Built on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation
I wouldn’t be the first person to compare a city to a forest, but it’s an analogy I like. Both cities and forests are collectives defined by the elements that make them up and the relationship between them. And as with a forest, a beautiful city can’t be made in an instant. In creating a new part of a city, some planning and design are necessary, of course; but the character of the city largely comes with the wear and tear of habitation, with weather, with the layering of stories, with the relationships between buildings and with the people. These things take time. The Quay Quarter Lanes development, on a small block at Circular Quay in Sydney, has gone a long way toward creating a characterful piece of the city by using history, scale and materials, and art and architecture as storytelling to produce a new urban place that defies its relatively young age and its controlled genesis.
The development consists of five buildings around a pedestrianized lane behind Customs House: two are pre-existing sandstone-era
