Architecture
The Biennale of Sydney’s occupation of White Bay Power Station, a vast temple of the industrial revolution, is an inspired metamorphosis – and it’s only the beginning of the site’s possibilities. By Naomi Stead.
How the Biennale of Sydney’s has reactivated White Bay Power Station
Back in 2020, then New South Wales treasurer Dominic Perrottet suggested the disused White Bay Power Station should be demolished. It seems he was spooked by the shadow of every treasurer’s most feared animal: the white elephant. His comments drew instant public outrage and a sharp rebuke from then minister for planning Rob Stokes, who whisked him off on a tour of the site in full Ghostbusters-style hazmat gear. A chastened Perrottet conceded that “when you walk through you can see what a fantastic office space this could be”.
The most common response to large, complex, character-filled and difficult industrial heritage buildings is not, however, to turn them into offices, but to fill ’em up with big art. This is partly a practicality: contemporary art has been getting larger and heavier for decades. Part of the reason why virtually every major art museum in the world is expanding is they can’t fit today’s mega-scaled artworks into yesterday’s human-scaled gallery spaces.
Post-industrial buildings are big, with huge load-bearing capacity. Plus they’re atmospheric: sized for the Übermensch, on the scale of Piranesi or even Boullée. Celebrated post-industrial transformations such as the Ruhr Valley in Germany, or the many former industrial-turned-art venues across Sydney itself, show how heavy industry can be superseded by the creative industries. So it is that White Bay Power Station, a building shuttered for 40 years and closed to the public for more than 100, has its doors thrown open to the people as the centrepiece of the Biennale of Sydney.
The spatial theatre would be melodramatic if it wasn’t so awe inspiring. Entering the Boiler House through the sheer brown-brick cliff of its northern façade, you come into a low, compressed space, shadowy, full of looming machines with tangled pipes, chutes and hoppers of bolted plate steel, the labyrinthine entrails of some monstrous creature. You trail through this dark tunnel-like passage until – lo! – the space expands suddenly into light and vastness. The ceiling leaps upward to its full 45-metre height, mezzanines and gangways lean out vertiginously, spidery open-grid stairs zigzag up, a tracery of girders and trusses cross above. The whole is flooded with light through paned windows some seven storeys high. This is a glorious, lofty room, at the heroic scale of a cathedral or a train station, a shrine to the machinations of the industrial revolution.
If the Boiler House has height, the Turbine Hall has length. It stretches more than a hundred metres, lit by a long clerestory above and a rhythm of windows to the side. A platform floor is punctuated with voids onto the underworld shadows below. Everywhere are scars of violent forces – the concrete floor gouged and patched, sections of massive steel girders cut jaggedly through. Every wall is encrusted with the remnants of nearly seven decades of intensive use – layered with switches and signs, hung about with chains and lights, the whole picturesque, haphazard composition of industrial pragmatism. Locked up and quietly rusting since 1984, it feels much more Mary Celeste than shipwreck, as if the boilermakers and electricians simply switched off the lights and walked out, leaving machinery and detritus intact.
The Biennale of Sydney represents a temporary activation for White Bay, one of the “predominantly community and cultural uses” for which the building was rezoned in 2022. This represents a moment of inspired opportunism: the biennale had to move from the Cutaway at Barangaroo because of refurbishment works, the power station was looking for a “meanwhile use”, an excuse to bring people in and a celebratory opening event. A happy confluence ensued.
It must have been intimidating to take custodianship of this landmark, a chalice that was significantly poisoned – with lead, asbestos, contaminated water and the various biohazards that come with mountains of pigeon shit. Dealing with this was the task of Placemaking NSW, the not-for-profit state government agency formerly known as the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority.
With a significant and highly patinated industrial heritage building, the injunction is, above all, to Not Fuck It Up. White Bay could have been scraped too clean or made too safe and lost its raw dirty-realist aura. I’m pleased to say it hasn’t – just enough has been done to remediate and decontaminate and make it “safe, secure and stable”, with the barest of necessary facilities. The experience is not overly controlled or curated and the space rewards exploration: some of the magic of urban discovery remains. But remediation was always going to be expensive. An initial hundred-ish million dollars was needed just to make it habitable, more again to make it accessible and safe for public use.
