 | HIGH AND LOW Music and architecture come together in the Sydney Conservatorium redevelopment by the NSW Government Architect
and Daryl Jackson/Robin Dyke. Jeff Mueller presents a response in six parts.
Photography by John Gollings
| Project description |
The redevelopment of the Sydney Conservatorium and the Conservatorium High School
comprises three elements: the refurbished Greenway stables and Verbrugghen Hall; the
new terraced buildings surrounding this colonial centrepiece; and a dramatic threestorey
foyer linking old and new. The concept was designed by the NSW Government
Architect and developed by a project team led by Daryl Jackson/Robin Dyke in response
to the acoustic brief, and to heritage, technical and urban design constraints. Located
within the Royal Botanic Gardens, at the top of Macquarie and Bridge Streets, the site is
a sensitive historic, urban and landscape precinct, with the added complications of the
Cahill Expressway and two underground City Circle rail tunnels. The historic site required
a sympathetic yet decisive response. The intervention of the new foyer clearly defines
and announces the new building. It also reveals a remnant drainage and road system
found by archaeologists during the excavation and displays the excavated rock face.
Groundborne vibration and airborne noise from the railway tunnels were also major
considerations, necessitating unique engineering solutions. The project has several main
functional areas: the refurbished stables and Verbrugghen Hall, the main studios and
teaching spaces to the east of the foyer, the high school to the north of the Greenway
building, and the performance spaces south of the foyer. To the west, the new library and
music technology rooms are distributed over two levels. The new roof gardens draw on
the tradition of landscaped terraces to provide a seamless extension of the Royal Botanic
Gardens and to re-establish the relationship of the stables to the gardens and to
Government House. A series of light courts and skylights provide natural light to the
studios and office below. The new conservatorium reinterprets the extensive layers of
intervention on the site and inserts a contemporary layer that responds to the existing
form while meeting the expectations of a world-class performance facility. An interface
between old and new, the project also adds to the rich history of the place.
NSW Government Architect and Daryl Jackson/Robin Dyke.
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New entrance to the Sydney Conservatorium, with the refurbished Greenway stables to the left and the new glazed entry.
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The foyer is the main orienting space, linking old and new elements, and serving a series of performance and teaching spaces.
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Interior of the
600-seat, refurbished Verbrugghen Hall (1914-
1915), in the Greenway stables. The original
deep balcony has been replaced with a new
horseshoe balcony, removing the acoustic
shadow over the stalls. The enlarged stage now
seats a full symphony orchestra.
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Interior
of one of the two 150-seat Recital Halls, located
below the terraced gardens. High-performance
vibration isolation has been achieved by sitting
these spaces on springs.
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The Music
Workshop, the largest venue directly off the
foyer, can support professional-standard
productions.
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Entry level of the new three-story foyer, adjacent to the refurbished Greenway stables, with a display of the archaeological dig.
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Lower level of the foyer, with the rock wall excavated during construction.
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Looking over the upper terrace towards the
Royal Botanic Gardens and the Opera House.
Skylights for the spaces below are to the right.
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| Review |
Prelude. The basis for music’s inclusion in the quadrivium of classical and medieval
education was as the astrophysics and quantum theory of the day: it was an earthly
emanation of the music of the spheres, the harmonic relationships connecting
everything. Music and architecture in the west have long been surrounded by cloudy,
ancient ideas of an underlying order that can be seen by those with appropriate
knowledge and capacity for discernment. The best-known re-formulation of this idea in
relation to architecture is by Friedrich von Schelling in his Philosophie der Kunst (1809):
“Architecture in general is frozen music.” But rather than opening up the question of
how any order might constitute itself or find expression in the materials of the everyday,
the use of this aphorism tends to paralyse thinking about these activities, and the
relations between them. In this understanding Bruckner’s symphonies are cathedrals in
sound, and modern pop music is mean, ugly project homes or developers’ towers.
How, then, to approach a building designed in relation to some odd pieces of
heritage for a new, urban, state-funded institution, which teaches music? My strategy is
twofold – to examine old music/architecture saws for what they may yet reveal, and to
look at the building via the conceptual framework through which students with an
intimate relationship to musical performance are taught to conceive of their undertaking.
