out of 10 award winners,the city’s second-tallest skyscraper,Salesforce Tower by architects Foster and Partners,came in first with nearly a third of the 3400 votes cast as of Wednesday at 5pm.
Quay Quarter was second,with about 18 per cent of votes.
Readers continue to have a vexed relationship with its tallest and sparkliest building,One Crown at Barangaroo. It came in third with 14 per cent of the votes in the online poll asking readers to nominate their favourite building. Australia Square,by late architect Harry Seidler,received 11 per cent of the votes.
The poll is not scientific,and readers can vote more than once. The International Towers at Barangaroo and the Greenland Centre received the fewest votes – respectively,three per cent and one per cent of the vote.
Greenland Centre.Supplied
In emails sent to theHerald,though,more than 50 per cent nominated the Wilkinson Eyre-designed One Crown as Sydney’s worst building. They called it a travesty;its domination of the skyline was a blight on “a once-beautiful city”,and it defiled a treasured peninsula,Barangaroo.
Many readers wrote saying they lamented the change in Sydney’s skyline. Others called for a stop to the hideous growth and the soaring skyline that had created sunless and windy canyons.
The city was once called the Paris of the Pacific,said readers via email and in comments. “Now it’s just like any other large city crowded and lacking any depth of architectural history or community,” said a reader in an email to the paper.
“Sydney ain’t no Paris,” replied another commenter under the pseudonym PrivateCitizen.
In emails sent to the Herald more than 50 per cent nominated One Crown as Sydney’s worst building.Louise Kennerley
Two of architect Harry Seidler’s high-rises in Sydney’s CBD won nearly 20 per cent of the vote for favourite building online,but many Sydneysiders wrote saying how much they disliked Blues Point Tower at McMahons Point. Designed by Seidler,it was completed 60 years ago.
With plans for new skyscrapers in the CBD,the city was not designed for super-tall buildings with its narrow,goat-track streets in a very confined site,wrote a reader under the pseudonym Torchbearer.
“The super talls work better in a broad,laid out city like Melbourne or even Adelaide. Sydney by virtue of its lack of planning was destined to fail as a great city centre,” said another reader.
Reader Denis Goodwin commented:“If you don’t like tall buildings there’s a huge number of other low-rise towns in the state/country to choose from if that’s more your style.”
Another reader,Demos,said Sydney had improved since he arrived in the country in 1967. “It was a gusty desolate deserted depressing empty place.”
Lex wrote that up was better than going out. “Given the physical constraints of the Sydney basin it is preferable that Sydney goes up rather than continuing to resort to car-dependent,facility starved new developments claiming green space on our city fringes to meet our housing need.”
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