Waterloo Apartments Chenchow Little

Scale is an underappreciated element of urban housing. Housing must find its measure between the intimacy of the domestic realm, the intermediate community of its residents and its responsibility to make the city fabric itself. The elasticity of these scale conditions is demanding and powerful. Much of Sydney’s contemporary housing is a catalogue of misunderstanding, from the banal repetition of domestic micro-grids, the extraneous aluminium appendages or the even more reductive painted “supergraphic” through to my personal favourite, the stepped transitions at the top of buildings that scream, “Just pretend I’m not here!”

Waterloo Apartments by Chenchow Little, located in the Lachlan precinct of Sydney’s Green Square, is apparently known by locals as “the Rock.” This moniker likely stems