Most of the new work has been designed by heritage architects Design 5, who have inserted new balustrades, stairs and walkways at various points, a lift, and other accessibility and circulation measures. These insertions are serviceable: in some places elegant, in others a touch heavy-handed.
Outside, the public realm design is by landscape architects Turf, who have done a nice job particularly on the eastern forecourt, between the big chimneys, with small timber decks – designed to encase jagged concrete – making a series of platforms from which to contemplate the building. Meanwhile out the back, Scale Architecture has gussied up a set of transportable amenities blocks, using the simple but effective method of cladding the whole with translucent corrugated polycarbonate and lighting it up like a beacon.
The original, heritage building is unquestionably the star of this show. The two big spaces of the Boiler House and Turbine Hall have garnered most of the attention, although to my eye the bits around and in between are just as good. The greatest potential lies in the “back of house” spaces not yet open to the public – only about 13,000 of a total 30,000 square metres is currently open. There are whole sub-buildings yet to be revealed, and they hold some of the choicest opportunities for the future.
The administrative block harbours an unexpectedly graceful formal entry and is being upgraded into contemporary workspaces. The old workers’ recreation hall will likely continue its life as a performance venue. The control room is an intact Wes Anderson-esque wonder in its own right, and the skinny, tall courtyard of Transformer Alley holds endless possibility. Perhaps most excitingly, the switchhouse has been floated as a potential site for future artist studios and maker spaces.
The power station is not just spectacular in its own right, it’s also a crucial piece on a larger urban renewal chessboard: the Bays West precinct, an enormous area of prime harbourfront land covering Rozelle Bay, White Bay and Glebe Island. Having been marooned by transport inaccessibility for decades, this precinct is about to be “unlocked” by the new Bays metro station. It will be the last of the major redevelopments of Sydney foreshore and the biggest since Barangaroo, which it also dwarfs – at 77 hectares it’s more than three times larger.
Some worry Bays West will be “Barangarooted” – that initial good intentions will be gradually displaced by vested interests and overdevelopment. Housing has been a key discussion point – how much housing, how dense, how close to the water, how much of it “affordable”. There are other anxieties as well – including about the area’s ongoing life as a working port, as the only deepwater berth next to land’s edge within the inner harbour. For now, however, government intentions are indeed good – the new metro station is well under way, there are plans for a harbourside park and “world class harbour foreshore walk”, and a proposal to reopen cycling and pedestrian access to Pyrmont via the heritage Glebe Island Bridge. Plus, of course, there’s the remediated power station.
Once, this place was literally infernal – burning up the solidified sunlight of millennia stored in black coal, exploding it into heat to boil the water to turn the turbines to make the electricity to power the trams into rattling motion. It has always been a place of metamorphosis. But as the sun drops lower and pours through the west-facing windows of the Turbine Hall, it takes on a distinctly elegiac feeling. In the dying days of the civilisation that fossil fuels built, this is a cathedral to extraction, to enlightenment narratives of technological and social progress that now, themselves, feel like ashes. In art, and the art of architecture, there is at least some small consolation.
ARTS DIARY
BALLET Carmen
Sydney Opera House, Gadigal Country, until April 27
INSTALLATION Kubik Frankston
Frankston Waterfront/Bunurong Country, Victoria, until April 20
DANCE ONE
State Theatre Centre of WA, Whadjuk Noongar Country/Perth, April 19-20
FESTIVAL SALT Festival
Southern Eyre Peninsula, Barngarla, Nauo and Wirangu Country, April 19-28
THEATRE Loot
Ad Astra, Meanjin/Brisbane, until April 27
LAST CHANCE
EXHIBITION Marshmallow Laser Feast: Works of Nature
ACMI, Naarm/Melbourne, until April 14
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 13, 2024 as "Industrial light and magic".
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