DAWN OF A NEW AGE?

Sydney is one of the most romantic sites in the world, but few of the towers which make up its famous skyline are distinguished architecturally. Renzo Piano's office and apartment blocks set a new standard of thoughtful elegance.

At first glance Renzo Piano, so much the aficionado's architect, was an odd choice for the speculative redevelopment of one of Sydney's last downtown, tower-capable sites A second look, however, shows the Renzo factor at work. The Aurora site, in the heart of Sydney's legal-financial quarter, was then occupied by Ken Woolley's Brutalist but recently-vacated State Office Block, or SOB (no, really). The SOB was architectonically accomplished (the lyrical juxtaposition of glass and concrete, the use of transparency and reflection, the muscular bronze-clad columns) and widely admired within the profession. Being a 1960s office building, though, it was also a curmudgeonly old thing: stuffed with asbestos, cursed with inadequate floor-to-floors, replete with insitu concrete and generally resistant to change. Permission for its demolition was sought and proposals made. Then, just as the modern-heritage lobby was beginning a low growl, Lend Lease Development pulled Renzo out of a hat.

Lend Lease had selected Piano from a global shortlist after two normally sober development execs visited the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) at Vesima, out of Genoa, and fell head over Zegna heels in love with the whole ideas-praxis-beauty thing that tumbles glassily down the escarpment there to the Med (AR September 1995). Seduction perhaps, but it's the seductive power of a highly evolved thought process. And it was the same euphoriant mix of intelligence, practicality and charm that allowed Piano to clear a swathe for Lend Lease through Sydney's tangled thickets of heritage, citypolitik and planning controls.

Piano's brief from Lend Lease had three main planks: context, architectonics and social innovation. The contextual job was to respond sensitively at several scales 'from the grand sweep of harbour and opera house down to the level of civic space' on and to a site which was narrow, controversial, overgrown with planning controls and plum in a prime civic/sandstone precinct, opposite the Botanic Gardens and a gentleman's stroll from Parliament. Architectonically, Piano was asked to explore facade technology to create a landmark urban sculpture with plausible environmental credentials. (He was also keen, this most practical practitioner of the world's most material art, to continue his old pursuit of the immateriality thing.) And in social terms the idea was to reinvent the corporate workplace, making it more open, more humane, more real, if you will. And of course the building had to be commercially viable, conforming to all the thumb-rules regarding floorspace, office depth, core location and so on. The thing had to sell.

Imagine the Norman Foster response to such a brief: layers of parallel systemic diagrams showing how the various problems -- circulation, structure, air movement and so on -- are collectively solved by a single ingenious parti. Piano's design does something similar, only without the diagrams and in a single, voluptuous flourish. The idea is essentially simple: to wrap the building in a ghostly white facade which is perfectly smooth along its length but dissolves into sky at the top and peels away at each end, allowing the building to breathe. Thus wrapped, Aurora Place resembles nothing so much as some exquisite neo-oriental canape, tastily cocooned in the latest translucent rice pastry.

It's a multi-functional pastry though. The rooftop 'sail', extending some 30m above the 44th floor, waves symbolically to the opera house and the world; the cantilevered fins at either end of the building provide vertical, wind-protected slots within which Piano's wintergardens give real-air breathing space to each floor; and the smooth-bellied facade itself, fritted with baked-on ceramic dots at various scales, provides a semi-opaque ghosty-look from without, transparency from within. Glass edges, at the top of the sail and hanging over the street, are terrifyingly naked: dissolving, as it were, into the ether.

That was the idea. Making it real has been a smidgeon trickier. Indeed, it is a tribute to the team, itself a complex of RPBW, Lend Lease Development (joint client), East Asia Property Group (joint client), and Bovis Lend Lease (builder/project manager), that they were able to bring such an eminently breakable idea through the process more or less intact. There must have been some memorable meetings.

Take the sail. How do you persuade a curved glass triangle to cantilever 30m into the sky, well above terra firma in a city prone to sudden tempests, without the engineering becoming grotesquely apparent? How do you stop it sailing away, and still maintain the illusion of immateriality? And how, moreover, do you persuade all the beancounters to pay for what amounts to no more (or less) than poetry?

The answer lies in a half-dozen three-dimensionally tapering needles, up to 30m tall, roll-formed from steel plate up to 40mm thick, and capable of withstanding up to 18 tonnes lateral load. Single-point fixings for each pane of glass prevent in-plane shear in either the glass itself, or the structural silicon which is all that keeps it off the footpath. Plus it all had to be fixed in place pre-dawn. The moment the sun rose, differential movement in the steel would make the great needles 'bend like bananas', says engineer Rocco Bressi.

