Architecture of Sydney

The architecture of Sydney, Australia’s oldest city, is not characterised by any one architectural style, but by an extensive juxtaposition of old and new architecture over the city's 200-year history, from its modest beginnings with local materials and lack of international funding to its present-day modernity with an expansive skyline of high rises and skyscrapers, dotted at street level with remnants of a Victorian era of prosperity.

Under the tenure of early nineteenth-century Governor Lachlan Macquarie, the works of Francis Greenway were the first substantial buildings for the fledgling colony. Later prominent styles were the Victorian buildings of the city centre created out of local Sydney sandstone, and the turn of the century Federation style in the new garden suburbs of the time.

With the lifting of height restrictions in the post-World War II years, much of central Sydney's older stock of architecture was demolished to make way for Modern high rise buildings – according to Singh d'Arcy, in The Apartment House (2017), "From the 1950s onwards, many of Sydney's handsome sandstone and masonry buildings were wiped away by architects and developers who built brown concrete monstrosities in their place. The 1980s saw uncomfortable pastiches of facades with no coherence and little artistic merit".^[1] Despite this, Sydney is still home to Australia’s oldest public building, Old Government House, located in Parramatta.

Sydney's notable new buildings were designed by the Austrian-Australian architect Harry Seidler, as well as by international architects such as Jørn Utzon, Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, and Frank O. Gehry throughout the 1960s up until the 2010s.