Composition. The largely underground new conservatorium development makes
decorous institutional gestures to Macquarie Street, the Greenway stables building
(restored to its Macquarie-era external appearance), the Botanic Gardens and even the
gaping maw of the Harbour Tunnel entry. From the Farm Cove approach, the building
seems to be another terrace of introduced species in the gardens. The restoration of the original windows has made the stables seem surreal; the strange proportions and
scale of the building are now apparent – especially when one knows that the turrets
now contain tiny rehearsal rooms for divas to let down their hair. The lawns, which
cover much of the new work, are accessible to the public. They create new spaces
around the stables, revealing the building from new angles, and open a harbour vista
from Hunter Street.
The decision to build into the ground has many resonances with myth: the
resurrection of an institution, or its emergence, like Orpheus, from Hades. It could
also be read as a metaphor for the modern professional performer and his or her
relationship to the invented musical traditions of the nineteenth century. In
architectural terms, it offers rich yet problematic opportunities to manipulate light
conditions. Top lighting solutions have been creatively pursued, and internal partitions
tend to be transparent. Sunken courtyards, which will be colonised, punctuate the
building and create pleasantly lit corridors, giving natural light to most practice and
teaching rooms. Most staff offices enjoy enviable relations to the Botanic Gardens and
treetop views to Farm Cove and beyond. For the performance venues the problems of
leaky sound and light are reduced, in principle. The difficult proximity of two
underground rail lines, which troubled recordings in the old buildings, seems to have
been alleviated by the rubber mountings of the shells of the Recital Halls and Music
Workshop and the Verbrugghen Hall.
Performance. A live musical performance demands our attention and alters our
perceptions of time and space. This compulsion has famously caused envy for any
other art: “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music” is Walter Pater’s 1873
dictum. Since Pater’s time, we have developed a different understanding of the
conditions of reception of music and architecture. But, for architecture, perhaps the
least satisfactory aspect of Pater’s conception is that art in an ideal state – like an
abstract piece of music – has no meaning outside itself. By contrast, the
conservatorium redevelopment was invested with meaning long before the first sketch
was made. The redevelopment of the Sydney Conservatorium site occurred in a
climate of several contested claims for territory. Even the location of the Sydney
Conservatorium and the Conservatorium High School on the Macquarie Street site was
questioned. Hot on the heels of a perceived defeat on the East Circular Quay
controversy, a building in the Botanic Gardens, in the coveted Greenway Stables, was
never going to please the urban conservation lobby. An almost comic outcry followed
the discovery of archeologically significant drains – but is this the right kind of
attention to pay to urban design and conservation?
In his most famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (1938),Walter Benjamin makes a proposition about the reception of
buildings: contrary to other works of art, they are not appropriated in terms of the
“attentive concentration”. In Benjamin’s understanding, buildings are appropriated by
tactile use and perception in a state of distraction. This offers a more useful way of
understanding the experience of the conservatorium buildings than Pater or Schelling’s
dicta. The new public foyer is rendered in a palette of materials similar to other recent
institutional buildings in the city: sandstone facings (complete with the de facto gesture
of rustication made by the exposed foundation materials) and polished black granite,
balanced against fine steel and toughened-glass roof supports and handrails.
Discretion of the best sort seems to be the aesthetic deployed in setting up a light
rhythm of raked columns through which the stables can be viewed at close range. The
Macquarie-era brick drains (sensibly) do not pass overhead, but sit a little forlorn in a
few corners: staff and students affectionately call one “the pizza oven”. The sandstone
cistern is a more splendid ruin, and sits well in the large space of the foyer. The glass-floored areas displaying the exposed excavations offer compromised protection to the
in-situ brick artefacts. Perhaps the most disappointing note is the prosaic nature of the
display of the smaller archaeological artefacts in vitrines against one wall.
