Pier Pavilion
Barangaroo
Wugul Ora (one mob)
Our 2020 design competition proposal for a
public events pavilion at Barangaroo, on Sydney
Harbour’s western foreshore. The design seeks to
reconcile the conflicted history of a site occupied
for millennia by the world’s oldest living culture,
with its post-Colonial heritage.
Connection to place
Barrangaroo was a strong Cammeraygal woman,
wife of Bennelong, namesake of the promontory on which the Sydney Opera House today stands to the city’s east. Along the city’s western foreshore, the redevelopment of Barrangaroo is
one of the world’s largest industrial waterfront renewals ever undertaken. Within this epic context, our pavilion is conceived
as an adumbration, using material and spatial tensions to embody the inherent cultural schism of the place and Australia more broadly. The pavilion’s plinth of rough-sawn sandstone off against faces a dark polished granite wall, where a sheet of water disappears into the void between them.