Rail Operations Centre Jacobs and Smart Design Studio

The new Rail Operations Centre in Alexandria, in Sydney’s south, recently completed by Jacobs and Smart Design Studio, centralizes rail operations from multiple Sydney locations in one room, making incident responses more efficient, collaborative and personal. The ROC, as the building is known, recalls a little bygone grandeur to make a public architecture of rail infrastructure.

For an architect, the first observation of ROC’s huge red-brick arches and tie beams, and its geometric monumental singularity, might echo Louis Kahn’s National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, with its geometric shapes, or the deep offset facades of his Exeter Library. But for the rest, it reflects the architecture of infrastructure: bridges, viaducts and tunnels from Cronulla to Lithgow in brick from the State Brickworks. These touchstones are made familiar by daily commutes, walks to school or footy in the park. Aldo Rossi, in his autobiography, wrote, “I could