Musicology. Each type of live music has its own ideal spatial and acoustic
setting which reflects its origins. The now-archetypical music venue, the concert hall,
illustrates the intertwining of musical and architectural effects: the enlargement of the
orchestra and the development of a particular sound were responses to the acoustic of
larger spaces produced to accommodate a paying public.
The range of music training offered by the conservatorium requires a number of
different acoustic settings. The foyer serves a number of performance venues tucked
under the Botanic Gardens – from the Music Cafe for jazz or cabaret, to a 350-seat
auditorium with flexible pit arrangements. But it is also a possible venue itself: tiers of
musicians might be placed on the stairs to the recital halls, and smaller ensembles
placed on the narrow balconies around the top of the foyer space.
The Music Workshop, the largest of the venues directly off the foyer, demonstrates
a robust approach to detailing. The material palette of veneered plywood and steel
handrails evokes string instruments; fabric banners, for the adjustment of
reverberation time, hang unobtrusively over painted concrete block walls. The acoustic
is perfectly suited to training young musicians, and, especially, voices – it encourages
accuracy, and detailed musicianship, rather than simple volume and endurance. It will
take the audience a while to realise that, in this acoustic environment, its every move
is also audible. The most important functional aspect of the Music Workshop is the pit,
which enables the training of orchestral musicians and singers in staged performance.
Although it has no flytower, it nevertheless offers the opportunity for professionalstandard
productions, and will be a valuable venue for introducing new singers and
works to audiences in the heart of the city. The two 150-seat recital halls have
similarly lively acoustics, and will make it possible to revive the song recital – if an
audience can be found. The refurbishment of the 600-seat 1912 Verbrugghen Hall,
inside the stables building, makes use of the same palette of materials as the other
venues. It has yielded a greatly improved internal acoustic and separation from street
and train noise.
Improvisation. The new conservatorium building will easily succeed in fulfilling
its functional brief, and will produce an effective institutional image. The real success
of the institution and the building will, of course, be in the spaces for casual social
engagement between students and staff, and the support that it is perceived to give to
the casual and independent activity generated by its students. The building seems to
be full of in-between spaces, which encourage casual interaction and appropriation.
Coda. The conservatorium redevelopment has answered the need for new
venues and for the presence of a musical institution in the city. What practices and
values it can be seen to embody will vary with the eye of the beholder. As an example
of daring but discreet work in a heritage context it is exemplary. The provision of four
professional-standard venues for student recitals, orchestral concerts and opera two
minutes from the CBD means that it is a valuable addition to Sydney’s concert life, and
to the educational life of its 800 students. As an urban design gesture it works as
large, slow tempo pedal notes, allowing the refurbished stables to act as an iconic
flourish on Macquarie Street. As an inhabited building, it imposes order through the
rhythm of natural light along its corridors, and connections to exquisitely manipulated
images of nature. As a series of institutional spaces, the building seems supportive in
the best possible sense, like a room which gives a singer’s voice resonance and power
to make the loudest or the most tender of gestures.
Jeffrey Mueller is an associate lecturer in architecture at UNSW
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| Project Credits |
The Sydney Conservatorium of Music
Architect Daryl Jackson/Robin Dyke, NSW
Government Architect—design principals Robin
Dyke, Daryl Jackson, Chris Johnson; NSW
Government Architect project team, project
architect Peter Poulet, assistant project architects,
Stewart Morgan, Ben Hewett; DJRD Team, project
architect Barry McGregor, assistant project
architects Alex Kibble, Daniel Beekwilder. Heritage
Architect Tanner and Associates—project architect
Megan Jones. Acoustic Consultant Kirkegaard &
Associates. Structural, Mechanical, Hydraulic, Fire,
Lift and Traffic Engineers Ove Arup and Partners.
Electrical Consultant Barry Webb and Associates.
Landscape Architects Clouston. Building
Regulations and Certification Lincolne Scott
Australia. Building Vibration Isolation Wilkinson
Murray. Theatre Consultant Tony Youlden and
Associates. Kitchen Consultant The Mack Group.
Construction Manager, Builder Walter Construction
Group. Project Manager NSW Department of Public
Works and Services.
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