The Opera House Project: Telling the Story of an Australian Icon | ArchDaily

The Opera House Project: Telling the Story of an Australian Icon | ArchDaily.

Sydney_Opera_House_construction_1968

finger wharf

The Finger Wharf is a wharf in Woolloomooloo Bay, Sydney, Australia. The structure is the longest timbered-piled wharf in the world, and was completed in 1915.

The Finger Wharf was an operational working wharf for much of the 20th century. By the 1970s, new container ports with larger wharfing facilities and cruise liner terminals around the city meant the usage of the wharf declined. By the 1980s the wharf lay derelict and empty and in 1987 the state government decided to demolish the Wharf.

A new marina and resort complex was approved to replace the wharf in Woolloomooloo Bay, but when demolition work was due to begin in January 1991, locals blocked entrance to the site. Unions imposed a Green ban which stopped demolition crews from undertaking work.

Due to such a strong public outcry it was decided that the existing wharf would instead be renovated into a boutique hotel, featuring 104 guestrooms, loft-style suites and private residencies. Walker Corporation undertook that renovation. The hotel features several restaurants and bars, including the popular Water Bar, frequented by many visiting local and international celebrities. The hotel was officially launched as “W Sydney – Woolloomooloo” and it was W Hotels’ first property to be launched outside of the United States. The hotel’s licensing to Starwood Hotels & Resorts expired in 2007 and re-branded as “Blue Hotel”, managed by Taj Hotels & Resorts. Notable residents include actor Russell Crowe and media personality John Laws.

Text courtesy of Wikepedia.

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where did the term “form follows function” come from?

Image of “form follows function” sofa by Daan Mulder

The first mention of the phrase could be ascribed to the American sculptor Horatio Greenough, who in 1852 was relating it to the organic principles of architecture.1
The American architect Louis Sullivan, who admired rationalist thinkers like Greenough, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and Melville – picked it up, in 1896, in his article The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered. Here Sullivan actually said “form ever follows function”, but the simpler (and less emphatic) phrase is the one usually remembered. For Sullivan this was distilled wisdom, an aesthetic credo, the single “rule that shall permit of no exception”. The full quote is thus:
It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law. 2

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