Partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, where his projects include Terminal 4 at Barajas Airport in Madrid, the National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff, a Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre in London and the 22-hectare Barangaroo masterplan, Sydney.

It’s trip number 53 to Australia in seven years, a forest full of offsets failing to ease my carbon conscience and a nagging feeling of opportunities missed on terra firma as I while away three months in the air. I dutifully fill in my landing card as the sun rises over the Pacific, my destination silhouetted against the intense light reflected from the ocean below. ‘McLeod Street, Mosman, NSW’. Your postal district is optional in London; here in the self-proclaimed agglomeration of villages, your city doesn’t figure.

As the superjumbo locks on to the glide slope, picture-postcard Sydney comes into view. This city is blessed with extraordinary geology, the long finger ridges of sandstone extending to the harbour, remnants of a long-drowned river and its tributaries. The harbour is Sydney’s central park, its boulevard with its Grande Arche, its emblematic face to the world.

It is Sunday in Mosman Bay and I engage in the Aussie lifestyle expected of me: the beach, the pool, the BBQ. The rule is to stay awake as long as possible, work through the nausea of the jetlag, drink some beer. The kookaburras lead the dawn cacophony. On my first visit an engineer told me, ‘Remember, in Australia an overcast sky is twice as bright as in the UK’. Nature is twice as loud too, and the smaller it is, the louder.

Short sleeves and a short stroll to the ferry stop takes me past the red pan tiles of federation cottages and ‘federation style’ apartment buildings jostling for space on the steep sandstone inclines leading to the water. The footpath leaves the road, cuts through the rock and descends. I grab a coffee on the jetty and look back. The built form towers above, layer upon layer of dwelling stretching for a water view. The urbanisation is insufficiently compact to contrast with the natural habitat but dense enough to overpower it. The visual impact of suburbia is normally tempered by its low scale. Here it is stacked up and I ponder, is it poorer quality than elsewhere in the world or is it just that I can see it all at once?

In the quest for unencumbered waterfront access, the final infilling tackles opportunistic sites of staggering topography, utopian in their implausibility. Here is where architects should prove their worth. There are two contemporary schools of thought evident from the ferry in Mosman Bay: first, the perched object touching lightly – Ian and Rosanna Collins’ mid-1970s house, a meticulously executed white fibreglass container whose vertiginous site is narrower than it is tall. In contrast, the site-sensitive ‘Sydney school’ slope-hugging form of John and Hilary James’ mid-1960s house, built with natural materials, makes space around and between the trees and is all but invisible from the water.

The ferry to Circular Quay makes a few more stops and whisks us in beautiful silence across smooth harbour water and past the opera house in 20 minutes or so. It is hard not to be envious of the lifestyle it represents but this is an experience reserved for a privileged few. Sydney is a city of 4.5 million inhabitants but the metropolitan area is similar to London. The aspiration of direct access to the playground is beyond the reach of the vast majority who inhabit the sprawling western suburbs.

A Sydneysider friend summarises Sydney as a ‘developer’s town’. It is an environment where architecture has played second fiddle to opportunism and maximised returns. In the dense core, as in New York, this tension gives the city a buzz. Outside, it has had a detrimental effect on both the built and natural landscapes.

The car that enabled the suburbanisation reinforces the city of villages and represses desire for better public transport. Sydney is one of few major world cities without a light rail infrastructure. The downtown city centre, physically constrained by the harbour and botanic gardens, has many of the ingredients required for the compact sustainable city. It is spearheading a quality of life renaissance, shifting the balance from car power to pedal power and encouraging more people to live in its core. It is dense, compact and walkable.

Much of the post-war built fabric feels as if you’ve seen it before. Harry Seidler, most significantly, developed an architecture at a large scale that is of this place, with the strong daylight articulated across precast concrete facades and with outdoor places that are peculiarly suited to the environment. In a similar vein, Woods Bagot’s Ivy hotel explores the outdoor room to good effect (driven perhaps by the impact of smoking bans). McConnel Smith & Johnson’s NSW Supreme Court plays Seidler’s facade game, the precast panels aping the colouration of sandstone.

More recently, the city has adopted postmodern planning rules – ‘tops on buildings’ and street wall setbacks – but none have matched the grace of Seidler’s best. More meaningfully, the city has impressive plans to improve the public realm including a new civic square at the town hall. The indigenous sandstone has provided Sydney with a beautiful building material which abounds. It is prominently displayed in the convict-hewn cliff face that forms the dramatic interior of the Bond building on the city’s west side. Vernon and McRae’s Central Station is all carriage ramps and catacombs, infrastructure and architecture, topped with a federation classical clock tower, all in this warm and lively material.

My own favourites, however, are not in stone but rather the extraordinary iron and timber structures of the two-storey wharves at Walsh Bay. The early twentieth-century Turpentine and Ironbark timbers are steel-hard, their repetition and classical simplicity breathtaking.

The strong material continuity extends into the inner city suburbs where the gentrification of terraced workers’ cottages and industrial buildings sits cheek by jowl with frenetic activity at Kings Cross and Chinatown. The inner city plays its life out on the street and the whole makes for a better place.

Of course, my visits here have mostly been associated with our work at Barangaroo. Once realised, this huge brownfield development will complete the western side of the central business district. Its ambition is impressive: 50 per cent public open space, mixed-use high density on the water’s edge, water positive, zero waste, carbon neutral. These are the credentials for a city of the future on, arguably, the most beautiful waterfront in the world.

First published in AT226, March 2012