International SketchCrawl(TM), Sydney – QVB

  

Reconnaissance photos ahead of the International SketchCrawl(TM) scheduled for next Saturday, taken around 1pm (mid-Winter).

The Queen Victoria Building is a multi-storeyed “shoebox”-shaped building with a large central copper dome and smaller domes at each of its corners. It is surrounded on three sides (east, north and west) by relatively narrow streets; the south faces the Sydney Town Hall.

Top left is at the pedestrian crossing at the NW corner, corner of York and Market Streets. Public seating has been removed from outside 44 Market Street (in York Street) but on a Saturday morning this should be reasonably safe and secure, though the NE corner of the building will be obscured.

Top right is the central dome seen from York Street. York Street, as you can see, is quite narrow. so sketching – especially of the dome and marble statues – will be uncomfortable. That said, it may be possible to position oneself outside office buildings closed on Saturdays, but the footpath is narrow.

Bottom left is the view down York Street (with midday sun hitting the dome) and of the SW corner. The SE corner has been under renovation for some time now. This is the view as seen seated right on the north wall of Sydney Town Hall – probably the least busy open-air location from which to sketch the building.

Sydney sketching – Town Hall, St Peters NSW 2044

2B pencil; 1pm mid-Winter. east-facing facade of St Peters’ Town Hall, 39 Unwin’s Bridge Road, St Peters NSW 2044. 150g Daler-Rowney 5×8″ sketchbook.

8km from Sydney’s city centre, this liver-brick facade with sandstone columns and first-floor balcony, slate roof and white-painted wooden eave struts (built 1927) faces east and invariably whenever I pass it is in shadow. At his time of day, the north facing facade was in some sunlight, so there seemed justification for attempting a sketch of it.  This building gives the impression of being somewhat forlorn these days, since the hub of civic activity has been moved to Marrickville and this suburb now forms part of the much larger Marrickville LGA. Since 1949, this Town Hall became the St Peters branch library of Marrickville Library; upstairs is a large meeting hall (south side) with a wooden floor. The width of eaves is conveyed by the shadows they cast on the north wall. Sketched from Sydenham Green, created in 1995 when houses were demolished because they were directly under the flightpath of the East-West runway of Mascot Airport.

I want to keep up the current momentum during this week in case I can make Saturday’s International SketchCrawl(TM) which will focus on the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney.  I am currently reading Ernest Watson on the importance of creating pattern in building sketches.

Sydney sketching: former CBA bank, Tempe

B pencil on 150g paper – more retouching with eraser than I’m used to impossible with a thinner paper

Thought a ‘simpler’ form would help me get a handle on my perspective issues. Complicated facades like Marrickville Fire Station can wait. Strong afternoon shadows on concrete-rendered flat and curved surfaces. This is an intro – next time, I’ll concentrate more on measuring.  To the right there is a massive tree planted next to the Princes Hwy; to the far left, there are cars parked during the day- it’s difficult to identify a horizon on-site. I’ve been checking the architectural studies done by the very young J.M.W.Turner – Tom Tower, Christchurch, for example – done on no more than an A4 sheet of paper.

Background

From what I can gather, architects working for the federal Commonwealth Department of the Interior, the Architectural Branch, introduced the new-fangled Art Deco style into bank branch design for the C0mmonwealth Bank. The CBA as it’s known today was then a State-run bank. From the 1930s onwards, Sydney was provided with a number of interesting examples of the genre.

I’m aware that a Deputy Governor on the bank’s board was on the planning committee for the ANZAC War Memorial in Hyde Park, Sydney. Plainly the bank wanted to appear hip and cool and with-it at the time and threw themselves wholeheartedly into the new architectural style. Branches were built in this brash new style from Crows Nest in the north to Sutherland in the south, from Bondi in the east to Croydon and Strathfield in the city’s west.

Here’s a local one at Tempe NSW 2044, built in 1940.

