ARCH7216_La Perouse Final

T H E MACQUARIE TOWER
:
La Perouse is a unique suburb where people around Sydney would
visit and getting away from the busy urban life during the weekend.
In the first assessment of mapping the suburb of La Perouse, I started
to feel and understand the “spirit” of La Perouse – an isolated
community only 18km from Sydney CBD, a world within a world.
Therefore La Perouse has a very unique context compare to other
Sydney suburbs. First, there are lots of visitors come to here every
weekend for family activities which makes it a tourist spot rather than
a suburb; secondly, people in La Perouse cherish the natural
landscape and historical treasure, limited of urban development were
established there, this might be influenced by the local indigenous
history and culture; thirdly, the history of the suburb La Perouse was
quite long (date back to 1800s), many of the public facilities may have
been decayed and therefore moved to somewhere else.
Therefore it was a struggling process for me to both choose the
public building for my project and suit my own interest of finding the
“untold stories” of La Perouse. Instead of picking a building I
continued on researching the history of La Perouse. The fire of the
Macquarie Watch Tower in 1957 has captured my eyes. The complex
stories and dramatic transformation of the Macquarie Watch Tower
made me believed that this building is an essential element to
discuss when talking about La Perouse. Behind its historical value as
an old architecture, the different purpose of the building through
different period of time reflects the socio-cultural environment of the
time. In fact, there were some interesting individual stories hided
under the flow of the time and the disappeared space caused by the
fire.
Photo of the Macquarie Watchtower before 11957.
Elevation of Macquarie Watch Tower, 1822 Plan of Macquarie Watch Tower, 1822