Saving The Sirius is Hard to do

Built in the late 1970s on land initially resumed by the NSW State Government in 1901, the Sirius apartments replaced Rowan’s Bond store erected by the NSW Housing Board in 1916. Ironically, it was the erection of commercial properties that resulted in the Housing Board being disbanded in the mid-1920s, after criticisms that it had not focussed on its principal purpose of housing provision.

The Sirius apartments were erected by the NSW Housing Commission to house people who would be displaced by the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority (SCRA)’s redevelopment scheme. The Green Ban, which had effectively halted the planned redevelopment of the entire Rocks area, was lifted in June 1975 to allow the erection of a building on the Bunkers Hill site to proceed. The green bans made SCRA rethink its initial proposal to demolish the majority of the surviving building stock in the precinct and replace it with high-rise towers. Architects including Neville Gruzman had assisted the Rocks Action Group with the preparation of a People’s Plan. Public pressure led to the conservation of the area north of the Cahill Expressway and the creation of The Rocks as one of Australia’s most popular tourist destinations.

The project’s architect, Tao Gofers, had trained in Canada and was influenced by the New Brutalist movement, especially its focus on design based on social concerns and the truthful expression of materials, function and structure.¹ As was frequently the case during the 1970s, social concerns were an important consideration throughout the design of the Sirius project. Gofers remembers that:
The brief that Jack Burke (Chairman of the NSW Housing Commission) and I prepared for the design of Sirius was quite simple. The building was to provide for a range of units from pensioner one-bedroom units, accessible two-bedroom units, two, three and four-bedroom split level units with balconies, roof gardens or terraces. The complex was to encompass community facility area and a special pensioners’ community space. The complex was to include undercover parking. The designs were to be based on the three-storey prototype built at Sans Souci although all accessible and pensioner unit were serviced by the lifts.² Professor Phillip Goad notes that the design represents … architecturally, the important philosophical move by the NSW Housing Commission in the mid-1970s away from modernist ideals of housing in towers or slab blocks on cleared sites towards solutions that involved community participation and sympathetic contextual placement of such housing and retention of long-time low-income residents in historic inner urban precincts.³

Sirius is listed on the NSW Chapter’s Register of Significant Architecture; it has also been registered by the National Trust. However, neither of these listings affords statutory protection. The local campaign to save this building was generated by the local community and has attracted international press coverage. Chapter President Shaun Carter has been advocating retention and retrofitting of the block and serves as president of the Save our Sirius Foundation, a lobby group formed late last year.

Sirius is one of the many brutalist projects under threat from demolition that are featured on the international #SOSBrutalism website sosbrutalism.org, a growing database of over 700 brutalist buildings. But some of the most well-known brutalist works have also achieved official recognition: Habitat 67 in Montreal remains ‘a functioning icon of 1960s Utopianism and one of the period’s important buildings’ and has been heritage listed by the Quebec Government.⁴ while Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower (1968–72), a 31-storeyed social housing block in West London, is also a listed building.

One of the arguments used in attempts to downplay the significance of the design of Sirius was that the architect was not well known. But this ignores the fact that architects working in the public sector in this period sought to improve the quality of public architecture rather than advancing their own careers. Project recognition was directed to the agency undertaking the work, not to the individual architect.

The reason given by the Minister was that the listing would reduce the sale value of the site by up to $70m and that there were conflicting views regarding its aesthetic significance.⁵

In preparing its recommendation that Sirius be listed on the State Heritage Register the Heritage Council of NSW did not accept Housing NSW’s view that Sirius was not worthy of heritage protection at a state level. It instead sought independent architectural advice from one of the nation’s leading architectural historians, Professor Philip Goad at the University of Melbourne. The nomination submitted to the Minister included Goad’s findings that Sirius is… a direct outcome of the so-called ‘Green Bans’, the protest movement instituted in Sydney in late 1971 against the commercial redevelopment of The Rocks and Millers Point precincts in the 1970s. Instead of relocating local residents, the NSW Housing Commission decided in an unusual move to consult and build affordable public housing for those residents and others displaced in the area. [A] fine example of the late Brutalist architectural style, especially in its application to public housing and in its use of off-form concrete and its picturesque massing of stacked cubic components intended to minimise its impact on the neighboring historic precinct of The Rocks and alleviate the effects of vehicular noise from the Sydney Harbour Bridge approaches.⁶

At the time of publication the future of the Sirius looks bleak. On 31 July the NSW Minister for Heritage Mark Speakman announced that he had decided not to list the building on the State Heritage Register. Since this announcement, there has been considerable comment in the media, including comments regarding the use of the financial hardship argument by the NSW Government. This provision in the Heritage Act is meant to apply when the costs of conserving the building are prohibitive. Tao Gofers’ design prototype for Sirius at Sans Souci has already been retrofitted, demonstrating that such an approach can be undertaken successfully.

The Australian Institute of Architects’ NSW President said to the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘The government says the building is not fit for purpose. But it was designed for housing, operates as housing, is fit for tomorrow and is perfectly fine for housing right now’.

‘We see this as a backwards step for the government, and we will continue to fight to save the building’, he said.⁷
Noni Boyd is heritage officer at the NSW Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects

saveoursirius.org sosbrutalism.org

NOTES
1 Russell Rodrigues quoted in the State Heritage Register nomination
2 Tao Gophers quoted in The Sirius Apartments, millerspointcommunity.com.au/the-siriusapartments
3 ‘Expert report: Sirius apartment building’ prepared by Professor Phillip Goad, 2 November 2015
4 https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/13/habitat-67-montreal-expo-moshesafdiehistory-cities-50-buildings-day-35
5 Minister Speakman’s media release, 31 July 2016
6 ‘Expert report: Sirius apartment building’ prepared by Professor Phillip Goad, 2 November 2015
7 smh.com.au/nsw/sirius-building-will-notreceiveheritage-listing-nsw-governmentdeclares-20160731-gqhp0f.html