Sydney, please don’t lower yourself to a New York high-rise jungle

’Tis the season of Sydney skyscrapers. The new Atlassian tower, the planet’s tallest hybrid timber structure, has just held its “topping out” ceremony, after soaring to its highpoint of 39 storeys. Approval has been granted for Castlereagh Place, a short walk from Hyde Park, which features not one but two 82-storey towers. At the lower end of the tall building scale, plans were unveiled this week for a 26-storey tower above the heritage-listed Sherbourne Hotel overlooking Darling Harbour.

All this as the Chau Chak Wing Museum at Sydney University hosts an homage to Harry Seidler, the pioneering modernist behind Australia Square, the city’s first truly high-rise skyscraper, and Blues Point Tower, which still offers one of the superlative views of Sydney partly, as the old joke goes, because Blues Point Tower is not in its line of sight.

At a time when attention has naturally been focused at ground level on the new plaza planned in front of the Sydney Town Hall, let us not overlook the CBD’s airspace and the congestion of its skies. Sydney, historically speaking a pretty stumpy city, runs the risk of becoming too vertiginous.

Even without the Opera House or Harbour Bridge, the Emerald City would have a finely contoured skyline. That’s partly because of a height limit that no tower should rise above the underside of Centrepoint Tower, or Sydney Tower as it is now known. The cityscape has also benefited from a planning decision in the early 1970s to exaggerate Sydney’s topography. Further inland, tall buildings would thrust skyward but heights would taper off towards the harbour.

One Barangaroo, or “Packer’s Pecker” as it is colloquially known, smashed that convention by completely altering the silhouette of the city. Here was a shoreline skyscraper more than 270 metres tall. New skyscrapers also rose Circular Quay. The tallest three Sydney skyscrapers – a list topped by One Barangaroo at 271 metres – have all been completed since 2020. Next are Salesforce Tower (261m) and One Sydney Harbour Tower (247m).

Some of the city’s lankiest buildings would benefit from being lankier.

OK, Sydney Tower pips them by stretching to 309m with its antenna, but its indoor observation deck is 250m above the street, and its open-air skywalk platform 268m.

I am not against skyscrapers per se. Why, as a one-time architecture student, I used to dream of designing one myself. High-rise additions have spruced up the skyline, chief among them Quay Quarter Tower. The world’s first “upcycled” skyscraper, which retained much of its original core while completely remodelling its jagged exterior, was named World Building of the Year in 2022. I am looking forward to seeing the completion of what Durbach Block Jaggers – this year’s Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal winner – calls a “skyscratcher”, a pencil tower on Pitt Street.

Some of the city’s lankiest buildings would benefit from being lankier. That’s true of the CBD’s most elegant tower, the Italian “starchitect” Renzo Piano’s Aurora Place, with its glass curtain walls and high-rise nod towards Utzon’s shells.

Height is not the main problem. It is where you situate that height, and how many high-rises are clumped together. In 2020, the City of Sydney introduced a new zoning envelope allowing for a greater number of taller buildings, while at the same time guarding against the overshadowing of parks and civic spaces, such as Martin Place. The first part of that equation is potentially problematic.

Modern-day Manhattan offers a cautionary tale. There, a cityscape that was once so beautiful it looked as if some godly hand had scattered diamonds on the horizon has been horribly disfigured. Over the years, as a resident of the city, I watched tall buildings grow like untamed weeds. On what became known as “Billionaires Row”, super-high residential blocks cast shadows over Central Park. A mammoth new development called Hudson Yards – Manhattan’s Barangaroo, in effect – changed the shape of city, making it look bloated and distended.

In perhaps the most egregious architectural crime, the Chrysler Building has been crowded out, its bright shining halo almost consigned to the shadows by new, neighbouring super-towers. As a result, New York has become a city of lost views, disrupted sight lines and overcrowded skies.

Sydney is still only the world’s 39th tallest city. Melbourne ranks 24th. But it is creeping up that list. So now is the time to sound a warning, as Le Corbusier did in the 1930s, when surveying Manhattan. The legendary French-Swiss architect, reported The New York Times, complained of what the paper translated as “the wild barbarity of the stupendous, disorderly accumulation of towers, trampling the living city under their feet”.

I wouldn’t put it in quite such melodramatic terms, but the great man had a point.

Nick Bryant, a one-time architecture student, is the host of Saturday Extra on ABC Radio National and a former New York correspondent for the BBC. He is the author of the Substack History Never Ended.

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