The award-winning development changing the way design is done in Sydney

I t’s 6pm on a weeknight and already, basement bar Apollonia on Young Street is full. Earlier in the day, queues snake along Loftus Lane as customers wait their turn to order lunch at Marrickville Pork Roll. It’s the same story at nearby Hinchcliff House, where it can take weeks to book a table at the busy restaurant.

While Quay Quarter Laneways at Sydney’s Circular Quay has picked up a number of awards, including the Lord Mayor’s Prize for Architecture and the Urban Design Award, it is perhaps the locals who offer the best measure of its success. For architect Shaun Carter, director of CarterWilliamson, it’s a delight to see so many people engaging with this part of the city.

“Before we started working on the laneway, it was scary,” he says.

Made up of five buildings – two existing heritage buildings and three new – Quay Quarter Lanes, tucked in behind the historic Customs House is the result of an eight-year process involving five architectural studios. While Loftus Lane is the main through way for visitors, 9 Young Street by Studio Bright, 15 and 11 Young Street by SJB and 18 Loftus Street by Silvester Fuller are home to several floors of apartments, as well as roof gardens and terraces, balancing privacy with world class views of Circular Quay. Two of the new buildings will also have office, retail and hospitality spaces.

Hinchciff House, one of only two surviving woolstores at Circular Quay, became the focus for the studio of CarterWilliamson while Lippmann Partnership took on Gallipoli Memorial Club.

Engaging five leading (but not large) Sydney architecture studios to collaborate on Quay Quarter Lanes, rather than one firm, is a marked departure from the way redevelopment has been done in Sydney. ASPECT Studios took responsibility for the landscape and urban design for both Quay Quarter Lanes and the adjacent Quay Quarter Tower.

Co-ordinating architect and SJB director Adam Haddow says bringing in five studios to work across the 2,200sqm site allowed for greater attention to be given to even the smallest aspects of each building.

“The best architecture is about smallness and specificity,” Haddow says. “Each building had its own site foreman and architect leading it. When you can form a team of diverse thinkers who can work those issues out between boundaries, you get great results.”

Although the buildings are quite different, the expectation was that they would make room for each other to be their best selves. This required a lot of conversations between architectural practices.

“It was a bit like herding cats,” Haddow admits. “But if you leave a project in one set of hands, no matter how good those hands are, they are spread thinly. If you can get many hands doing small things there is ‘bigness’.”

Carter says the collective met on site on a weekly basis to discuss progress of their work and how it would relate to the other buildings.

“It was like State of Origin where you have all the best players on the one team and they all had to play their part in the retelling of a Sydney block. But it only works if you have great players on the team,” Carter says.

“We met every Thursday and everyone would be tired because of the level of commitment -which was outstanding – but it meant often we weren’t getting enough sleep.”

Drawing on the history of the site, the palette is varied and yet sympathetic, leaning into the texture and warmth of brick for the new buildings and reviving the beauty of the original sandstone for the existing buildings.

In some parts, new brickwork curves upwards, like it has been peeled back from the building. Other parts have arched ceilings finished in finely worked plaster.

“When we started having conversations we had six teams working on how to define ‘place’,” Haddow says. “ASPECT found references to the ‘pleasure grounds’ that they created near Customs House in the early 1800s where people used to come together.”

Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones was selected to design a number of artworks that have been integrated into the site, from ‘oyster shells’ embedded into mortar lines as a reference to Indigenous middens once found on this site, to ‘fish scales’ using green marble from the demolished lobby of 50 Bridge Street.

“There was a strong narrative of people coming together on the site,” says Haddow.

Tucked in behind the heritage protected Customs House, the development also needed to take site lines to Circular Quay and the harbour into account. Once again, the coordinated collaboration paid dividends.

“All the buildings look down on Customs House,” he says. “Ours was the tallest building at the back so we consolidated the aircon plant so that not every building has to have that ugly service part to it. All the rubbish is also collected in one spot.”

For Haddow, it’s also the rubbish that has been his measure of the success of this project.

“When people really live somewhere, they take care of it and look after it,” he says. “I noticed one evening that there was a guy walking along picking up rubbish and I thought ‘you live here’.”

Lucky guy.

See more stories like this in the first issue of Kanebridge Quarterly magazine here.

They call themselves TikTok refugees—and the app they are fleeing to is a lot more Chinese than the video-sharing app whose U.S. fate now hangs in the balance.

After Supreme Court justices Friday seemed inclined to let stand a law that would shut down TikTok in the U.S., the Chinese social-media platform Xiaohongshu , translated in English as Little Red Book, has received a flood of American TikTok users. They are looking for a sanctuary or a way to protest the potentially imminent TikTok ban—never mind that they don’t speak Chinese.

Charlotte Silverstein, a 32-year-old publicist in Los Angeles, downloaded Xiaohongshu on Sunday night after seeing videos on TikTok about migrating to the app, which Americans dubbed “RedNote.” She described the move as a “last act of defiance” in her frustration about the potential TikTok ban.

“Everyone has been super welcoming and sweet,” said Silverstein, who has made three posts so far. “I love the sense of community that I’m seeing already.”

By Monday, TikTok refugees had pushed Xiaohongshu to the top of the free-app chart on Apple ’s App Store.

“I’m really nervous to be on this app, but I also find it to be really exciting and thrilling that we’re all doing this,” one new Xiaohongshu user said in a video clip on Sunday. “I’m sad that TikTok might actually go, but if this is where we’re gonna be hanging out, welcome to my page!” Within a day, the video had more than 3,000 comments and 6,000 likes. And the user had amassed 24,000 followers.

