PROJECTS

St. Margaret's

DETAILS

Arch / Design:		SJB Design (web)
Consultant:		PTW (web)
Type:		Apartments
Photographer:		Patrick Bingham-Hall (web)

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PROJECTS BY ARCHITECT SJB DESIGN

PROJECTS PHOTOGRAPHED BY PATRICK BINGHAM-HALL

The key goal of our master plan was the creation of a public place within the heart of the site that would connect to the surrounding pattern of paths, laneways and streets. At the heart of the design was the retention of two significant heritage buildings which became the principal anchors of the project.

The design response was to create an active and vital urban place that is contained and defined by buildings of diverse character and age that respond to their position in the urban composition. A key component of which was its activation by retail, commercial and community uses, allowing the place to appeal to the broad needs of the Surry Hills community. The architecture embraces a diversity of scale and materiality, thus avoiding the problems of perimeter block development. Effective and practical linkages were explored so that over time the buildings and their connections would engrain themselves in the location, giving the development its own individual character and expression. This reflects the diversity and eclectic nature of the established built character of the suburb.

The urban composition clarifies the site links by simplifying the alignments, allowing visual connection through to the centre, without passing under or through buildings. The positioning of building bulk has reduced the overshadowing beyond the site while allowing the central space to be in full sun from 12 noon year round. The resulting climate within the central space will be one that encourages a truly active urban space that is publicly accessible at all times.

PTW + SJB Architects believes that the resultant design provides for diversity of uses and experiences, the fundamental requirement for any enduring urban pattern life.

WHILE AUSTRALIA'S COLLECTIVE PSYCHE IS STILL PARTIALLY transfixed by the never-ending ideal of the Great Australia Dream of a house and a garden, there is an increasing awareness of the joys of engaging with denser domestic environments. Apartment living is becoming increasingly popular, with the 2004 census recording that the rate of increase in people living in apartment buildings is higher than the rate of increase of population in Australia.

Local authorities, however, seem to be caught between a desire for urbanm consolidation and a fear of what this might mean. Perhaps this nervousness is predicated on the negative experiences in many cities during the 1980s when swathes of existing buildings were demolished to create new, bigger developments, often resulting in some pretty uninteresting architecture, together with some poor quality urban spaces at ground level. QQestions of what type of development to allow, what density and what configuration are at the forefront, while in the background lies the issue of how to differentiate between opportunistic developers raping the site for maximum capital gain and adventurous propositions that both challenge the status quo and provide new and exciting urban and domestic environments.

In an effort to establish control over the resulting built environment, local council development control plans in New South Wales prescribe the limits of allowable density via floor space ratios and height controls, but these prescriptive numerical controls are powerless to ensure a particular quality of the resulting built environment. Unfortunately, rather than an exploration of urban ideas for places, the conversation seems to become lodged in a continual debate about numbers.

The most recent addition to this discussion comes in the form of the redevelopment of the old St Margaret's Hospital in Bourke Street, Sydney, just behind Oxford Street, to the south of Taylor Square. The project was contentious in its early stages of development, with several complaints that the density proposed was 'unsympathetic' to the area. The completed building reveals, however, a strong urban strategy that sensitively rearranges existing conditions to maximise sun and local interconnecting vistas, providing a positive micro-environment within the urban context, and establishing a new urban space, as well as providing 214 new apartments of various size and type.

For 100 years, the St Margaret's Hospital provided care to 'mothers and their families' from Surry Hills and surrounding districts. When the Sisters of St Joseph decided to sell the Bourke Street site after the hospital's closure in 1994,
they developed a master plan that would establish some parameters for future development in order to underpin the commercial value of the site. This set a proposed floor space ratio of 2:1, a similar density to the neighbouring terrace house developments and lower than the existing on-site density, which
included three five-storey hospital and convent buildings and a la-storey nurses' home. As the site had been zoned 'special use' there were no height restrictions.
Zone Developments, a joint venture company with Michael Teplitsky and
Boris Markovsky of the Rommark Corporation and the late Isador Magid of Overland Developments, purchased the site. Their initial intention was to refurbish the existing buildings and to create an outdoor space at the centre of the site. They engaged six firms of architects to explore the design and development potential of the site and asked two of the teams, PTW and S J B, to work together in a joint venture to collaboratively develop the ideas they had presented.