 

The key features for me are:

* the contrast between the horizontal lines incised into the cement-rendered facade on the ground floor and the smooth, undifferentiated surface on the first floor;

* the use of squares in the iron grills on either side of the front doors – and the alternation of the circle element (in the middle in one, then at top and bottom in the next);

* the repetition used in the panel above the doors – a central panel, repeated three times, with all incorporating four square ‘studs’ (see a similar four square ‘studs’ in the four iron grill panels immediately below);

* the variation on the ‘=’ motif: horizontally in the iron grill and vertically in the panel above;

* the treatment of the pillars/pilasters extending from the ground to the height inclusive of the second floor, framing the entrance. The fluted column, with all its stylization, is used similarly at Earlwood. The fluting itself creates interest at the entrance, compared to the smooth, flat areas elsewhere in the facade.

* the orders at the top of the pillar/pilasters have been rendered so small as to be a mere ghost of their Ancient Greek past.

I don’t have any idea what the original doors would have looked like. I imagine the glass window panel immediately above the door reproduces the window panels in the upper story above the entrance doors.

The upper storey was the bank manager’s residence; the west facade windows are not glass panels but in fact sash windows. The residence must have been in four roughly square areas, forming something of a Greek cross. It would be fascinating to see how the rooms of the residence were deployed; what is obvious that the north-east corner of the building constituted a rooftop garden.

The glass brick windows on the north facade curves are an important feature. The window treatment at the ground level beneath the rooftop garden has been changed since 1940, though then as now they featured internal fabric curtains.

It may have been built in 1940, but there is a nod to the past: a terracotta chimney pot pokes up at the rear section of the roof.

A similar Greek cross design was used in the Cronulla building (again a corner block) but the curve element doesn’t extend to the ground as at Tempe. The overall design is not dissimilar to Cronulla. The Earlwood building has more traditional treatment of Greek columns, again framing the entrance doors and extending almost to the full height of the building.

Reference

http://artdecoheritage.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/commonwealth-bank-tempe.html – this website covers Sydney suburban Art Deco Commonwealth Bank buildings at Cronulla Street, Cronulla; 6 The Strand Croydon; 219 Victoria Rd Gladesville, 58 Spit Rd Spit Junction, 546 George St Sydney, 31 Hall St Bondi, 204 Victoria Rd Drummoyne, 6-8 Norton St Leichhardt, 259 Oxford St Paddington, 79-81 Pacific Hwy Roseville and 212 Homer St Earlwood. IN addition to today’s sketch at at 838-840 Princes Hwy Tempe, there is one also at Sutherland.

Sydney sketching – Marrickville Fire Station

B pencil, 5×8″ double spread, Daler-Rowney 150g sketchbook.

The NSW Heritage Council description for this 1914 building mentions its non-symmetricality.  Initial foundation lines revealed play between halves and thirds in terms of geometry across the facade, but that has yet to show, especially in terms of window treatment. I got the height measurement right, but I suspect not the horizontals! I spent more time on foundation lines today and I am learning to ignore footpaths and edges where the building meets the ground – in old buildings, there will be variation created over time, one has to “imagine” the building’s foundations. That said, working in such a small scale (10×16″) means the slightest error in perspective – the mere skerrick of a pencil line – can cause problems.

Rather than get caught up in the interesting architecture of the top pediment, bay window and projecting bay over the semi-circular building, I concentrated on the engine bay doors.

Standing across the road – no seating possible – was all the more difficult because the building is so high. Perhaps even more interesting than this building is its link to the Town Hall next door and a just-finished 21st-century high-rise next to that: the contrast in architecture and levels is worth pursuing. Next time I go back, I’ll stand next to these facades to check their actual alignment.

Abandoned after a half-hour or so due to rain, inevitable in the years La Nina is hanging around. A dud of a session, especially since this facade faces south and thus gets no shadows or tonal interest, but I had fun observing the sandstone keystones and the contrasting lines of blue-black brick. I’ve also come to an important understanding relating to the history of Marrickville high-street: commercial multi-storeyed buildings near Marrickville and Illawarra Roads were built in the 1880s, so it’s not surprising that this group of civic buildings (Hospital, Fire Station, Town Hall) built in the first twenty years of last century are all on the “edge” of the high-street development and remain so a century later.

