 | L5 Crisp, clear and very lean, L5 is Bligh Voller Nield’s latest building for the University of New South Wales.
REVIEW Sandra Kaji-O'Grady PHOTOGRAPHY John Gollings Anthony Browell
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Front elevation to Anzac
Parade.
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Oblique view of the
front facade reveals the
sophisticated abstraction of
the structure and fenestration.
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The decked courtyard,
located between the two
wings, at podium level.
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Twilight view of the
courtyard and the
disciplined internal
building facade.
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The building’s east
and west edges are
devoted to circulation,
resulting in elegant
communal spaces.
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The wide timber entry
stair, rising from Anzac
Parade.
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One of two
long stairs, which
connect the lower floors
at the building’s north
and south edges.
Photography credits
01, 02, 04 John Gollings.
03, 05–07 Anthony
Browell.
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The L5 building at UNSW by Bligh Voller Nield
is flawless, both in execution and conception.
Refined material resolution and an accurate
response to programmatic requirements is what
we have come to expect from this practice. The
flawlessness of conception is something else, and
I will return to it, as it poses significant challenges
to critical interpretation, indeed, to engagement by
any audience.
Situated across from the main campus of UNSW
on the western side of Anzac Parade, the building’s
street facade is sufficiently graphic to withstand the
reductive gaze of passing traffic. Project director
Lawrence Nield is suspicious of the discourse
around the “branding” of institutions, yet the
abstract grid of structure and fenestration – akin to
an Agnes Martin painting – readily translates into
the two-dimensional medium of the publicity
photograph. At the same time, the street facade
offers deep concrete sills at just the right height for
perching and waiting, along with legible entrances
to its two main institutions – New South Global’s
Institute of Languages and Foundation Studies, and
National Information and Computer Technology
Australia (NICTA), a federally funded computer
research institution. The two institutions operate
independently and have very different corporate
cultures and activities. The first, which conducts
short courses that prepare international students for
university studies in Australia, needs a shopfront
and administration, teaching and examination
spaces. The second involves research students and
staff working on highly specialized collaborative
projects. If the scrawls on white boards around their
space are any indication, their work involves
experimental mathematics obscure to the layperson.
Andrew Cortese, the other project director,
caricatures this client as being made up of the sort
of individuals who work intensely all night.
The building area of 12,400 square metres is
organized into two wings, around a decked
communal courtyard at podium level. To reach the
courtyard from Anzac Parade there is a generous
10.8-metre-wide flight of timber stairs rising over
four metres. The deck will eventually be enlivened
by a cafe and furnishings, but the courtyard, by Sue
Barnsley Design, is currently sparsely vegetated with
clumps of bamboo that offer no relief from the sun.
Below it are two levels of classrooms with panelled
walls that are removed each examination cycle to
form a larger space. Without daylight or views some
of these classrooms could be claustrophobic, but the
students are undertaking short courses and move
around the building between different classes, a
design studio and a small library. Moving around is
easy. The organization of the programmatic elements
is legible from all parts of the building, with vertical
circulation between floors situated at the north and
south ends, adjacent to all the services and
bathroom facilities. Along the east-west axis,
circulation is, unusually for this type of building,
located at the perimeter with offices or classrooms
pulled back from the edge. This enables both social
encounters and complex, changing light qualities.
The facades are ventilated and equipped with
woven aluminium blinds that are automatically
triggered by heat, and can also be manually operated
to eliminate glare. Floor-to-floor heights vary from
2.7 to 4.9 metres and the ceilings are raised at the
edges – as a result these perimeter circulation spaces
are elegant, even lofty, spaces.
As a solution to a brief for generic office and
classroom space suitable to entrepreneurial facilities
that will inevitably change as demand shifts, L5 is
an undeniably masterful solution. The building’s
controlled detailing and legible organization is the
product of a mature team of architects confident in
their approach and unswayed by fashion.
