“You need to make buildings that are around for 50 to 100 years” – Philip Thallis Sydney and Paris trained Philip Thalis is a founding principal of Sydney’s Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects, a councillor of the City of Sydney, and a professor of architectural practice at the University of New South Wales.
Architecture & design
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P e op l e
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jul-sep 2019
WORDS hamish mcdonald
As well as winning numerous awards, he led the group that won the original design competition for Sydney’s vacated cityside container wharf area – now dubbed Barangaroo – only to have the design junked by the NSW Government and find himself the target of attacks by former prime minister Paul Keating. A&D: How do you juggle your various roles? Philip Thalis: For me architecture and the city have always been more than a ‘job’ – I have long juggled practice with university teaching, research, publication and public comment. And our practice has always been known for its independent standpoint, involved as we have been in so many highly-charged projects. So I guess that’s why the lord mayor asked me to join the progressive independents on the City of Sydney. It’s certainly a demanding combination of activities – yes it’s hard to juggle at times, but also very stimulating due to the significant overlap, and the contrasts, between practice, politics and university. Certainly I don’t have time or reason to be bored!
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A&D: You recently warned that Sydney risked becoming ‘a throwaway city of junk buildings’ to be knocked down every 30 years. So are we just a jerry-built city where nothing of lasting value is being built?
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PT: This seems to be quite an acute problem currently. You must keep in mind that buildings are one of the main consumers of energy. So having buildings that are disposable is the least sustainable thing you can do. You need to make buildings that will last for at least 50 if not 100 years. Many buildings last way longer than that. Even the humble terrace house – many of those are now 150 years old. You need to build for the long term. What’s particularly concerning with the examples that I cited: the demolition of Darling Harbour, the football stadium (SFS), the Parramatta stadium, The Powerhouse Museum, Sirius – major pieces of construction that lasted only 30 years. What it also shows is a government – and these are all government projects – seemingly hell-bent on shiny new things, rather than saying that Sydney needs to be a city that matures over time, that we build with a sense of permanence, that we build for the public good. A&D: But is it actually the government, the public sector that is building, owning and running these places? PT: What’s clear at Darling Harbour is that – and that was my first job after university in the mid-80s – for all its faults, and I’m one of the fiercest critics of the original scheme at Darling Harbour, it was actually a public project. It was designed and built by the NSW
Government. It had the National Maritime Museum, the aquarium, the exhibition centre, the convention centre, a Chinese garden, the Entertainment Centre next to The Powerhouse and the parkland in the middle, and it retained Pyrmont Bridge. All of these things were public goods. What’s happened now is that the bottom part of the area has been liquidated and passed to the developer to profit from, in order for them to build and run some reworked facilities over a 30-year period. What we are seeing is the privatisation of the city, privatisation by stealth. But these sort of projects and practices have many problematic dimensions. Our city parades as a global city but operates more like a provincial company town, a city fashioned by deals. Instead of building genuine public buildings that are in the public interest, it’s as if some buildings are simply to subsidise commercial operations. The Sydney Football Stadium – much the same thing: A 45,000-seat stadium swapped for a 45,000-seat stadium. Nobody thought the old stadium was bad, except that it needed more toilets and bigger bars. That would have been a routine renovation; not a complete knockdown and rebuild. One of the things shrouded with the new stadium is how much of the public seating is being given over to expanded corporate boxes and sponsors’ whims? Is the SFS deal
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