The project seeks to re-enchant the fading maritime and working harbour uses which Sydney has traditionally been built around, to maintain the Bays Precinct as a collection of working bays with innovative uses relevant to the 21st century. The Working Bays focuses on the last chance to address the value of marginal landscapes, which are fundamental to resilient cities, to the redevelopment of industrial harbour foreshore, as opposed to the thin landscape of spectacle and commerce in the current Barangaroo debate.

Syntax of the Bays enables the continuity of the notion of “working” in derelict yet familiar landscape of a post-industrial site, both in terms of functions and memories. It reveals the continuity of activities and experience between discontinuous events. The arrangement and ordering pattern of these built up layers, surfaces, flows, vectors, projections define the syntax of the bays, where the hidden intention or uses across time is once again in continuity enabled by syntactic design.

Five moves are inserted in the Working Bays: alternative energy and recycling for sustainable production, old urban new rural in the form of urban farm, healing garden for dwellers, linkage and distribution system to connect the flows, and terrain vague as a result of the site as flexible and temporary field.

In close scrutiny, the healing garden heals the urban fabric across syntaxes, the urban production by providing crops for self-consumption and sale, the community by improving neighbourhood quality, the socio-economics by relieving the increasing urban density and providing products for market exchange. The urban farm is a harvesting garden for the dwelling pods, the dwelling pods are in turn gardens for the container architecture, and the exploded programs are gardens to the dwellers.