October 2025

I still quite like this one that faces the forecourt of the State Library; it’s not too big, it’s got a podium that’s the same scale as the library, and there’s some fun shapes and colours. It’s by @mcbridecharlesryan, completed 2004, and the purple is one of their signature colours. I also like that the podium is all retail, they didn’t squeeze yet more flats in. The thing I don’t like is that the curvy upper volume sticks out over the footpaths quite a bit – those parts are balconies but it reads like the whole volume. There’s plenty of space to do it here, and maybe that’s why it was allowed, but many towers doing the same thing in a ‘little’ street would be a bit much….hmm that’s what I said in 2015, just before the 2016 built form controls in the CBD, which mandate a 5m setback above a podium. Another thing that changed that year was the ‘better apartment design guidelines’, which banned bedrooms without windows, or long ‘snorkel’ windows, both of which are used here.

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