And then, even symbolic gestures must comply with the regulatory framework, which included in this case an absolute height limit and street-wall requirement along Macquarie Street, a sun-angle plane designed to guarantee minimum solar access to the Botanic Gardens opposite, a podium requirement on Hunter Street and a plot ratio (FSR) limit. In the end, the development hugs the height and street-wall limits with some semblance of affection (the site being only 32m wide); the sun-angle plane was breached, but only by the sail whose translucent shadow falls anyway within an existing shadow; the podium requirement was dumped in favour of a Modernist solution with suspended glass canopy; and the FSR rule became, as is its wont, the subject of arcane and protracted horsetrading, requiring the purchase of sites, floorspace and substantial civic monetary contribution to fill the gap between the FSR limit and the sun-plane.

In fact, the site houses two new buildings which together comprise Aurora Place; a low-rise (17-storey) residential building on Macquarie Street and the commercial tower, fronting Phillip Street. Looking east over the Gardens and opera house, each apartment is designed to cross-ventilate, running east-west across the full width of the building. A shimmering wall of outsized white-glass louvres, electronically operated in banks, defines the private conservatories and maintains the Edwardian dignity of the street. Behind this, each apartment is cushioned against cognizance of mundane urban strife by further operable layers of very white, low-iron glass. Despite the curiously old-fashioned central corridor and the lack of northern [sunny] aspect occasioned by this configuration, and despite the undeniable traffic noise when the louvres are open, Macquarie Apartments has rapidly become one of the best addresses in town, fetching up to A$9m for the penthouses.

The commercial building, 88 Phillip Street, also out-rents the neighbours, its closest competitors being Denton Corker Marshall's Governor Phillip Tower and Kohn Pedersen Fox's Chifley Square. This coincidence between architectural and commercial quality is a new and reassuring phenomenon for Sydney, where (with the exception of Harry Seidler's towers) trash has traditionally ruled OK.

In fact, Piano has taken surprisingly well to the diamante world of commercialism, and it to him, enabling the production of a building which, confounding sceptics, is not only dollar-perfect but qualifies, more than most, as 'real' architecture. It's not just the wintergardens, which are not actually planted but do provide meeting and breakout spaces to each floor. In a sense these were easy, being FSR-free. The foyer was more difficult.

Even the classiest architects generally get trapped by commercial culture's obsessive-compulsive attachment to the high-gloss foyer. At Aurora Place, by contrast, the foyer feels attractive but not warm, exactly, and certainly not domestic, but real, Intensely civilized, but comfortable. And special, being ordinary. This quality is part spatial (big, open and square-shouldered like an Enlightenment nave), part material (terracotta ceramic, timber and paving stone) and part acoustic (soft, soft, soft).

Commercial lore dictates a central core: civic requirements demanded multiple street entrances. In order to ensure that, within this, the foyer operated as a single, encompassing space, Piano was determined to carve a number of major holes, up to.6m wide, through the core at ground level. Given that the building was anyway eccentrically loaded (12m-deep office space on the east, compared with 10.8m on the less valuable west) and that Piano had rejected any stabilizing outriggers, this determination to insert fresh air right at the point of maximum bending moment made for an interesting structural challenge. The solution was a raft of huge anchors, extending some I 6m into the rock below the underground car parking and locking the building to mother earth.

One of the joys of the building, though, is that such gymnastics are supremely discreet. The foyer reads as a simple composition of matte planes-- the vivid burnt orange of the terracotta (actually ceramic), the white, white glass, the grey-green street granite, and blond timber on the revealed surfaces within the lift core. It is sometimes tempting to characterize Piano as a poet of the object. This space reveals him as a genuine experiential craftsman.

Outside, the simplicity is comparable. Piano's now-trademark terracotta, while not exactly a traditional Sydney material (except when glazed as faience), exudes the latent energy of a fat, earth material disciplined into precision. As such it sits happily with the venerable sandstone buildings of the precinct while the unabashedly slick and glassy facade (something of a relief after all those perfunctory pseudo-punched openings) firmly establishes the building's twenty-first century credentials.

Sure the building has faults. The sail's translucency cannot always hide the junk on the roof; the fritting on the glass, fading out to nothing around each window instead of forming a continuous screen has, close-up, a slightly bathetic santa-snow look; the internal blinds, which function in part as night-time whiteness restorers, are capable of manual control and therefore cannot be relied upon' tore-form the gorgeous white ghost; and the public space around the feet of the building has yet to prove itself as a memorable civic place.

In broad terms, though, Piano's Aurora Place deserves nothing but exuberant applause, for sailing fearlessly into town, changing the rules, anchoring so prettily next to its boofy colleagues, proving a more-than-worthy successor to the handsome SOB and, above all, raising the bar once again for commercial architecture in this corner of the world.