Public Sydney is also a love story. Its authors, Philip Thalis and Peter John Cantrill, demonstrate a fifteen-year love affair with Sydney, an achievement of devotional documentation paralleled only by Joseph Fowles’s elevational study of 165 years ago, Sydney in 1848. It is important to note that Thalis studied in Paris under Bernard Huet, advocate of Bruno Fortier’s famous Atlas of Paris (1989), and Cantrill studied at IUAV in Venice, where the pioneering work of urban morphologist Saverio Muratori was hugely influential. These studies emphasised the deliberate disinterest or neutralising of content of the drawing and its power as an analytical tool, enabling urbanists to study a city’s morphology and its defining characteristics at a single point in time – in a way, to find its structural rather than social DNA. This is a very European tradition, documenting the city so that others might work on it with successive zeal. While some in the architectural cognoscenti might scorn these practices as outmoded, there is no doubt that such painstaking research creates an exceptional document for future architecture and urban design.

The focus of Thalis and Cantrill’s mapping has been the public buildings and places of Sydney. Compiled over many years with the help of 150 students from UTS and UNSW, plans, elevations, and sections of nearly one hundred buildings, monuments, and infrastructure works are presented here. The choice of the word ‘public’ – whether it denotes a building or space – is important. It is almost as if the act of recording is an act of resistance, a strategy to halt the onslaught of change or, at the very least, to usefully slow modernity’s inexorable flux through urbanisation. Alec Tzannes in his introduction uses the term ‘stewardship’: the right word for anyone in control of a city. Thalis and Cantrill refute the accusation that Sydney was unplanned. Indeed, it was not, but as a city it has evolved as a series of unfinished and constantly shifting plans, of overlaid and sometimes competing ideas, which this book now captures in a single volume.

State Office Block, from the steps of the State Library of New South Wales, Max Dupain, 1967

Two essays open Public Sydney. The first, by Thalis, is an impassioned definition of what constitutes the idea of the public project. It sets out a clear methodological framework for the research. The second, by Cantrill, is a detailed description of Sydney’s formation, and it is here that historic maps on each facing page of text illuminate the city’s gradual formation. These culminate in the exquisite new map of present-day Sydney, and it is from this point that the book begins in earnest with maps, plans, sections, elevations, original photographs, and descriptions of central Sydney’s most important public places, from the Sydney Opera House to the tiny Busby’s Bore Fountain in Hyde Park. There is a double page of sections showing the volumes that Thalis and Cantrill describe as ‘public rooms’, as well as a double-page spread of elevations, all drawn at the same scale.

The essays that follow round out the volume. Peter Mould gives a fine account of the role of government patronage, especially through the Government Architect and the NSW Public Works Department. He rightly marvels at Macquarie’s commissioning of Francis Greenway in 1818 to design an obelisk from which to measure distance to all parts of the colony. Thalis and Cantrill describe this monument as the omphalos – the belly button of English conquest and the colonial project. Lisa Murray charts the work of the City Architect and highlights the city’s role in providing for the public every day: markets, baths, and powerhouses, as well as roads, parks, street trees, lights, and public toilets. She also discusses the place of gender in the city. Lawrence Nield outlines the gradual squaring-off of Circular Quay, which, in characteristically frank style, he says ‘represents all the deeply flawed processes of planning that have become the norm for Sydney’. Craig Burton describes the roles of nature, landscape, and the pattern of Indigenous settlement in Sydney’s formation. He makes the compelling analogy that ‘the Sydney area [is] shaped like the back of a human right hand’. Especially revealing are his diagrams of the Tobegully and Tarra ridges east and west of the Tank Stream, which embraced the original settlement. Ian Innes details concepts of nineteenth-century ‘improvement’, especially through the development of the Botanic Gardens and the Domain. Stephen Collier, using Manuel de Solà-Morales’s phrase ‘the territorial floor of the city’, hints at other ideas and connections beyond the public building – in many respects tantalising readers with this book’s potential as the basis for future design research. Not content to leave it at that, Thalis and Cantrill provide a full comparative chronology of drawings and biographies of the city’s architects as well as a chronology of major design competitions held across more than 200 years of Sydney’s making.

At the end of all this, you need to take breath. This book has been a mighty undertaking. But, at the risk of sounding churlish, I wanted more – and this is a measure of the book’s worth. I went back across maps, drawings, and text. Across almost all of the authors is unanimity about the negative aspects of the Cahill Expressway, so I studied the drawings trying to see why I didn’t seem to mind its crazy addition to Circular Quay as a wonderful Futurist transport hub. I also didn’t agree with Clive Lucas’s negative description of the Conservatorium of Music as a ‘cupcake on a plate’. Sure, the intrusion of surrounding roads has made it an island, but its isolation meant that any additions had to rethink the ground plane, and was it ever not a cupcake?

Overseas Passenger Terminal, Circular Quay, Sydney c.1988 (photograph by John Gollings)

I also wanted to see the buildings of public spectacle. So I pondered the exclusion of Darling Harbour, and especially the Sydney Exhibition Centre and John Andrews’s Sydney Convention Centre, and the Aquarium and Maritime Museum. Surely these major public buildings were worthy of inclusion and retention – and also as a measure of how these places of public spectacle had shifted from the east (with James Barnet’s Garden Palace of 1879) to the west with the 1988 Bicentennial development of Darling Harbour? I also wanted to see the labyrinth of retail arcades, connections to cinemas and department stores, the influence of the public spaces of commercial and corporate modernity – to test, for example, the spaces of Seidler’s Australia Square and Andrews’s former American Express Tower to see and experience Sydney as a connected and contested metropolis and to feel the tension between the cosmopolitan and the civic, the private and the public. Where in this book are the 1920s, the years of so-called ‘street architecture’ that celebrated urbanity and propinquity? Sydney’s buildings and spaces of 1920s commerce and their associated, now forgotten, little streets are nowhere to be found. Was there selective nostalgia at work here? But I had to stop myself. This was my opinion running riot with the excellent data in front of me. The key message is that new research can now be done given the appearance of this book and, as Alec Tzannes describes it, ‘the foundational knowledge’ contained therein.

Clover Moore states boldly in her afterword that ‘Public Sydney is a compendium of what our predecessors got right’. Sydney is beguiling – of that there is no doubt. Perhaps this explains why opinion is so hotly divided over the city’s direction and accounts for its peripatetic evolution. Thalis and Cantrill’s maps and plans, however, allow architects, urban designers, and politicians to take stock, to take the city’s measure. Their book allows opinion to be put aside so that the beauty of Sydney’s landscape, the intricacy of its urban morphology, and the diversity and dignity of its public buildings, monuments, and places can be put into proper perspective. If the city can be seen for what it actually is, Sydney might recognise and recover some of its innate characteristics, withstand the ‘storm of progress’, and grow to be the ‘open city’ that the authors of this fine volume wish for.