Sydney sketching – fmr Marrickville lockup

Apparently delinquent youth in Marrickville a hundred years ago were running riot, which might in part account for the bizarre facade of this local Police Station built at the time. A case perhaps of the NSW Government looking tough on law and order issues. Designed by Government Architect, Walter Liberty Vernon, it is said to mimic a local property developer’s villa nearby, overlooking the Cooks River, which featured rusticated sandstone. “Rusticated” is an architectural term I’ve recently come to grips with and refers to sandstone with a roughly-hewn looking appearance, as opposed to smooth surfaces of what I think is referred to as “dressed” sandstone. Vernon contrasted areas of rusticated and dressed in his numerous buildings around town: the Pyrmont Fire Station, Newtown Post Office and the Registrar-General’s Building.

Unlike the other three mentioned, this a squat single-storey building. What marks this facade as a Police Station (apart from the sign above the entrance) are the stone crowns atop the pilasters flanking the entrance.

I spent half-an-hour standing up sketching this with a blunt pencil and realised very quickly that the blocks of sandstone seem ready-made for continuous line. Spending more time on the “middle” process (initial process is general shape and last process is the detail and tone), moving towards the largest geometric shapes, is still required. Focussing on individual blocks of sandstone sets up the extraordinarily tight symmetry of the facade. I’m often asked if I use a ruler for straight lines – the idea abhors me – but as a foundation, it would have helped today! I would have liked to have contrasted the dressed sandstone areas (lintels and sills). In Gladstone Street, it’s off the high road shopping strip and incongruously in what is now a relatively quiet back street of residential houses. Facing west, it’s good to draw in the afternoons.

Here are photos taken at the time it changed hands from being a neighbourhood centre to a real estate agency. What isn’t obvious here is that the building is symmetrically designed around a single axis, lit by a skylight,  which runs the full length of the building block to, what I imagine, was an Exercise Yard past a series of prison cells. Not immediately obvious here is the original bright green front doors with yellow trim. Sometime between 1936 and the present, elaborate external light fittings have been removed.

  

I’ll come back again with my own seating. I think this is the most unusual Police Station in the entire city and I’m on the lookout for anything else in such a Fort Knox-looking style.

References

Built in 1895-1896; cost 2,369 pounds 2/4. Referred to initially as the ‘Marrickville Lock-Up’. Meader, Chrys, Richard Cashman and Anne Carolan, Marrickville: People and Places. Hale & Ironmonger, 1994. 

NSW Office of Environment & Heritage. Heritage Item report: http://www.heritage.nsw.gov.au/07_subnav_04_2.cfm?itemid=2030174

Sydney sketching: Tempe House

1 July 2012: Tempe House and surrounds.

Getting John Verge(1) to design an arcadian villa for Alexander Spark, Director of the Bank of Australia, was in 1840 the equivalent of getting Tzannes to design a retreat at Berowra or Palm Beach today. Spark later got early Colonial painters of note, such as Conrad Martens and John Glover, to sketch and paint the house from across the Cooks River, though none tackled it ‘head-on’ as I have done today. This prelim sketch needs more work, including deciding what I’m going to include/exclude and measure using with a pencil accordingly. Wind and rain got the better of me today.

Instead, they tackled a three-quarter view, such as this, including a bathing shed by the river (extreme left, where the bridge is today):

The original sketches and paintings are in the Mitchell Library, but see reproductions and discussion by Mark Matheson, in his “Art in Arcadia”.

(1) Lyndhurst, Glebe; Elizabeth Bay House; Camden Park, Menangle.

References

Matheson, Mark. “Art in Arcadia”, in Heritage: Journal of the Marrickville Heritage Society, no.10, 1998: 9-16.

Sydney sketching. Pyrmont NSW 2009

Pyrmont Fire Station; B pencil. Worked for an hour under a tree (much beloved of the local dog population as it turned out) in a small park opposite. I’m surprised how historic buildings often have public seating directly opposite them in this suburb. I guess because there is so little left by way of historic architecture that the few items that remain are treasured by the locals. I stopped after an hour, because I wanted to get in another sketch before the Sydney Sketch Club meetup downed tools for lunch.

    

Pyrmont Public School; 2B pencil. About 40 mins’ worth – rather more rushed and lacking proper foundational drawing. The bright white tilework of the bell-tower give it a distinctly Italian feel. This was a comfortable draw given a small piazza directly opposite, the venue for outdoor chess players on Saturdays.

