Architecture of Sydney
Under the tenure of early nineteenth-century Governor Lachlan Macquarie, the works of Francis Greenway were the first substantial buildings for the fledgling colony.
With the lifting of height restrictions in the post-World War II years, much of central Sydney's older stock of architecture was demolished to make way for Modern high rise buildings – according to Singh d'Arcy, in The Apartment House (2017), "From the 1950s onwards, many of Sydney's handsome sandstone and masonry buildings were wiped away by architects and developers who built brown concrete monstrosities in their place.
The early years of the colony suffered from a sense of provisionality and the attitude of the majority of convicts and their guardians that they would return to Britain once they had "done their time."
In 1790, Governor Arthur Phillip began the process of freeing convicts and granting them land, such as that at Rose Hill 20 km inland which provided a stable food supply to the colony.
[2] Population growth, the granting of perpetual leases on town properties, the encouragement of free trade and exports underpinned a booming economy.
John Verge was the most renowned architect in the 1830s and his buildings included Tusculum in Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay House, and Camden Park.
[2] The 1840s saw an increasingly buoyant economy and confident society pushed along by the end of convict transportation and the commencement of an independent legislature.
A building boom embraced the neo-Gothic style whereby the colony's strong need to identify with the home country was manifest.
[2] Public, commercial and domestic architecture overlooked the local climate in favour of styles transported from Britain, and projects with substantial budgets often produced an indiscriminate eclecticism.
Conversely, projects with limited budgets that precluded ostentatious and derivative design often resulted a kind of vernacular style that responded to local conditions.
On the other hand, housing for the working and lower middle class remained substandard and the prevalence of unhygienic and slum conditions grew.
The simplicity of early colonial architecture was replaced by decorative facades using ornate cast iron with higher ceilings featuring elaborate mouldings.
The remaining storeys were intended to provide rental office accommodation for importers and other firms engaged in the softgoods trade".
[5] In response, young architects who had worked in Europe and returned to Australia brought a simplicity to design and construction and renewed interest in logical structure and free planning.
He studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard, worked with Marcel Breuer, and had been tutored by Josef Albers at Black Mountain College.
[6] In contrast to Seidler's strongly European flavour of Modernism was the softer form practised by the so-called Sydney School of the 1950s and 1960s.
[10] Developed as a joint venture between Frasers Property and Sekisui House, it was constructed as the first stage of the Central Park urban renewal project.
[12][13] Sydney lost most of its notable inter-war cinemas between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, including the Winter Garden at Rose Bay, the Odeon at Manly and most disgracefully of all The Regent in George Street, where the property developer had purchased the structure cheaply, only to pull it down.
[15][16] The demolition of the Regent Theatre on George Street in 1988, which had been slowly falling into disrepair, is a reflection of the shoddy heritage attitudes that persisted in the 20th-century, despite protests from Sydneysiders and pleas for green bans: the ornate Free Classical-style theatre was purchased cheaply by property developer Leon Fink, who subsequently demolished the building days after purchasing it.
[17] Sydney Mayor Clover Moore, then the MP for Bligh, addressed a crowd in Martin Place in 1988 to help save the building.
Articles in The Sydney Morning Herald on 2 February 1982 ran spreads about protecting the building at public meetings organised by the Australian Institute of Architects.
The Anthony Hordern Brickfield Hill site, Palace Emporium, was subsequently used by the NSW Institute of Technology (now UTS) for some years.
The emporium buildings were controversially demolished in 1986 for the World Square development, which remained a hole in the ground for nearly twenty years, before finally being completed in 2004.
