Exploring visions and designs for our city that preceded the built reality today, Unrealised Sydney is a new exhibition at the Museum of Sydney from Saturday 6 August 2022.
Unrealised Sydney investigates the genesis of, and community response to, design proposals by governments and the private sector to redevelop major precincts in and around the CBD through the second half of the 20th century.
Post-war reconstruction was promoted by governments to plan for peaceful years of prosperity and progress ahead. ‘Brave new world’ thinking came to the fore with new and revived utopian visions of rebuilt cities sweeping away slums, congestion and other unwanted legacies from the past.
Guest curator, Robert Freestone, Professor of Planning, University of New South Wales said that cities evolve as a dialogue between the possible and the actual with change often contested.
“The years after WWII saw complete replanning of precincts, not just buildings, on a scale that increased into the 1960s,” he said. “Alongside the proclaimed technological social advancements came serious community resistance for the first time in Sydney.”
With a focus on eight precincts, the Unrealised Sydney exhibition includes a range of plans, designs, sketches, photographs, models and documentary footage that form a rich insight into what Sydney ‘might have been’.
Examples come from official and unofficial plans, competition entries, unsolicited proposals, and one-off inspirations sparked by historic events, opportunities, crises, and design challenges.
The selection of projects are displayed in various tangible and digital modes, ranging from the sensible, the weird and wonderful to the dysfunctional, disastrous and even the dilettante.
Accompanying the Unrealised Sydney exhibition is an interactive Realise experience where visitors can design their own future city block, considering factors such as environmental sustainability, liveability and productivity and see their visions brought to life.
Unrealised Sydney exhibition themes cover:
Tubowgule on Gadigal Country / Sydney Opera House:
Calls to build a national opera house before WWII led to an international design competition in 1956 that attracted over 200 entries from 28 countries. The winning drawings, by Jørn Utzon, were described as ‘simple to the point of being diagrammatic’, but what else was suggested?
Warrane on Gadigal Country / Circular Quay:
Circular Quay has long been one of Sydney’s most dynamic, diverse and unfinished places. The first comprehensive post-war plan was made in the early 1960s, followed by variously inventive and almost always controversial schemes through to the 1990s and beyond.
Tallawoladah on Gadigal Country / The Rocks:
One of the first places of colonial settlement in Australia, The Rocks developed organically as a rough-and-tumble seaport village and with little thought to the Gadigal people or urban planning. However from the late 1950s ambitious redevelopment plans were in the offing.
Museum of Sydney on Gadigal Country:
Australia’s first Government House complex built in 1788 is of national significance as the location of early encounters between the local Gadigal people and the British colonists. The decision by the state government in the 1980s to invite tenders for redevelopment led to a series of attempts to find the right balance between heritage and commerce.
Macquarie Street on Gadigal Country:
Named after the civic-minded Governor, Macquarie Street has long been recognised as Sydney’s principal public and cultural axis. The need to conserve its major historic buildings was publicly debated and gradual acceptance of the precinct’s heritage significance stymied major redevelopment plans.
Wallamool on Gadigal Country / Woolloomooloo:
In the early post-war years, Woolloomooloo was seen as a run-down working-class area. Various redevelopment plans from the 1930s culminated in the late 1960s in what a city planner described as ‘the archetype of all urban planning disasters’.
Tumbalong on Gadigal Country / Darling Harbour:
This prime 50-hectare site attracted private and public entrepreneurs offering a confusing jangle of contradictory plans. Eventually a vision to create an entertainment, retail, convention, exhibition and museum precinct was confirmed as part of Australia’s 1988 bicentenary celebrations.
Tumbalong on Gadigal Country / Barangaroo:
Barangaroo, once an integral part of Sydney’s working port, is the most recent story. An international urban design ideas competition attracted nearly 140 entries and a wining entry that was not built.
“Ideas for new buildings and precincts reveal a lot about the time of their conception – the economic and political influences, technological advances and insights into our society and environment,” said Adam Lindsay, CEO, Sydney Living Museums and NSW State Archives.
“Unrealised Sydney takes a look at the many visions that did not come to fruition and offers a thought-provoking reflection of what the city of Sydney may have become.”
Unrealised Sydney
Museum of Sydney, Corner Phillip and Bridge Streets, Sydney
Exhibition: 6 August – 13 November 2022
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.sydneylivingmuseums.com.au for details.
Image: Discovery Village, Darling Harbour development proposal architect, Tony Corkill. NSW State Archives