Frank Gehry’s UTS business school building brings Australia into the fold

AUSTRALIA is about to join the club of countries with a Frank Gehry building — this one resembling the contours of clothing.

WHEN the first building in Australia designed by international architect Frank Gehry opens early next year it will have been completed more or less on budget.

The bill for the Dr Chau Chak Wing of the business school at the University of Technology in Sydney will come in “within 3 per cent” of its $180 million budget, Gehry tells WISH magazine in an exclusive interview at his office in Los Angeles.

“I’m very proud of that because when you look at it, you say, ‘Oh that’s got to be expensive.’ It wasn’t cheap but it was on budget and the budget was a rational one. It wasn’t a fat and sassy you-can-do-anything budget, it was a normal university building budget with a small premium added for doing something special.”

Gehry, who is best known for his titanium-clad buildings, has designed a predominantly brick structure at UTS and says the choice of materials was driven by the neighbouring buildings. “I think when the university hired me they expected a shiny metal building,” he says. “I made some shiny metal models but they were things I had already sort of worked over and done. I just felt that it should be a material like in the neighbourhood. If I’d built it in metal it would have been fine too, but I think the metal would have cost more.”

The striking curvilinear brick building has been described by some critics as resembling a crumpled brown paper bag. Gehry, however, says the inspiration didn’t come from that. “It comes from the fold,” he says. “Throughout history the fold has been fascinating to philosophers and artists. If you look at portrait painting from the past you’ll see these wonderful voluptuous costumes and this little head on top and you realise after you do a little study that they were commissioned to do the head and all the rest of it was fun for the artist to explore colour and form and shadow. … I’ve never really gotten to do a lot of that because when you start doing the contractors and everyone start telling you you can’t do it. But because of the technology we’ve developed we were able to design something that was primitively made — hand-laid brick — that could follow those kinds of forms and I’ve always wanted to do that with brick.”

Read more of editor David Meagher’s interview with Frank Gehry in the November issue of WISH magazine, free with metro editions of The Australian this Friday.