Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects principal Philip Thalis, the architect who was part of the architectural team that won an international competition to design the transformation of Barangaroo, now describes the project as “a symbol of squandered opportunities”.
In a story published in The Sydney Morning Herald as part of an investigative series on the Barangaroo precinct, Thalis recalled how the winning team comprising of Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects, Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture and Paul Berkemeier Architect was selected from a pool of 137 schemes in 2006 based on their plan for the 22-hectare land, which earmarked the entire 1.2km stretch of the foreshore or 50 per cent of the site as ‘inalienable public land’.
According to Thalis, their plan for the Barangaroo precinct prioritised public interest by proposing new public transport, well-connected streets, parklands, and several community facilities including buildings, theatres, outdoor event spaces, public art and more. The development also made room for affordable housing and workspaces, Thalis said.
However, just three years later, the winning plan was discarded by the NSW Government in favour of private development, a move that Thalis described as an “unfolding disaster” in an interview to The Conversation published in November 2012.
“Based on my direct experiences, I think Barangaroo is an unfolding disaster for Sydney – a disaster that plummets further with each degenerative development. At Barangaroo there has been a perversion of public process and an outrageous privatisation of public land – abdicating the public interest,” Thalis said in the interview.
Lend Lease was granted 7.5 hectares of public land in the southern part of the precinct, effectively privatising the foreshore. This was also the biggest transfer of public land to private interests in Sydney’s history, according to Thalis.
Some of the key failings of the Barangaroo urban renewal project listed by Thalis in his 2012 interview to The Conversation included lack of proper connections between the three disjointed enclaves and to the waterfront, absent community spaces, a contracting parkland, paucity of public transport, and narrow and crooked roads among others.
He reiterates the same in his recent opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald where he asks, “Would any jury have selected the current scheme with its fragmented and diminished parks atop massive car parks, mean streets with no connection to the harbour, cursory cultural investment, dictated by development cartels delivering a shiny 75-storey casino hotel plonked right on the foreshore and a phalanx of bulky commercial and glassy residential towers hogging the foreshore and despoiling historic vistas?”
Describing the situation as a betrayal of public interest, Thalis blames the Barangaroo failure on successive NSW Governments as well as public agencies such as the NSW Department of Planning, which placed the interests of developers over the greater public good.
Worse, the Barangaroo effect is spreading beyond the foreshore site to newer developments in inner city areas, he says, observing that Barangaroo should be “the last such alienation of our precious, irreplaceable public land”.
In a recent tweet, Thalis noted: “As professionals, as citizens, it’s so important for people involved in city making to speak up on failures such as Barangaroo. Too few independent voices being heard, engaging in complex urban issues, explaining what is the public interest. In their silence, too many complicit."
