Headquarters of the UBET gambling business fails to win protection

DESCRIBED as a fine example of the “Brutalist” style, an architect applied to have this building heritage listed. It failed. He says it’s not fair. Beauty, it seems, really is in the eye of the beholder.

TAB Building at Albion, now UBET

NOT pretty enough?

Albion’s old TAB building has been included in the State Library of Queensland’s Hot Modernism exhibition alongside other iconic modernist buildings in Brisbane such as Glenfalloch, the Cultural Precinct and La Boite Theatre, but its architectural qualities were not enough to warrant heritage listing.

A Department of Environment and Heritage Protection spokesman said the Queensland Heritage Council (QHC) “resolved not to enter” the former TAB building into the state’s heritage register “as it did not satisfy one or more of the cultural heritage criteria specified”.

Richard Kirk, the former Queensland Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects, nominated the building for listing late last year.

Architects Geoffrey Pie and Richard Kirk outside the UniTAB building. Picture: PETER CRONIN

He said the QHC decision was surprising and believed it was a mistake not to afford protection to the building which demonstrated a “rare, uncommon ... endangered aspects of Queensland’s cultural heritage as a surviving, intact example of late 20th Century Brutalist architecture”.

Now known at the UBET building, it was designed by Geoffrey Pie and completed in the early 1980s.

“The problem is there are very few post-war buildings on the register and we are quite surprised a building of this order could not be repurposed and retained,” Mr Kirk said.

“Visually the building is not seen as pretty or as beautiful. But we have to be careful not to ignore the representation of this style of architecture on our heritage lists. It would be a shame to lose the building.”