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.

Location

Sydney NSW

Date

2020