I look forward to returning to Pyrmont to taclke the Post Office (west facing, so needs an afternoon visit); the memorial to the Saunders standstone quarry; the former Sydney Eletric Powerstation building and remnants of 19th century shops. The peninsula is vaster than I imagined, but not surprising, given that it was a quarry.

      

 

 

Pyrmont, named after Bad Pyrmont in Germany following the discovery of a natural spring; inhabited by Eora aborigines who called it ‘Pirrama’; home of the sandstone from which many important Sydney buildings were built; today its long industrial history and population of working class poor (waterfront shiopyards and warehouses, sandstone quarry and later power station for Sydney business district) has been replaced by high-rise residential apartment blocks.

The Fire Station (1906)

In the Federation Free style, it’s an imposing three-storey dark red brick and sandstone corner building, built by Govt Architect, Walter Liberty Vernon.  Note its restrained use of dressed standstone in sills, keystones, quoins, eaves line and tower detailing, with rusticated sandstone dominating the segmental arches of the engine bays and florid art nouveau motifs in the upper level railing. Situated high on Pyrmont ridge, the Fire Station would have been reassuring to the several large businesses which became established in Pyrmont just a few years before.

As  a Fire Station building of the period, it can only be compared with two others – Castlereagh Street and Darlinghurst (the latter designed by Vernon). The snubby-looking finials are identical to those of the Registrar-General’s Building and the large curved bay window of Newtown Post Office was replicated on a smaller scale on the northern façade (the billard room).

For plans and a 1996 sketch by the NSW Fire Department, see http://www.heritage.nsw.gov.au/07_subnav_04_2.cfm?itemid=4690049

 

The Primary School (1891)

Another building on the Register of the National Estate, this was designed by W.E. Kemp and built in 1891, featuring a bell tower, belfry and slate roof. Modern property development directly across the road has incorporated, very sympathetically, a small piazza from which to view this north facade of the building.

Sydney sketching: St Mary’s Cathedral

2B Derwent graphite pencil on 5×8 Daler-Rowney 150g sketchbook

Okay, so I’ve started up a medium-size sketchbook just for drawing buildings on location and this has been an exceptional week since it hasn’t been raining. Sydney has hardly seen the sun for ages.

I was in Sydney around lunchtime again today checking out the Supreme Court and former Land Titles building adjacent to St James’ Church, but since that meant sketching directly into the sunlight, I opted for College Street. The Cathedral is across the road from my efforts of Monday and Tuesday.

Amid the homeless dossed down under trees in Hyde Park North and alongside lunchtime fitness fanatics doing boxing routines with their personal trainers, I managed to get down some of the delicious shadows of the transept entrance facing Hyde Park and its tower. I am eternally grateful to the manufacturers of WalkStool; they have made sketching comfortably a reality. This is but a fraction of the facade, so I’ve left the rest of the page blank and the other half of the double-page spread as well to follow up at a later time. The clarity of the shadows came and went; in undifferentiated light, there are basically just two colours – a brown of the tilework and the yellow of the sandstone (not counting the purple-grey of the slate roofing).

This is something of a personal odyssey since my father came to sketch the Cathedral once (or several times) during his lunchtime breaks from work almost exactly sixty years ago. I don’t have the sketches but have the memory of them – they were lightly drawn and on watercolour paper, so he may have had an (ambitious) watercolour in mind. I haven’t worked out his vantage point exactly, but he may have sat at the foot of the Archibald Fountain; the full west facade is quite dramatic as far back even as Elizabeth Street at David Jones’ department store.

Yes, I detect minor probs with perspective, and yes, I could have “grounded” everything a bit with attention to the footpath and steps and street furniture. While colleagues draw Italian palazzi and Spanish cathedrals, I’m in their wake, working on the local equivalents. I find myself these days looking intently at building facades, noting the use of Greek columns or pseudo-Medieval ornament. A Gothic Revival cathedral such as this – it differs little from examples at Lincoln or York – is in the same vein!

Sketching Sydney. Cooks River at Tempe NSW 2044

 

3pm, mid-Winter. Wolli Creek high-rise apartments, with Tempe House at lower left, viewed from Kendrick Park.

