About SAW
To begin with, SAW is not for everyone. We are friends who are also architects and we love cutting edge architecture and design. We have an unhealthy interest in cities, especially this city, and spend much of our spare time roaming the streets, looking for signs of life – those small pockets of resistance where a city's inner machinations can be seen volcano-like bubbling through its crust. We love raw, cultivated trash almost as much as refined beauty and we speculate wildly as we spin our urban narratives around the ideas & concepts, the political events, the personalities, the cultural & social attitudes which push and pull at Sydney like it's tides.
Unlike other tours, SAW guides are experts on the city and its architecture. The guide who leads the walk didn't learn a script; they wrote the walk!
 
About us
Originally from Adelaide [ don't believe what anybody says its a great place], Eoghan Lewis created SAW in between a teaching post at Sydney University and a practice he runs called Supple Design. For him SAW is an extension of teaching and a chance to ramble on about things he loves. He reckons cities are society's greatest cultural expression, and a city's architecture is there to be clambered over and talked (walked) about. He tries hard to cultivate a bohemian look [if anyone knows what that is please email us] + is often caught staring out of windows and muttering to himself I wonder what Utzon would do – most embarassing for anyone present. A couple of his recent projects are published here.
 

Apart from being an avid architect, designer & urban designer, Simeon King is a cityist. He loves cities and their spaces, especially Sydney's. Simeon has worked on the Sydney 2030 plan over recent years and at the City of Sydney in City Projects leading up to the Olympic Games and knows pretty much everything worth knowing about the city – especially the juicy stuff. Since then he has travelled to cities far and wide – wearing out a couple of pairs of shoes in the process, walking the walk. In his spare time Simeon runs Slidenight with Eoghan and enjoys his salads untossed.
 
Eoghan and Simeon were recently listed as two of Sydney's 100 'Creative Catalysts' as part of Brian Eno's Creative Sydney Festival 2009, 'honouring and exposing 100 inspirational and innovative Sydneysiders who have made a unique contribution to the city’s creative culture.'

 

Get SAW feet
Sydney will never look the same again!

Bookings phone +61 2 8239 2211
Weekend & after hours bookings phone 0403 888 390
Online bookings here
To contact us directly email info@sydneyarchitecture.org
web site & images by SAW
Copyright 2000 Sydney Architecture Walks

 

T H E SAW S T O R Y
the sydney architecture walks [SAW] began in a flurry during the summer olympics of september 2000, when eoghan lewis, a young-ish bloke with questionable hair + tickets on himself, discovered that sydneysiders couldn't give a stuff about architecture + design, and were, surprisingly enough, more interested in sport than buildings [heathens!].
for three weeks, he sat near the opera house steps, twice a day - every day, waiting and hoping that someone might turn up for a walk. no one did. not even his friends! (he found out that they were more interested in sport as well). anyway, our hero sat day after day until one day, one and only one person came on a walk (the boyfriend of american gold-medal swimmer misty hymen!, or at least thats what he claimed), and it was around about then that he realised he was pretty keen on sport as well and would be stuffed if he was going to sit a day longer feeling like a complete git when everyone else was having a good go of it
so what began as a rambling, gambling join-the-dots stroll between eoghan's favourite buildings has since blossomed into FOUR BIG WALKS with a hack team - sorry, crack team of passionate architect-guides. we're great gossips when it comes to architecture and this big, brash, beautiful and slightly daggy city of ours so buckle up, hang on tight and come along to enjoy the ride
ENOUGH ABOUT US

we love feedback on our walks, the city, the site and so on. email us at info@sydneyarchitecture.org with comments, questions, complaints or requests. if they're nice we might even post them on the site!
the only art that politics knows is the art of compromise
[richard leplastrier | on east circular quay's controversial toaster development near the opera house]
it takes ten years to learn to draw, and then ten more to learn to draw like a child
[pablo picasso]
'zero tolerance' is a deadly mantra for a metropolis: what is a city if not a space of maximum license?
[rem koolhaas | on mayor giuliani's new york]
i have the opera house in my head like a composer has his symphony
[jørn utzon | interview on abc tv | see SAW2]
When the NSW Labor government of Joe Cahill settled on Utzon's design, with all its engineering problems, the city got tapped on the shoulder by a rainbow
[paul keating ]
why should the study of the banal itself be banal? Why wouldn't the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?
[henri lefebvre ]
i love the clouds... the clouds that pass... up there... up there... the wonderful clouds!
[Baudelaire ]
The real master in the art of living makes little distinction between his art and his leisure, he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing, To him he is always both
[glenn murcutt quoting a zen budhist statement in his greeting on utzon's 90th birthday ]
architecture is not about the conditions of design, but about the design of conditions that will dislocate the most traditional and regressive aspects of our society and simultaneously reorganize these elements in the most liberating way, where our experience becomes the experience of events organized and strategized through architecture
[bernard tschumi]