Neither Xiaohongshu nor TikTok responded to requests for comment.

The flow of refugees, while serving as a symbolic dissent against TikTok’s possible shutdown, doesn’t mean Xiaohongshu can easily serve as a replacement for Americans. TikTok says it has 170 million users in the U.S., and it has drawn many creators who take advantage of the app’s features to advertise and sell their products.

Most of the content on Xiaohongshu is in Chinese and the app doesn’t have a simple way to auto-translate the posts into English.

At a time of a strained U.S.-China relationship, some new Chinese-American friendships are budding on an app that until now has had few international users.

“I like that two countries are coming together,” said Sarah Grathwohl, a 32-year-old marketing manager in Seattle, who made a Xiaohongshu account on Sunday night. “We’re bonding over this experience.”

Granthwohl doesn’t speak Chinese, so she has been using Google Translate for help. She said she isn’t concerned about data privacy and would rather try a new Chinese app than shift her screentime to Instagram Reels.

Another opportunity for bonding was a photo of English practice questions from a Chinese textbook, with the caption, “American please.” American Xiaohongshu users helped answer the questions in the comments, receiving a “thank u Honey,” from the person who posted the questions.

By Monday evening, there have been more than 72,000 posts with the hashtag #tiktokrefugee on Xiaohongshu, racking up some 34 million views.

In an English-language post titled “Welcome TikTok refugees,” posted by a Shanghai-based Xiaohongshu user, an American user responded in Chinese with a cat photo and the words, “Thank you for your warm welcome. Everyone is so cute. My cat says thanks, too.” The user added, “I hope this is the correct translation.”

Some Chinese users are also using the livestreaming function to invite TikTok migrants to chat. One chat room hosted by a Chinese English tutor had more than 179,900 visits with several Americans exchanging cultural views with Chinese users.

ByteDance-owned TikTok isn’t available in China but has a Chinese sister app, Douyin. American users can’t download Douyin, though; unlike Xiaohongshu, it is only accessible from Chinese app stores.

On Xiaohongshu, Chinese users have been sharing tutorials and tips in English for American users on how to use the app. Meanwhile, on TikTok, video clips have also multiplied over the past two days teaching users the correct pronunciation of Xiaohongshu—shau-hong-SHOO—and its culture.

Xiaohongshu may be new to most Americans, but in China, it is one of the most-used social-media apps. Backed by investors like Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group , Xiaohongshu is perhaps best described as a Chinese mix of Instagram and Reddit and its users increasingly treat it as a search engine for practical information.

Despite its Little Red Book name, Xiaohongshu has little in common with the compilation of Mao Zedong ’s political writings and speeches. In fact, the app aspires to be a guidebook about anything but politics.

Conceived as a shopping guide for affluent urbanites in 2013, Xiaohongshu has morphed into a one-stop shop for lifestyle and shopping recommendations. Every day, its more than 300 million users, who skew toward educated young women, create, share and search for posts about anything from makeup tutorials to career-development lessons, game strategies or camping skills.

Over the years, Xiaohongshu users have developed a punchy writing style, with posts accompanied by images and videos for an Instagram feel.

Chinese social-media platforms are required to watch political content closely. Xiaohongshu’s focus on lifestyle content, eschewing anything that might seem political, makes it less of a regulatory target than a site like Weibo , which in 2021 was fined at least $2.2 million by China’s cyberspace watchdog for disseminating “illegal information.”

“I don’t expect to read news or discussion of serious issues on Xiaohongshu,” said Lin Ying, a 26-year-old game designer in Beijing.

The American frenzy over a Chinese app is the reverse of a migration in recent years by Chinese social-media users seeking refuge from censorship on Western platforms , such as X, formerly known as Twitter, or, more recently, BlueSky.

Just like TikTok users who turn to the app for fun, Xiaohongshu users also seek entertainment through livestreams and short video clips as well as photos and text-posts on the platform.

Xiaohongshu had roughly 1.3 million U.S. mobile users in December, according to market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which estimates that U.S. downloads of the app in the week ending Sunday almost tripled compared with the week before.

Sensor Tower data indicates that Xiaohongshu became the top-ranked social-networking and overall free app on Apple’s App Store and the 8th top-ranked social app on the Google Play Store on Monday, “a feat it has never achieved before,” said Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower.

Run by Shanghai-based Xingin Information Technology, Xiaohongshu makes money primarily from advertising, according to a Xiaohongshu spokeswoman. The company was valued at $17 billion after its latest round of private-equity investment in the summer, according to research firm PitchBook Data.

Not everyone is singing kumbaya. Some Chinese Xiaohongshu users are worried about the language barrier. And some American TikTok users are concerned about data safety on the Chinese app.

But many are hoping to build bridges between the two countries.

“Y’all might think Americans are hateful because of how our politicians are, but I promise you not all of us are like that,” one American woman said on a Sunday video she posted on Xiaohongshu with Chinese subtitles.

She went on to show how to make cheese quesadillas using a waffle maker.

The video collected more than 11,000 likes and 3,000 comments within 24 hours. “It’s so kind of you to use Chinese subtitles,” read one popular comment posted by a user from Sichuan province.

Another Guangdong-based user commented with a bilingual “friendly reminder”: “On Chinese social-media platforms please do not mention sensitive topics such as politics, religion and drugs!!!”

The award-winning development changing the way design is done in Sydney

Quay Quarter Lanes won the Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design in last week’s Australian Institute of Architects awards

Chinese users of Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, welcome Americans fleeing a feared TikTok ban