One thing I like about urban sketching is its power to record something that is constantly changing. You can sketch it one day, but the scene may look radically different sometime in the future. These days, with the Internet, it’s possible to see how a building or landscape was sketched, painted and photographed in the past. Sometimes even the most boring, most unprepossessing-looking vistas can change dramatically over time. You can record something now and have absolutely no idea how much it will change in the future.

Here’s a good example: below is a composite of two photos I took, about twenty years ago, of a very ordinary-looking river bank. It’s just a few miles from Sydney. A hundred years ago it was a popular weekender tourist spot, I assume because it was quiet and rural, reminding visitors of Home, England. A villa was built and named Tempe House; Tempe is the only suburb of Sydney in the Greek language. This “vale of peace” from Antiquity has been memorialised by painters in the past, but was fairly non-descript during the 20th-century. Around the time this photo was taken, the locality was considered one of the most down-and-out in Sydney, number 212 out of a total of 214 in terms of popularity as noted by the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. Only Cabramatta and Redfern had a worse reputation. 

This particular view has been drawn and painted by many artists since European invasion in 1788. Back in the 1990s, I was being introduced to the idea of plein air sketching and had the idea that a local scene might be worth trying. I was too intimated at the time by the sheer bulk of tiny detail to tackle it, either as a sketch or a painting, so I just filed it away as a future “to do” project.

Cooks River at Tempe NSW – about 1993

Far left: the concrete bridge across the Cooks River was built in 1967; in the 19th century it was a causeway made of stones. The road was the main road south of Sydney Town and had a tax collector on the southern bank; another tax collection point was back towards Sydney at Newtown, where the railway station is today. To the extreme left you can just see the top of the Airport Hilton Hotel. Out of sight (but visible in the 19th century paintings of this vista) is the reclaimed land on which the International Airport now stands. The river bank in the foreground has recently been upgraded by Marrickville Council; it’s busy with picknickers on weekends.

Centre: towards the centre, the sandstone columns of the portico of Tempe House are just visible, as is the small church next to it. At the time this photo was taken it was a retreat/aged care facility for retired Franciscan priests. Around this time too, an Open Day of Tempe House allowed locals to get up reasonably up-close-and-personal with the house and chapel. Since then, it was bought by QANTAS, ever interested in land adjacent to airport property. Later still, Tempe House and the chapel were sold into private hands and is now strictly inaccessible to the general public, despite its enormous historical value.

Right: in the river sits Fatima Island, exposed only during low tide.

Far right: the grey stanchions of the main southern railway track are just visible. There is evidence by the riverbank of local rock and sand being processed by Pioneer, a companying providing natural materials to the building industry. On the hills above in the distance sits the suburb of Arncliffe, a very good vantage point for watching the fireworks on Sydney Harbour in the distance on New Year’s Eve.

During the first decade of the 21st-century, Sydney underwent massive changes, both visually and as a place to live. The social stigma attached to living in a “unit” disappeared; low-tech industrial land was turned over to high-rise apartments and industries moved to the western suburbs; any land reasonably close to the Central Business District has since been transformed. We have a funny attitude to our architecture here in Sydney. It is the stuff of our everyday lives, but we ignore it. The great French poet Theophile Gautier lamented his lost Paris after the work of Baron Hausmann; it’s nearly impossible for any of us to imagine what Paris was like before Baron Hausmann. Similarly in Sydney, we are indebted to photos taken of the historic Rocks area of Sydney by government health officials in the wake of a breakout of plague around 1900. That led to artists like Lionel Lindsay, and later Sydney Ure Smith and Lloyd Rees, starting to draw that district which is know a tourist money-spinner for the city. 

I’ve been sketching buildings in Sydney on and off since the 1960s. I still remember going to the top floor of Sydney’s then tallest buildings, a whopping twelve storeys, to watch the construction of the Sydney Opera House from above.  My first proper paid job was in one of the largest if not the best interior space in Sydney, the Reading Room of the NSW State Library – now the Mitchell Library. I like the patina of old buildings, the potential for change in derelict buildings, curiosity engendered by building sites and how new spaces will alter the landscape. I notice an artist painted Pyrmont as it changed out of all recognition recently. I’m wondering about good vantage points to sketch the changing face of Barangaroo, the “next big thing” in Sydney’s architecture.

