Sydney Architecture is a survey of the city’s buildings, arranged in six groups: Colonial, Victorian and Federation, Art Deco, Modernism, Brutalism and Contemporary. Sydney Sandstone gathers the buildings made of the city’s own stone, from every group. It is a selection, not a complete record.
Each building is drawn as an elevation: its front drawn flat and to scale, without perspective, the way an architect draws one. The drawings were made for this site from photographs and published descriptions, and the Timeline shows them all at one scale, side by side in order of date. They are interpretive drawings and not measured surveys, and many proportions are estimated from photographs.
Each entry and explainer lists the sources it was checked against, and states only what they support with confidence. Many are public web pages, including Wikipedia, which reproduces much of the text of the NSW State Heritage Register. The register’s own pages could not be read directly, so wording from the listings comes through those copies.
Photographs, including historic pictures, are from Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and Unsplash, under the licences credited beside each one, and have been resized, converted for the web and shown slightly desaturated.
The Sydney Sandstone Walk is routed along footpaths mapped in OpenStreetMap. If you ask it to use your location, your position is used only on your own phone and is never sent anywhere or saved. Check the route as you go: footpaths close, and maps can be wrong.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Building footprints, streets and names are as mapped there.
Made with love from Sydney by Ray Zhu.