16 May 2013
The winning design by Wilkinson Eyre for the Crown Resort Hotel at Barangaroo captures the special character of Sydney as a harbour city, says the Urban Taskforce.
The winning design by Wilkinson Eyre for the Barangaroo hotel is an organic flowing shape that relates well to Sydneys network of bays, our curving beaches, the rolling surf and the sails of yachts on the harbour, says Urban Taskforce CEO, Chris Johnson If any city can claim the flowing shapes of nature as part of its character, it must be Sydney.
For a tall building to be elegant, it needs relatively small floor plates that come with a hotel or apartments rather than the much larger floor plates that commercial buildings need. The brief for the Crown Hotel Resort has floor plates that work with an elegant tower.
The work of Wilkinson Eyre in designing organic shaped conservatories for the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore and their elegant temporary basketball structure for the London Olympics demonstrates their expertise in producing an organic architecture with connections to nature.
The presentation to the Urban Taskforce forum on the winning design by Crown and Wilkinson Eyre demonstrated that a mixed use of a variety of functions was needed to make a project of this size work economically at a level that can sustain the organic design elements. A simple hotel on its own is unlikely to lead to a special design of the character proposed for the project.
The elegance and beauty of the final form of the building will need to be championed to avoid the planning approval process becoming a default designer.
There are still many areas at the public domain level to be resolved. The southern cove is an essential part of the overall concept for Barangaroo and the design team needs to work with the Barangaroo team to ensure this is maintained. In a similar manner a dialogue is now needed with the design team for the central section of Barangaroo.