But there is something else going on here that
leads to my inability to open the work to
interpretation. This is an architecture without
ambiguity or doubt and devoid of symbolic
references or contextual clues. Cortese explains that
its compositional principle is that of radiant
geometry. Everything, from the spacing of the
structural concrete blades that delineate the facade
to the spacing of the pigeonholes in the office
common area, is in a proportional relationship of
three. In this adherence to an internally consistent
system, the building compares more closely to the
work of Hiromi Fujii than it does to Tadao Ando,
whose use of white off-form in situ concrete was a
model for the architects. Briefly (and mistakenly)
renowned in the 80s as the Japanese Eisenman, Fujii
was greatly interested in the architectural effects of
repetitive or serial systems of composition on
authorship and experience. Fujii described the
consequences of using predetermined
compositional rules as anti-humanist, since a
system – an epistemological machine – is
established that is independent of human
occupation or involvement. L5 adheres to a neutral
logic that suppresses the expressive gesture and the
signature flourish. Indeed, if rigorously followed the
method precludes the widening or narrowing of a
space or element for reasons outside of the
compositional driver. Serial systems, when used in
musical composition by Pierre Boulez and others in
the Darmstadt circle in the 1950s, were accused by
their detractors as being cerebral and unlistenable.
Adopted in the visual arts by Mel Bochner and Sol
LeWitt in the late 1960s as antidote to the excesses
of American Abstract Expressionism, they were
described as solipsistic and cool. Bochner and
LeWitt were confident that their work left the critic
with nothing to do, since there were no deeper
meanings to be reprised, no art historical references
to be made, no decisions to be puzzled over, no
metaphors to be invented. As LeWitt put it in his
famous 1967 manifesto against illusionism and
representational art, “Paragraphs on Conceptual
Art” in Artforum, “What you see is what you see”.
BVN has worked closely with their clients, with
the local climate, site and materiality. As a result,
L5 is in no danger of solipsism, nor can it be
entirely cerebral. This is not a work that
subordinates functional requirements to formal
ideals, since the mathematical proportioning system
operates at an architectural scale. Yet the overall
effect is of an austere beauty, the beauty of
mathematics. Whatever the physiological
experience, such an effect is an ancillary result
rather than a primary ambition. It pursues the
Kantian beauty of disinterest, of the coolly
intellectual, the complete and anonymous, rather
than the beauty of the sensual and expressive. This
building does not represent anything – not the
history of the site, nor the programme, not the
structure, and definitely not the personalities of the
architects. Nield insists that substance is the
essence of this project, indeed that it is the essence
of architecture, yet materials are used here to
achieve an abstraction that is indifferent to their
tactile or tectonic qualities. I find that substance
here is used neutrally, its quiddity is beside the
point; there is no “signature” material. This is not
to say that materiality is neglected, for to achieve
this degree of leanness requires extraordinary
commitment and control. Even the bamboo in the
courtyard appears regulated and contained. This is
a building that invites intellectual contemplation
and as such suits the NICTA folk particularly well.
For the international students, its clarity may be
ironically at odds with the inexplicable illogic of
the English language and Australian culture they
encounter therein.
DR SANDRA KAJI-O’GRADY IS HEAD OF THE ARCHITECTURE
SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY.
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BUILDING L5,
UNIVERSITY OF NEW
SOUTH WALES
Architect Bligh Voller
Nield, Sydney––project
directors Andrew
Cortese, Lawrence Nield;
project architect Ian
Goodbury; project team
Matthew Bennett, Craig
Burns, Namaste Burrell,
Kelvin Tam; NICTA
Interiors Nikki Fine,
Sandra Loeschke,
Marcus Trimble.
Managing contractor
Lipman. Building facade
engineer Connell Mott
MacDonald. Structural
engineer Taylor
Thompson Whitting.
Mechanical and
environmental engineer
Steensen Varming.
Electrical engineer
IT & C Services.
Hydraulic engineer
Sparks & Partners.
Landscape architect
Sue Barnsley Design.
Cost monitor Project
Cost Planning.
BCA consultant Stephen
Grubits & Associates.
Communications
consultant UNSW
Communications.
Acoustic engineer
Richard Heggie
Associates.
Client University of New
South Wales.
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