steadily displaced other work” and “office buildings displaced others and monotonized more of the physical and working diversity of the city.”
The CBD’s character changed dramatically as Bourne’s process of intensification and succession began to encroach on the industrial-wholesale corridor west and south-west of York Street. Notes Sydney historian Peter Spearritt, “many of the trades and activities forced out by the office boom were labour-intensive operations, from women in the sweated clothing trades to brewery workers to employees of the PMG (post and telephone).” Industrial geographer Robert Fagan writes that after the 1950s “intense competition from other land uses such as … office development forced up rents and land prices in the central area.” Between 1954 and 1971, say geographers Peter Murphy and Sophie Watson, “the inner areas had lost some 60,000 manufacturing workers, a third of the 1945 total.” The Sydney CBD Survey (1976) reported that industrial floor space fell by as much as 45 percent between 1971 and 1976.
Geographer Peter Simons and colleagues found that “change in the physical appearance and economic function of the CBD associated with the growth of office based activities” also had a drastic effect on the wholesale district. “Overall, wholesalers were located further away from the inner city by 1977, 59 per cent of the new firms which survived were located outside the City of Sydney.” Property economist R W Archer thought that apart from higher land values and rents, rising volumes of traffic brought on by office over-building were a factor: “This congestion has accelerated, if not caused, some of the relocation of activities such as retailing, wholesaling, manufacturing and entertainment out of the C.B.D., so reducing the range of C.B.D. activities …”
And the office boom’s destructive impact on industrial jobs extended to the CBD’s working-class leisure venues. Spearritt lamented, for instance, that “the heaviest concentrations [of pubs] were around Circular Quay, the wharf and warehouse area to the west of George Street and around the Haymarket … Many of these hotels were demolished in the office boom of the 1960s and 1970s.”
By the early 1970s, state and city politicians confronted a new problem which has come to preoccupy CBD planning ever since. How to reconcile two conflicting imperatives. First, to safeguard the CBD’s contrived raison d’etre as Sydney’s dominant site for office supply – though not necessarily office demand – and second, to mitigate the loss of amenity from over-development in such a confined area, surrounded as it is by physical barriers to expansion, Sydney Cove, Botanic Gardens-Hyde Park, Darling Harbour and Central Railway. The relentless drive to scale up and gentrify the CBD’s streetscapes, public spaces and transport facilities was underway, and continues to this day.
This is an abridged version of Chapter 11 from our feature report Rise of Luxury Urbanity as a System: Sydney CBD. Sources for quotations in the above article are footnoted in the report.
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