 | FORMAL GEOMETRIES MGT Architects’ elegant insertion at Sydney University sets the stage for campus life, but does not steal the show. Review by Naomi Stead.
Photography by John Gollings.
| Review |
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View along Eastern Avenue. The
new building reinforces the campus “street” and
helps revitalise a formerly downgraded area of
the Sydney University campus.
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Geometric forms arrayed
across the ground plane.
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Pyramidal skylight into the
auditorium foyer.
Above Auditorium.
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Auditorium.
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The new, formally organised
courtyard bounded by the Carslaw Building, the
brick drum of the auditorium and the raised
metal box.
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Southern elevational view
showing the end of the raised metal box and the
triangular stair.
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Courtyard.
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View along Eastern Avenue.
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MGT Architects’ auditorium and lecture theatre complex for Sydney University is
located on Eastern Avenue, in a formerly degraded part of the campus along the Victoria
Park edge. In attempting to revitalise this area, design architect Richard Francis-Jones
conceived of the project as comprising two essential elements. A brick “podium” is
formed level with and parallel to Eastern Avenue, reinforcing the building’s connection
with this campus “street”, and accommodating seminar rooms on its lower level. A box-like
aluminium and glass volume, which contains further teaching space, is raised
above this platform on columns. These two distinct elements are interrelated and
intersected by a series of carefully disposed geometric elements: a large red brick drum
containing the 500 seat main auditorium, a concrete cylinder lift shaft, a triangular
external stair element, and a pyramidal skylight. The geometry of each of these parts is
striking in its autonomy and completeness – geometry here is not implied, or set up only
to be subverted, it is actual and concrete. These elements further serve to define a
series of internal and external public spaces, integrating the surrounding buildings,
gardens and streetscape into an ordered sequence. The courtyard on the southern edge,
in particular, with its formal planting and seating arrangement, acts as interlocutor
between the new complex and the existing Carslaw Building, and opens a sophisticated
rapport between the two.
At the northern end of the raised volume is a framed opening containing stairs and
a balcony, described by the architect as “stage and set elements for the theatre and
ceremony of campus life”. This theatrical analogy could be applied to many other recent
tertiary education buildings, but this project is unusual in that it provides the stage, but
doesn’t attempt to steal the show. Standing out for its quiet and understated elegance rather than any overt theatricality, it is neither gaudy nor deliberately “iconic”. This is
perhaps a result of its lack of affiliation with any specific school or faculty – it bears no
obligation to represent a particular disciplinary “character”, and the university as a whole
seems to take much of its architectural identity from the sandstone and gargoyles of the
main quadrangle. For all its reticence, though, this new addition to the campus still says
much about the generic and commercial character of the contemporary university.
Capable of being rented out as a conference or public entertainment venue, or used as a
general teaching facility, the complex has something of the feel of a convention centre,
an air of vacancy which is unaffected by the presence of people.
This is nowhere more evident than in the raised metal volume, the most prominent
element of the scheme. With its preternaturally smooth, soft-metallic aluminium panel
skin, this volume has something of an alien quality, settled lightly into an immediate
context of Brutalist-influenced rough brick and concrete. The shape and disposition of
the louvred windows accentuates this impression – particularly the pattern of glass and
aluminium across two storeys of the eastern face, which tends to obscure a reading of
scale. For me this volume is reminiscent of the seductive smoothness of a desirable item
of domestic consumer technology – in surface and geometry it is not unlike a scaled-up
DVD player or VCR. It also has some of the blankness of such appliances, the deliberate
unobtrusiveness of the sleek and simple box which houses high technology. Function is
concealed and made to seem effortless. The more high-end your stereo, the fewer the
knobs, and so seems to be the case here. There are few theatrical flourishes, but this is
an attractive commercial package for the functions of a twenty-first century university.
Naomi Stead is a Sydney-based architectural writer.
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| Project Credits |
Eastern Avenue Auditorium and Lecture Theatre Complex, University of Sydney
Architect MGT Architects—project team Richard
Francis-Jones, Johnathan Redman, Elizabeth
Carpenter, Richard Thorp, David Haseler, Dua Cox.
Project Manager Incoll Management. Engineer
Taylor Thomson Whitting. Quantity Surveyor Rider
Hunt. Builder Belmadar Constructions. Landscape
Architect Tract Consulting. Mechanical/Electrical
Services Steensen Varming. Hydraulic Services
Warren Smith & Partners.
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