The Sydney Architecture Walks {SAW} explore ideas through architecture, offering an interface between in-depth architectural knowledge and the wider design-conscious community. Each route is driven by certain themes and ideas and attempts to decode the city whilst stimulating new ways of thinking about and seeing Sydney.
Joyfully trespassing across disciplines and genres we seek out the architecture and public art that materialises contemporary conditions and attitudes; projects that respond to the culture, history and environment of Sydney and not just imported formulaic codes. We are interested in the edgy and the beautiful, the provocative and the daring, the local, the foreign, the trashy and the raw revelling in the vibrant network of ideas and human relationships that are every cities' very reason for being.
Our walks are aimed at you, the general public. We don't assume you know anything about architecture, rather, we assume you are interested in the underside, in the ideas that generate. We want you to get stung by architecture and begin to understand why buildings and cities are the way they are.
 
The Walks
SAW 1 SYDNEY SAW 2 - UTZON
SAW 3 - HARBOURINGS SAW 4 - ART PLACE LANDSCAPE

 

Get SAW feet
Sydney will never look the same again!

For bookings phone +61 2 8239 2211
to contact us directly email info@sydneyarchitecture.org
web site & images by SAW
Copyright 2000 Sydney Architecture Walks
updated March 2008

 

D O W N L O A D S
SAW dates & map [1MB]
 
S A W F E E T

our content is historically informed, our context contemporary. if a work of architecture or art addresses the world in a sustainable way, we draw attention to it. if it provokes, we take note. like detectives gathering evidence in a confused and elusive landscape, we tell the stories and explain the concepts behind the concrete shells, glass skirts and sandstone facades that define sydney's urban landscape.

P R I C E S
$25 / $20 (concession & hht members). this includes entry to the museum of sydney. see tour dates for timetable and booking info
G R O U P S
click here for information on group or special walks
 
R E V I E W S
here's a chance to remember how vivid and exciting sydney can seem. recommended, three hats [Sydney Morning Herald]
the inside info; the personal lives, the trivia, and genius insights are all tantalising. check out SAW for inspiration as an architect, tourist, or as a young artist trying to get your own act off the ground. they set a great example [ABC]
this piece of urban theatre... a 2 1/2 hour walking narrative taking in the city's design icons... is perhaps the most innovative of australia's architecture tours [The Australian]

 

a flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic
[edmund white | the flaneur| 2001 - bloomsbury publishing plc]
cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody
[jane jacobs]
what the map cuts up the story cuts across
[michel decerteau]

the city fosters art and is art. the city creates the theatre and is the theatre.
[lewis mumford | what is a city? | 1937]

so a city comes to be regarded as a person with all its idiosyncracies + little weaknesses, its strengths + power.
[alan birch | 1962]
imagine our city as some living tapestry where the landform is the warp and the constructed elements the weft. through time it develops a sense of oldness and charm. things only become truly beautiful with appreciative use
[richard lelastrier] gold medallist's speech | 1993]
as debard has written, if you set off on a derive in the right frame of mind you will certainly end up in the right place.
[francesco careri | walkscapes]
for this is how we experience this
sydney place; from oblique angles and
in–between spaces; from the edges of sydney’s ever–shifting shapes, shadows and moods. its palimpsest layers, fragments of the unbuilt and the unbuildable; its sensuous materiality of rich textures highlighted by the shifting patterns of Sydney light and shade; its strange wounded beauty of rawness, toughness and even carelessness about its fragile nature and the scars and stains of weathering past lives and tempests.

[dr. peter emmett ]
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. [Jean-Luc Godard]
ideas come from everywhere
[alfred hitchcock]

living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, 
of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man 
and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban 
living. the city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, 
myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more 
real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, 
in monographs on urban sociology and demography 
and architecture
[jonathan raban | soft city | british travel writer and novelist | 1974