Sails on the Bay: Renzo Piano and Sydney Harbour

The two buildings of Aurora Place in Sydney by Renzo Piano reflect the city’s harbour more than any others. To anyone saying ‘It’s the opera house’, its curling ‘sails’ at Bennelong Point are more like ocean waves crashing against the headlands than the chop on the harbour.

Aurora Place has sails too. It is possible to imagine its apartment building as the fat helm of ship being propelled by the tall sails of the building behind. Piano goes further, suggesting Sydneysiders (as with Australians generally) are coastal dwellers enclosed by the desert. The Place is opposite the botanical gardens on a block enclosed by Macquarie, Bent and Phillip streets.

Why Sydney? Piano also designed the Californian Academy of Sciences building in San Francisco, the New York Times tower, and along with Richard Rogers the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

1. Macquarie Street

The façade of the fat helm, a fourteen-storey apartment building on Macquarie Street, is always changing. A rim of terracotta tiles surrounds a curtain of glass balconies that gathers to form the front. Each balcony is segmented vertically by horizontal glass panels that turn to open. Behind each segment is a white roman blind.

Each tenant adjusts their panels and blinds according to taste and temperament and goings on in response to the weather, or the seasons or the angle and intensity the sun.

A blind is like a fleck or a wave blown off the top of the harbour’s swell. Closed glass panels reflect the sky to pedestrians as if it is water. Open glass panels darken the façade and give it rhythm and relief by evoking the harbour’s currents and depths.

2. Phillip and Bent streets

Aurora Place, right

The east and west façades of the skyscraper behind – the sails – are shaped like an unfolding Japanese fan. The building bulges so each façade traces a shallow convex curve around a centre spine. Perspex fixed to each gives the fan effect and together they appear as sails, hoisted upon a radio mast, tacking across the wind.

At its entrance, the narrow edge on Bent Street, a plaque shows that the 19^th century humanitarian Caroline Chisholm opened the Female Immigrants’ Home here in 1841. The plaque doesn’t say the Home was established in an empty, rat infested part of the old Immigration Barracks.

I walk in and order a coffee in a huge shoe-box atrium that feels comfortably confined. It is lined with the same tiles as the Macquarie Street facade. Up close they are copper orange, but they darken and warmify with distance. Under my fingers their texture is like barely roughened sand and their material like metal when I knock on one with my knuckle.

The coffee hall has about fifty seats at long jarrah and small round black tables, all spread around a ten-metre coffee bar. I sit and drink and watch, and just before I finish a tall man strides through wheeling an overnight suitcase in blue jeans and a lime green pullover. He is luminous, like the first new growth of spring against an earthen orange desert.