The Sydney height of buildings story : an examination of the intellectual, cultural and political background to development control in Sydney City Centre 1900-1960

Abstract

This thesis examines the causes and effects of some of the generic changes in the built form of Sydney’s city centre in the first sixty years of this century. Throughout this time, control of building height was by far the most critical determinant of building form; this thesis focuses on eliciting some of the primary directional influences on change in building height controls, and on testing whether the commonplace assumptions regarding these changes are necessarily correct. The work is in three parts. Part I considers the causes and motives underlying the 1912 Height of Buildings Act and the grounds, if any, for the widespread and persistent belief, even now, that the statutory building height limit so imposed was causally related to the finite capacity of contemporary fire-fighting technology. Part II analyses similarly the nexus of cultural and political forces which lead to the amendment of the Act in 1957, when widespread light-and-space based fears, remarkably similar in nature to those which had in 1912 impelled the banishment of skyscrapers from Sydney, conditioned their eventual acceptance. Part Ill chronicles the first years of the operation of the Height of Buildings Advisory Committee, as established by the 1957 amendment, which for nearly 30 years exercised control over all Sydney skyscraper development. HOBAC was charged with the implementation of a de facto FSR provision, a corollary of which was the development in Sydney of control by discretion. Both phenomena were underpinned by a remarkable but characteristically Modern belief in the wisdom of expert judgement. Part Ill examines some of the built effects of these and related cultural developments.