A $100 million event centre big enough to contain Notre Dame cathedral will open its doors in mid-2026 and leave behind a planning corpse.
The Cutaway in Barangaroo, a massive sandstone, concrete and timber cavern on Sydney's harbour foreshore, will welcome musicians, performers and partygoers around the clock after the NSW government parried residents' concerns about noise.
The space is complete with a kitchen, dressing rooms and a green room for on-stage talent.
"It will be as important as the Sydney Opera House", Premier Chris Minns told reporters on Thursday.
"It had to be spectacular."
The current design for the cutaway emerged from the ashes of a promised Indigenous cultural centre called Buruk, scrapped by the state's previous coalition government in 2022.
Plans for Buruk reportedly snagged on the proposal it be owned and run by local Indigenous community leaders and on a price tag six times as hefty as the revised design.
An investigation by Nine Newspapers in 2022 also revealed emails allegedly showing former prime minister Paul Keating influenced the state government's choice to back away from the plan.
They floated relocating the cultural centre to the site of NSW's original government house, which has strong colonial associations.
The new cutaway design has nevertheless miniaturised Buruk's spirit into a dedicated First Nations education space within the cutaway.
Indigenous references are woven all over the space, with eleven sculptural timber trees inspired by the Damun - or Port Jackson Fig - towering over the event hall and helping mitigate what developers described as a "traumatising" 15-second echo.
"You can literally do away with the microphone, the acoustics are so good," Infrastructure NSW project director Kate Holmes said.
The bare cavern, originally opened in 2015, was also exposed to the elements and to neighbours treated to sounds ricocheting out into the adjacent suburb of Millers Point.
In February, state planning minister Paul Scully stepped in to ensure the space was an all-hours as well as an all-weather venue, saying it was key to loosening and growing NSW's night-time economy.
