Body works.

Design of a new recreation centre celebrates the building's proximity to Sydney Harbour Bridge while respecting the scale of a historic neighbourhood.

Ed Lippmann designs elegant houses for private clients in and around Sydney (AR March 1996). Built on Modernist principles and subtly complex, they are the products of an interest in developing lightweight steel and glass structures.

King George V recreation centre for the city of Sydney was the practice's first civic commission. The site in The Rocks was a sensitive one. This is the oldest part of Sydney, to the west of Circular Quay and the Opera House, characterized by nineteenth-century buildings and narrow hilly streets, There was a twentieth-century invasion in 1936 when Sydney Harbour Bridge was built, springing from the top of the Rocks across the harbour divide to the northern shore. As if connecting the historical gap, the site is wedged between the neighbourhood street on the east, and the boundary wall of the elevated freeway to the bridge, curving from the south along its west side.

Sporting precedents already existed in the form of a dilapidated 1920s sports hall (demolished) and a children's playground, which was retained and improved at the south end. The architects were also asked to retain a large '60s mural painted by community artists across the freeway wall.

The new centre has an outdoor court on the north, a sports hall with two indoor basketball and volleyball courts, and an adjoining two-storey concrete frame building. There are community and changing rooms on the ground floor with direct access to the hall, a gymnasium on the first and a roof terrace with stunning views over Circular Quay. While the architects have conformed to local scale, the presence of the bridge, an iconic piece of twentieth-century industrial design, suggested other industrially poetic possibilities which they have exploited.

The main architectural drama is in the curvilinear structure of the sports hall's roof. Spanning 20m it provides 9m of clear height inside the building while minimizing its impact on the street. A series of curved steel trusses are pin-jointed to the slab and supported along the decorated west wail by pin-jointed props. This structure is covered by corrugated steel sheet, screwed to steel purlins spanning the trusses, and lined internally with a corrugated steel ceiling. To give views of the mural from the street, a glazed wall, 3m high, wraps round the building. This, with central skylights, floods the interior with luminance. A skylight along the wall illuminates the mural.

This is an exhilarating space; made so by the lightness and expression of the structure, the breadth and length of the shining wooden floor terminating in brilliant yellow walls, and graphic drama of the mural. It is naturally ventilated with cool air being drawn in through low louvres in the glazed wall on the east, and hot air expelled on the west through high louvres below the long skylight.

Architect Lippmann Associates

Design team Gerhard Abel, Nerida Bergin, Scott Lester, Ed Lippmann, Roll Ockert, Brett Sperling

Photographer Ross Honeysett