UTS puts Ultimo on the drawing board

Students at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), have been charged with the mission of transforming Ultimo from a ‘placeless’ dead zone to the city’s innovative and cultural hub.
An exhibition by students in the Masters of Architecture at UTS will show the fruits of a new course designed to help revitalise the area known as the Ultimo Cultural and Education Precinct.
Course coordinator and curator of the exhibition titled Ulterior Motives, Adam Russell, said that Ultimo, characterised by large ‘closed-off’ institutions such as UTS, ABC and the Powerhouse Museum, was desperate for a pedestrian network to activate the undiscovered corridors off Harris Street and other main roads.
“It’s widely accepted that it (Ultimo) is a neglected area, and suffering urban decay, and doesn’t have any real sense of civic life or pedestrian activation and yet it has a lot of pedestrians using it every day,” he said.
“There’s this idea of creating some permeability between the public realm and the closed insitutions.
“There’s a hell of a lot of interesting things happening but it’s usually behind closed doors.”
One student’s solution to this is to revive dead-end streets with scaffold-like galleries that connect pedestrians to existing buildings.
Another student suggests several localised energy ‘seeds’ for the area, which control food production and energy production waste renewal in a sustainability push.
A snake-like promenade was also pitched to intertwine through all the major institutions along Harris Street.
UTS vice chancellor has flagged that the winning design for the first stage of the university’s Broadway redevelopment could set a precedent for the precinct’s creative reinvention.
With the 12-storey design boasting massive gill-like shields and pulsing LED lighting on the glass façade, Professor Milbourne said it was an inspirational piece of architecture that would come to be as well known as the Sydney Opera House.
Also housing a sunny atrium connecting pedestrian and cycleway access to China Town and the Fraser’s Broadway development, the design is just one of several proposed new buildings along the busy stretch.
The City of Sydney suggests the area could be the city’s key creative industries hub and recognises the need to make the area pedestrian-friendly, planning to extend the Ultimo Pedestrian Network that runs from Central Station, behind the ABC building, as well as create a cycleway network throughout the suburb.