Woods Bagot

The high part of Surry Hills in Sydney, despite being one of the mostly densely populated parts of Australia, is quite a green, thickly foliaged place. Established trees line the main streets, creating dappled shade and fresh air and protecting buildings and people from the city’s heat island effect. The whole suburb has a gritty urban coolness that sometimes provides the feeling that the style police must be stationed at a velvet rope somewhere on the boundary. Into this context Woods Bagot and its client have inserted a clever and entirely appropriate residential and retail building. It is a syncopated play of concrete forms overflowing with precociously