Sydney: Former Land Titles Office, Prince Albert Rd

 

Graphite pencils, both double-spreads, 5×8″ 150g cartridge paper, Daler-Rowney sketchbook.

Sketching

When it’s not raining, sunshine in Winter affords strong shadows. Deciduous trees have lost their leaves and that helps with clear sightlines in sketching buildings. Yesterday was sunny and the NSW Registrar-General’s Building in Prince Albert Road was half in-sun (the western facade facing St James Church) and half in-shadow (the southern facade facing St Mary’s Cathedral). I went back today – raining, but not enough to deter me – and the lack of crowds permitted a view from Hyde Park (including the Archibald Fountain). In my mid-sized sketchbook, the mark-making is rough. With a larger A4 page, I would have ‘drawn’ it a lot slower.

Here’s a photo I took in December 2010:

The next step is to get a handle on the geometry and its ‘boxiness’ and the National Library of Australia, Canberra online photo (#23381811) is very useful. The NLA  photo was taken (?late 1920s) before any trees in Hyde Park North had had a chance to grow and was probably taken from the top of the building on the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth Streets (where The Hyde building is currently) or even the top of the ANZAC War Memorial. It would have been taken around lunchtime; the same time as my sketch yesterday.

On the second visit, I became more aware not just of the geometry associated with the jutting staircases (the southern one looks very medieval and jolly), as well as the pseudo-Medieval detailing: the sandstone around the windows and the bizarre-looking fortified towers.

Definitely worth a few return trips to focus on the details! 

Background

1 Prince Albert Road is in fact the NSW Department of Lands, Land & Property Information Division Office and was formerly occupied by the Registrar General’s Department and is otherwise known as the former Land Titles Office of the Department of Lands. Not to be confused with the ‘other’ former Registrar General’s Department building, now the Supreme Court, behind St James’ Church opposite David Jones. Why such an imposing building for managing Land Titles? Because of the growth associated with the important business of knowing who occupied which land in Sydney and NSW.

There was tremendous pressure to secure the documents properly. Formerly a convict garden (it’s adjacent to Hyde Park Barracks) and the office of the Colonial Architect and a related timber yard; around  this time, Hyde Park Barracks was slated to be demolished and replaced by law courts.

The ‘medieval’ characteristics stem from its Federation Tudor Gothic style. It was built in c1912-1913, under Walter Liberty Vernon, NSW Government Architect, with The Records Wing added in c1962. Obviously any sketch or drawing needs to convey the sense of load-bearing masonry external walls in Sydney yellow block sandstone, from Pyrmont Quarries.  To quote from Noel Bell Ridley Smith & Partners Architects conservation management plan:

Each facade…is symmetrical around its centre axis and is designed in a series of bays. Each bay is defined by an octagonal corner pier and turret and generally contains three smaller divisions of equally-spaced windowwidths.

The report mentions the southern facade divided into five sections, dominated by three steep gables, the blind arcading at two levels, with plate ornamentation finishing in a ventilation spot and an Arts and Crafts-style finial apex. My sketch draws attention to the stone walls flanking the semi-circular entry steps (in the Arts and Crafts manner) ending in trachyte piers surmounted by modern metal light fittings.

My sketch notes the unsympathetic mansard roof additions in ribbed copper compromising the simple pitched slate roof: purple Bangor slate cladding and copper trims.

Sydney urban sketchers will be familiar with other Walter Liberty Vernon buildings: the Mitchell Wing of the State Library of NSW, the Art Gallery of NSW, McLaurin Hall at Sydney University, Central Railway Station, Darlinghurst Fire Station, Pyrmont Fire Station, Annandale Post Office, Randwick Fire Station, Crows Nest Fire Station, Newtown Post Office, Redfern Court House, Burwood Post Office (and Newcastle Court House).

References

Noel Bell, Ridley Smith & Partners Architects – Conservation Management Plan (including a “clean” photo c.1912 of the western facade): http://www.baseline.nsw.gov.au/hpr/documents/public/761/reference/2360.pdf