Barangaroo Reserve

PWP Landscape Architecture·Sydney, Australia

2015Landscape & Planning · Public ParkCultural

Year: 2015
Category: Landscape & Planning · Public Park
Type: Cultural
Status: Built
Firm: PWP Landscape Architecture
Location: Sydney, Australia

Named after an influential Aboriginal woman of colonial Sydney, Barangaroo is the most important reinvention of Sydney’s historic center for decades. The precinct is a globally significant, 22-hectare, AUD$6+ billion waterfront renewal project that redefines the western edge of Sydney Harbor. The Barangaroo precinct will support more than 24,000 permanent jobs, generate approximately $2 billion per annum to the NSW economy, and provide over 11-hectares of newly-accessible public land. Its three redevelopment areas: Barangaroo Reserve, Central Barangaroo, and Barangaroo South combine recreational, commercial development with residential and civic spaces, to create a stimulating network of new landmarks on Sydney’s waterfront.

On August 22, 2015, Barangaroo Reserve was the first phase in the 3-district master plan to open. Barangaroo Reserve is the re-creation of a “Club Cape” headland that restores the visual geography of Sydney Harbor. Using industry-first technology, a concrete container port was reborn as a naturalistic rocky outcrop headland park, with more than 75,000 plantings native to the Sydney region. Guided by geomorphologic studies, historical maps, and early paintings, the design of the headland includes a foreshore constructed from 10,000 sandstone blocks excavated directly from the site.

Pedestrian and bicycle pathways are separated by a low, one-meter-wide sandstone wall known as the “1836 Wall,” the symbolic marking of the original pre-colonial shoreline. Selected to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative and the One Planet Living program, Barangaroo Reserve kept the highest ecological goals always in sight. All existing materials were reused on-site and recycled to form the headland, including the kilometer of concrete caissons and asphalt from the container port and materials excavated from the Northern Cove.

Hidden beneath the artificial headland, the Cutaway is a super-sized void formed through sandstone excavation operations and flexible enough to host art exhibitions, music performances, or a future Aboriginal Cultural Center. After more than a century, the once-scarred promontory is now visually-reunited with its sister headlands, marking the transformation of one of the city’s oldest industrial sites into a modern reinvention of its more sustainable past.