The new UTS business school is Australia’s newest and weirdest building. We kinda like it. Do you?

THIS is not Photoshop. This is real, and they’re calling it the “squashed brown paper bag”. What do you think of Australia’s newest, weirdest building?

ASYMMETRIC is the new symmetrical. Squashed is the new smooth. Or who knows, maybe everyone was just drunk.

Australia’s weirdest building has just opened in Sydney and it’s causing plenty of ripples.

The building is as trippy on the inside as it is outdoors. Picture: John Appleyard

Actually, the new $180m Dr Chau Chak Wing Building business school building at Sydney’s University of Technology (UTS) pretty much looks like it’s made of ripples. But that’s a good thing, say most people, and we here at news.com.au are inclined to agree.

Don’t adjust your glasses. It’s the building’s fault, not yours. Picture: John Appleyard.

“The university when they hired me, I think expected a shiny metal building,” said architect Frank Gehry.

The cafeteria is over here. No wait, it’s over there. Actually Frank Gehry has no idea.

We’re not sure whether they expected anything of the sort. The 85-year-old Canadian-born US architect is an avowed enemy of the kind of cold glass towers which dot so many cities around the world.

Gehry is famous for his wild and wacky constructions like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a museum which literally put the dour northern Spanish city on the tourist map, helping generate a billion dollars and counting in visitor revenue since opening in 1997.

It’s an art museum but the most famous work is on the outside.

With his first Australian design, Frank Gehry was never going to play it safe. Governor-General Peter Cosgrove, who launched the new UTS business school this week, described as the “most beautiful squashed paper bag I have ever seen”.

We love it. Now if someone could just tear down the old tower and Centrepoint while they’re at it.

Excellent description, your Excellency.

Not that everyone is impressed. One architectural critic “bagged” the building for resembling a soggy paper bag, while another slammed it as looking like “bad Gaudi”, a reference to the 19th and early 20th century Spanish architect renowned for his droopy-looking (and even spooky-looking) buildings.

We invite your comments and impressions below. You might also care to share your favourite and least favourite buildings in Australia.

It’s a little known fact that the entire building is actually constructed of Jenga.

Whatever you think of the new UTS business school, you’d have to agree it’s a heck of a lot more interesting than the old UTS tower.

Such a subtle piece of design.

For those who don’t know Sydney well, the University of Technology is located right next to Central Station, but doesn’t have your traditional expansive campus like the nearby University of Sydney. Instead. UTS occupies a series of city blocks. Its main original uni building was the brutalist monstrosity straight out of some kid’s Lego set pictured above.

(Yes, brutalism is actually an architectural style.)

The new building might look like a squashed paper bag, but the old tower should probably be stuffed in one and hidden from view forever.