For twelve days in 2006 a group of architects, designers and planners from around the world spent 12 days amongst the disused and derelict dockyards, jail buildings and tunnels of Sydney Harbour's Cockatoo Island.
This aim of this intensive studio - involving University of Sydney academics as well as guests from Coasta Rica, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and the United States - was to dream up new, experimental and creative possibilities to revitalise this site. The results are now gathered together in a new book published bySydney University Press titled Cuttings: Urban Islands Vol 1.
The triangular-shaped island, Sydney Harbour's largest, is dominated by a sharply vertical sandstone knoll that is now largely devoid of the original vegetation that would once have covered the site.
Tucked in between the Woolwich peninsula to the north and Balmain peninsula to the south, it has over time been a convict prison, girls' reformatory, city jail, boys' training facility, and a naval and commercial shipbuilding site.
The site is now controlled by the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, which aims to turn it into a business, tourism and arts destination, with an eclectic mix of artists' studios, tours, commercial shipping operations, camping ground and special events.
The goal is to create a "site as emblematic of the city as the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House," said Geoff Bailey, the Trust's executive director in his introduction to the book.
Without the protection of the Foreshore Authority the island "might so easily become a Las Vegas surrounded by water rather than desert, or the ultimate gated enclave with each mansion having an absolute waterfront," said Professor Tom Heneghan, chair of architecture at the University of Sydney and contributor to the book.
Speaking at the launch of the book in the darkened, cavernous space of the island's former Turbine Shop, he said the island is a "place for intellectual speculation rather than financial speculation. A place for urban speculation about what such a unique place can offer to a 21st century metropolis." -University of Sidney
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