Barangaroo Pods | Atelier Luke

The Barangaroo Pods demonstrate how a tightly defined scope can meaningfully shape the civic character of major infrastructure. With a small team and a deliberately modest architectural language, Atelier Luke has transformed nine ventilation and services structures on Hickson Road into a sequence of durable, human-scaled elements that add unexpected amenity and meaning to the public realm.

Situated at the base of the Hickson Road heritage wall, the pods take cues from the post-colonial history of Hickson Road as a place of industry, work, struggle and resilience — the “Hungry Mile” — and respond with a restrained, robust palette of dry pressed brick, concrete and painted mild steel.

Each pod is uniquely designed with attention to small details and with materiality allowing the intervention to patina, recede and integrate with time. Between the pods, micro parks provide a more intimate scale of amenity in the context of the larger public spaces nearby.