‘Sputnik, Star Trek and the moon landing’: Upgrade for Sydney’s school domes

Grungy and dinged from 50 years of school children’s fingers and bags, Narrabeen North Public School’s space-aged domes, the Binishells, still stop principal Adam Hughes in his tracks.

“I still go, ‘Wow’,” he said.

The first to be built in Australia in 1974, they are the only ones of this design and configuration in the world. They also contain a secret message from the Italian architect Dr Dante Bini encouraging children to step inside to read and learn.

North Narrabeen Public School principal Adam Hughes with the “pearl of knowledge” . The binis a rare example of an unusual building technique by Dante Bini. They are being restored.Credit: Nick Moir

As they approach their 50th birthday, the binis still have many admirers, attracting a sold-out audience at a talk last month to mark the anniversary this year.

Heritage expert Matt Devine said he became truly obsessed with the Binishells when he learned about them.

Former NSW state architect Peter Poulet has said the Binis represented the optimism of the 1960s and ’70s. “This is sputnik, Star Trek and the lunar landing rolled into one,” he said.

There are 1600 binis remaining in 23 countries, and NSW’s collection of the 15 Binishells across 14 schools was the largest of its kind in the world.

Hughes is now working with the NSW Education’s heritage experts and engineers on plans to restore Narrabeen’s concrete domes.

A spokesperson for the Department said it was consulting stakeholders and heritage experts about where remediation work is required at six schools, including Narrabeen, where the domes remain in use.

Hughes hopes to transform Narrabeen’s smaller dome into an innovation hub that will extend its life for another 50 years.

“It’s almost back to the future,” he said.

Binishells provided NSW with fast, cheap and large school buildings for gymnasiums, libraries and assembly halls at a time when student numbers were increasing.

Like a balloon made of concrete, a Binishell could be blown up in one to three hours using the inflatable membrane.

This resulted in “instant inflation” before the eyes of impressed dignitaries, the 93-year-old Dante Bini told the Herald.

Bini was “delighted” when told that engineers from the NSW Department of Education were working on plans to repair water damage and restore the smallest of Narrabeen’s domes.

The plan for an innovation hub was “fantastic!”

“To know about their restoration and their repainting makes me very happy,” he said.

The other binis – at Ku-ring-gai High School, Ashbury Public School, Fairvale High School and Georges River College Hurstville Boys Campus – are considered by the department as “heritage significant.” Half are listed on NSW’s State Heritage Register.

A spokesperson said the Binishell structures were complex because of their dome shape and heritage significance. They required careful attention when considering repairs and restoration including waterproofing.

Over time some were demolished. A decade after construction of a 36-metre Binishell at Pittwater High School, the dome collapsed in 1986, prompting the reinforcement of others to prevent further incidents. One at Fairvale had to be rebuilt after a problem during construction.

Bini said when he visited NSW’s domes a few years ago with his son Nicolo Bini – also an architect who designed a Binishell home for Hollywood star Robert Downey Jnr – he discovered “my domes a little ‘aged’ but in excellent conditions”.

The first binishells in NSW are about to turn 50. They’re getting a facelift. Credit: State Library NSW

As for him, Bini said he was doing okay for his “ancient age”.

Unlike overseas, where the Bini system was licensed to others, Bini moved his family to Australia to live for seven years so he could design each of the school’s domes and oversee construction.

Aware that Narrabeen’s Binishell, the first in Australia, would be a showcase for what was to follow, Bini designed a spherical structure called the “pearl of knowledge” near the door to the former library.

It was a “symbolic piece of design that represented an opening shell that offered young students the pearls of knowledge to be contained in this new library,” he wrote in his autobiography Building with Air.

He originally pioneered the use of the domes because they used compressed air as clean and green energy able to lift, shape and temporarily sustain enormous amounts of material initially placed at ground level.

The domes were likened to mushrooms because they grew as fast as fungi, said Dr Alberto Pugnale, a lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne. He and Dr Alberto Bologna wrote the book, Architecture Beyond the Cupola: Inventions and Designs of Dante Bini.

Unlike most of the other Australian Binis that were 36 metres wide – only a little smaller than Rome’s Pantheon at 43 metres – Narrabeen’s three domes (two interlocking) are smaller, only 18 metres each.

Pugnale said Bini was not the first to dream of an inflatable dome. But his innovation was to combine a system to design the domes with one to build them.

Other domes relied on traditional formwork to be constructed to support them, something that Bini thought unnecessary.

Pugnale said in Bini’s system, the concrete is poured at ground level on top of a membrane (an inflatable formwork) and a network of steel springs and steel bars that lie flat.

As air is pumped into the structure, the formwork and the membrane rise together and harden into a shell. “They’re both lifted at the same time, which, I think, is the key innovation. If you think about lifting concrete, fresh concrete doesn’t have a shape,” he said.

The sketch by Dr Dante Bini showing the pearl of knowledge, a symbol of what children would learn inside the school building. It was initially a library. Credit: Dr Dante Bini

When a professor of architecture and civil engineering at Columbia University Mario Salvadori saw a Binishell going up in Italy, he said it was a “nonsense that an engineer’s mind could not have conceived.”

He was so impressed that he agreed to a demonstration in New York, which boosted demand for Binishells across the world.

The domes captured the spirit of the times, the space race between the USSR and the United States, and resembled the futuristic architecture shown in children’s television shows like The Jetsons.

Education officials including Davis Hughes at the opening of the Narrabeen binis in 1974. Credit: Dr Dante Bini

Some schools, though, have been happy to see the binis replaced by more conventional school buildings. They have been prone to water damage, they are an awkward shape for some school activities, and are often too hot, too cold, and have difficult acoustics.

At Narrabeen, Hughes said there had been “bit of community backlash”.

“Some people [have been] saying the domes need to be removed, there are infrastructure issues with rising damp,” he said. An engineering report found only the smaller dome, which had an atrium at its centre, had serious damage.

For Hughes, the restoration of the shells to their gleaming immaculate white shells is a once-in-a-career chance to design a new school.

The renewed Binishells would contrast other buildings now under construction: a new assembly hall and 15 classrooms in a two-storey block.

For former students of Narrabeen North, the day that the first bini was inflated was memorable. “It looked like a UFO,” wrote a student on Facebook before a 2020 school reunion. “We sat in the classroom and watch them blow it up,” wrote another.

Being teenagers we did call it the big tit.

A student describing a Binishell

Others recalled listening to their voices echo around the building.

“Being teenagers we did call it the big tit though,” wrote another.

How Bini came to Australia

Dr Dante Bini was one of many Italian designers who came to Australia in the 60s and 70s, bringing design innovation with them, said Rebecca Hawcroft, the president of DOCOMOMO Australia.

Bini came out of the era of industrial innovation in Italy that was powering Fiat, Olivetti, Ferrari and Gucci. “[Australia] were open to innovation and technology, which was huge, in postwar in Europe.”

Composite - Dr. Dante Bini in Australia in 1979. Brannan/Fairfax Media). Credit: Composite

At the talk about the binis, some questioned the differences between Danish architect Jorn Utzon’s and Bini’s.

Utzon had also moved to Australia to design the Opera House. NSW’s Public Works minister Davis Hughes had been a bitter critic of Utzon’s expensive and lengthy construction of the shells.

But he threw his support behind Bini’s inexpensive and fast construction method.

Hawcroft said she had snuck at a look at the bini at Ku-ring-gai in late December.

She said the domes had been an innovative way of providing flexible space that had stood the test of time. “The school still uses it. And it actually works very well in the context of its bush campus.”

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