Early analysis by the design team showed that the existing buildings presented problems with overshadowing of the proposed central courtyard space and that the configuration of the floor plates of some of the original buildings limited their reuse as apartments. Consequently, the decision was made to demolish five buildings and to replace these with three new structures.

Two of the original buildings, both of historic significance, were retained and have been refurbished and this provides an anchoring backdrop for the scheme, creating an aesthetic layering of old and new, adding to the eclectic mix within the site and beyond. The old 1951 sanatorium building has been adapted to provide a series of apartments that capitalise on the pattern of north-facing solariums, as they had existed in the original hospital ward layout. The apartment configuration within this building is quite complex as the various unit types are juggled within the existing structure and openings. Although some of the layouts are a bit awkward, the scale and detail of the original building give these spaces a grand character.

A chapel, designed by Ken Woolley in 1958, was also retained and is now the home of Object Gallery, with a new fitout by Sam Marshall. The formal mass of the adjacent new apartment blocks not only addresses the sun overshadowing the internal courtyard, but is also sculpted to allow this small round chapel to be seen as a jewel in the scheme. Although the various buildings present an eclectic mix of materials and style, the careful formal manipulation of each element ensures that neither the central urban space, nor the chapel, are overwhelmed by the scale of the adjacent 10 and 17-storey buildings.

The project has endured the usual process that occurs when a building contract is novated and the architect becomes a consultant to the builder with little ability to ensure that key design intentions are upheld. The II-storey Bourke Street building, known in quirky marketing parlance as 'Jasper: has undergone changes to the proposed external finishes. The planned off-form concrete was rendered and painted white and the red protruding boxes on the street, elements designed to assist in reducing the perceived scale of the building as viewed along the length of Bourke Street, became powder coated instead of anodised.

Although both of these changes have not impacted on the 'bigger picture' of the scheme and no doubt produced a saving for the client, they do represent
a reduction in the subtlety of the architecture. The stark white render reflects the sunlight rather more harshly than the pale grey of the concrete would have and similarly the anodising process would have produced a subtle colour variation in the red boxes. The original material choices would have also provided a more coherent overall visual connection between the three new buildings, each of their own style and character.

With a floor space ratio of 3.25:1, the scheme exceeds the floor space ratio and height limits of surrounding sites by more than 60 percent; however, it provides a very positive contribution to the urban environment of Surry Hills. The density is stacked vertically over a restricted floor plate, the placement of which carefully considers the effects of overshadowing and leaves more than 40 percent of the site as open urban space. The arrangement of parts creates a finely crafted (albeit slightly windy) urban space that sensitively responds to the pattern oflaneways around the site and sets up the opportunity for connections between other spaces in the neighbourhood: from Taylor Square to the already popular pedestrian areas of Crown Street to the west.

The St Margaret's project shows that it's worthwhile to consider the detail of individual schemes in terms of the promise that they offer the surrounding environment, rather than hiding behind numbers and calculations in the hope of preventing the worst possible case scenario. Although 'atypical' developments are difficult to manage under current regulatory systems, they are also sometimes just what might be needed to provide a shift that will allow a cultural change. Sensitive 'space making' can be the genesis of successful 'place making'; good architecture and urban design can present opportunities for places that are both subtly configured and extend the perception or expectations beyond what is currently known.

Sydney's Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, is championing the idea of'urban villages: 34 areas of distinguishable character that would be identified across her electorate of Sydney South. This idea has merit in a conceptual sense and supports the beliefs of urban theorists and sociologists who promote the idea of'social capital: but there is a risk that this description may be taken too literally, with cheesy thematic definitions, rather than more subtle ideas that include sensitive spatial configurations that promote variation and allow a range of activities to both occur and also change over time.

In considering the detailed development of urban villages, the council could do well to observe some of the subtle characteristics of design presented at St Margaret's which establishes all the right manoeuvres that are needed to support the development of a built environment that can embrace urban living and social interaction. With St Margaret's making a place for this activity to occur in a great location in the middle of the Surry Hills, it seems that it is only a matter of time before the perfect commercial tenant realises the potential of the urban space created and moves in, to become the catalyst of a great 'urban village: providing a model for Clover's dream.