Packer v Star: duelling towers and #MeToo moment for Sydney

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Opinion

Packer v Star: duelling towers and #MeToo moment for Sydney

Illustration: Dionne Gain

Illustration: Dionne GainCredit:

I’ve always avoided the obvious tower-phallus analogy, focused as it is on an erection pun every bit as puerile as the priapism it seeks to satirise. But the game of casino leapfrog now facing off across Darling Harbour shoves the truth in our collective face. Mine’s bigger. No, watch thiiiiiis! See? Now mine’s definitely bigger.

It’s a few years since James Packer slid his enormous verticality – the 271 metre Crown casino, higher than anything else in Sydney - through Barry O’Farrell’s specially crafted “unsolicited proposals” planning sluice and onto a promised public park. The Star, across the water and after 20 years as Sydney’s sole casino, was miffed. Well might Premier O’Farrell offer placatory exemption from the lockout laws. Unimpressed, Barry. Now, in response, the Star offers its own shiny new erection, gleaming like some proud celestial gift. Like we should be chuffed.

It’s not taller than Packer’s but mighty in girth. None of that slinky feline stuff here. This is a double-trunked job, stolid and grunty, that makes the Crown look positively feminine. Take that! it yells across the bay. Stick that up yer jumper, yah big girl’s blouse.

Star's new tower proposal by FJMT architects.

Star's new tower proposal by FJMT architects.

There’s no way round it. Blokes just do get very excited about towers. The more improbable the vertical cantilever - the more dangerous, unwieldy, and apparently non-structural - the more cockily they are deployed as tools to compete, impress and dominate. Maybe this is a #MeToo moment for cities. Suddenly it’s hard not to see the grand glossy tower as a form of urban bullying; the Harvey Weinstein of the architecture world, the swinging dick.

Mukesh Ambani’s towering $2 billion house in Mumbai illustrates the point. At 173 metres it is the height of a 60-storey building (although only 27 ultra-lofty levels in fact), manifesting old feudal oppressions re-energised by new wealth. Reputedly the world’s most expensive private residence (after Buckingham Palace), it has 50-odd rooms, 600 staff and three helipads - all built, as befits a monument to inequality, on the site of an orphanage.

Antilia in central Mumbai, the home of India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani.

Antilia in central Mumbai, the home of India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani.

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Sydney isn’t in the same class, inequality-wise. Not yet. No single-dwelling skyscrapers here, although the City of Sydney council recently approved two $20 million terraces in once-sweet little Elizabeth Bay. Designed by architect Tony Chenchow, these frou-frou dwellings with their seven-metre ceilings, personal cinemas and glass-drapery facades illustrate the truism that money and taste don’t often coincide, especially in Sydney.

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Their interior designer, George Livissianis, likens them to Glenn Murcutt designs. No simile could be less apt. Where Murcutt has always eschewed ostentation for a disciplined, Quakerish simplicity, these houses prove even a fine architect can be undone by an obscene budget.

But when it comes to obscene, few things compete with Sydney’s two imminent, high-gloss tower casinos, made only more obscene by our apparent acceptance that - as “icons” - these tacky protuberances deserve to occupy public land, dominate public views and infect the public realm with greed, grime and graft.

Packer insists that his casino - “an iconic building that complements the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House” – will single-handedly revitalise the Sydney economy, NSW tourism and (good old trickle-down) the country. Way he talks, you’d think he was doing us a favour by grabbing our harbour front with the exact same zeal that Trump grabs pussy, exceeding even the original hotel concept by 100 metres or so and squeezing the public promenade to a minimum with his vast floor of gambling tables.

James Packer's Crown Casino by Wilkinson Eyre architects.

James Packer's Crown Casino by Wilkinson Eyre architects.

Why do we tolerate this? A casino is not an icon. It’s a private temple to private profit. It has no public significance except associations of crime and theft - including the theft of parkland. There was no public tender for the casino license – and scarcely even the pretence of a planning process, with the planning department overriding its own independent expert panel and a public hearing that found, disgracefully, that planning permission had effectively been given years earlier with the license approval.

Now, duplicating all this, we have the Star’s own heaven-sent phallus just across the water. The development application was lodged last month and the proposal was on public exhibition until this week. At 237 metre it’s a tad shorter than Crown’s, but that’s before we start the game of casino-creep. Plus it’s Pyrmont, not downtown, and will be every bit as conspicuous on its headland as Blues Point Tower.

Back in the 1990s, when the Star was first approved on ex-public land, the Central Sydney Planning Committee, in its doddery, cigar-smoking old-boy wisdom, set the height limit to match the Pyrmont power station’s four chimneys. Never mind that these chimneys would necessarily be demolished for the new building. Never mind that, being publicly owned, uninhabited and, in any case, derelict they constituted neither precedent value nor existing use rights. Respect was due. A phallus, even a ghost phallus, demands it. Bow, ye miserable plebs. Bow.

Fast forward a couple of decades. The Star’s new tower will breach zoning and floorspace rules and exceed the current 28 metre height limit by more than 700 per cent, casting its long, fat shadow across much of the peninsula. Its designers, fjmt architects, call it “organic responsive architecture” that “grows from the sandstone of the site” – using the word “responsive” three times in a paragraph, with images of twining hands, folded rock-formations and budding cells.

I mean, please. It’s not sandstone, it’s not organic, and its only responsiveness is to eye-watering gluttony and a desperate need for attention.

Astonishingly, although both towering casinos flagrantly ignore all zoning, height and floor-space restrictions, they’re treated as mere “modifications” to existing buildings already approved, to slip more easily through, with no look-in from the council.

I suppose a grown-up debate on architecture is too much to ask. It’s ridiculous to think we as land-owners should have some say. Naiive to imagine rules might apply to the wealthy as they do to you and me.

But these two pretty-face monsters, that when built will stand as priapic sentinels on both Darling Harbour promontories, reveal a planning system unworthy of the name. Grateful? We should feel ashamed.

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