A Continuing City

Architectural history has a tendency to pigeonhole its protagonists, often assigning them a place based on a small number of buildings and from the limited purview of a single building type. For gifted architect Alec Tzannes, this happened early. A series of elegant, formally composed townhouses, designed in the 1980s, caught professional attention and captured effortlessly the mood of a swing to history. His urban houses had (and all those ever since have also had) the pedigreed echo of Sydney’s colonial Georgian past and the work of its early-twentieth-century inheritors such as William Hardy Wilson and John D. Moore, as well as the Mediterranean rightness of Leslie Wilkinson’s houses, which negotiated Sydney’s steep harbourside sites with artful informality. Tzannes’ houses also demonstrate a complete understanding of mass and its embrace of Sydney’s lilting sun and shadow, while exhibiting accomplished modernist spatial control. But what is really at issue in all of these houses and missed by commentators is Tzannes’ overriding preoccupation with the city – as an ongoing project of cultural and formal continuity and as a project fuelled by an ethical responsibility to place.

Tzannes was a brilliant student at the University of Sydney, where he won the Sir John Sulman Prize and the University Medal in 1976. However,