CONCRETE & STEEL

A 1967 UNSW Architecture School assignment that still resonates today.

It was 1967, eighteen years after the Faculty of Architecture was formed at the University of New South Wales on the site of the former Sydney Technical College, in the four-storey building where the current Architecture School now stands.

The political storm centred on Jørn Utzon's dismissal from the Sydney Opera House had abated. Our 1964 student cohort was in its third year of the five-year full-time course. Our Dean was Professor John Maxwell Freeland. Our 1967 third year was, as it remains to this day, the study year in which most students’ comprehension of the “architect design sense,” built on the knowledge acquired in the preceding two years, comes to fruition.

Our Faculty Design Studio Master, Peter Kollar, and his group of tutors offered us the perfect teaching team… so we came to realise as we progressed in our knowledge of architecture. Professor Peter Kollar and Neville Gruzman were the theorists leading a team of full-time academics and Design Studio tutors—the latter, an impressive array of Sydney-based practicing architects. These architecture luminaries, renowned for their work and talents, included Bill Lucas, Bruce Rickard, John James, Harry Howard and Libby Howard.

Most of them belonged to the so-called “Sydney School.” They developed a Sydney-born colloquial architecture: one that was responsive to its climate, topography and natural landscape. The “Sydney School” style, in great part inspired by the philosophy and practice of Frank Lloyd Wright, favoured the making of “organic and natural” buildings.

The third year Design Studio required us to form and develop our design assignments as a collaborative team of up to a dozen students. We were challenged to organise, cooperate, research, innovate, experiment and synthesise our design ideas into a single coherent design and presentation outcome. We were introduced to the work of the “World Greats”: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and others. We were encouraged to emulate their passion for the Arts. We were also encouraged to participate in design reviews with our fellow students, a practice that would mature into a respectful understanding of our mutual professional development.

Our architectural education was not only unfolding in the university classroom, tutorial or design studio. There was an easy bond between the students and tutors. Almost every Saturday, a practising teaching architect would host an evening at their home, at which fellow architects and students were welcomed even when not invited. This was the cultural norm. It was the perfect opportunity for the shy acolytes to gain confidence, ask questions and venture opinions. The same practice pervaded the Sydney University Architecture School. As well as polishing our professional dialectic, it also nurtured our social skills, tempered between sips of beer and wine. The UNSW Architecture School students prided themselves on their reputation for the consumption of beer, and its effect on setting the tone of conversations that invariably turned to architecture and notable projects in the making.

At the School, a core of students gravitated together in their passion for design, their aspirations, and their desire to innovate, experiment and test the limits of their faculties. The zeitgeist of our generation, in those years, was the birth of Pop Culture and Art. We came to our intellectual and emotional maturity through the School and the grace of our teachers—but also through the Beatles; Timothy Leary¹ and the Eastern mystics and gurus preaching an expansion of consciousness² ; New York Pop Art novelist Tom Wolfe³ ; “father of media studies” Marshall McLuhan⁴ ; and John Cage, the musician renowned for his experimentation with sound and the formation of musical structure from random sounds.⁵ Buckminster Fuller was touring Architecture schools across the world and spoke to us on numerous occasions,⁶ whilst Peter Cook and his AAA cohort invented Archigram.⁷ That year, the annual Architecture Review preparations were in full swing. I volunteered to direct it.⁸

In our third year, when the “Concrete and Steel” term studio project was announced, the customary “studio design groups” formed. In our team were Tom Barber, Renato Giacco, Geoff Watson, Alison Booth, Stuart MacDonald, Eric Yuen and myself. To make our team effort work, we decided we should set up our own studio space somewhere conveniently located and, more importantly, suitably priced to suit our modest means.

What better location than the corner of Oxford and Crown Street, near Taylor Square? A forty-by-ten-metre vacant commercial space on the top floor with high ceilings, rented to us at a pittance. Oxford Street had buses on the UNSW line and in all directions, as well as hamburger joints with Coca Cola, the staple food and drink of the student body. As for washing, there was a tiny utility room fitted with a cold-water sink tucked in a corner. The space came with a colourful Greek landlord who would appear with a short hunting knife poking out of his back pocket.

There was plenty of room for sleeping bags and work trestles for the project’s “latter days,” when invariably the design group would spend sleepless nights close to the submission deadline; when ideas were hatched under pressure; when anxious thoughts of success or failure gave way to the necessity of invention, and the preceding two-and-a-half months of a semester compressed into one continuous collaborative flow of planning, discussions, ideas, resolutions and layouts.

We were presenting our research on the nature of structures in concrete and steel. That was the brief. But through what medium? How could we adequately express the multi-dimensional and multi-layered nature of these subjects, knowing that “the Medium is the Message”? Marshall McLuhan loomed large as we considered how best to communicate about concrete and steel—their organic origins, inherent structural order, strength of material, play of tension and compression, the effect of natural forces and gravity—these materials, orchestrated by architect and engineer, that would transform a building into architecture. How could the principles of geometry, rhythm, and pattern in form, inherent in nature and material, be expressed in a perfect gesture of a master architect?

For us back then, as for many of us today, images spoke better than words. Our submission was to be an experience—better still, an experience of the senses. Instead of an A3 or A1 folio, we chose a six-by-one-metre roll of light-sensitive photographic paper. The ideas jotted on “butter paper,” the photographs we took, and our handwritten notes were all painstakingly exposed, developed and printed onto two long rolls of photographic paper.  We carefully and purposefully selected “information-charged” images so that the “message”—as so eloquently argued by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy and performed by John Cage—became a “mosaic of ideas” through which the viewer could compose his own constellation of knowledge. 

As was customary for our design team, the results were another pioneering work. A photographic print on a scale large enough to give homage to the best: Utzon’s Opera House and its tensile concrete sails.

Our submission earned us a Credit Mark. In retrospect, the presentation did lack some finesse. Was it worth a credit mark, or did it earn its mark with the sleepless nights, our guileless dedication, and our exploration of the origins and the essence of steel and concrete structures? Our tutors encouraged us and gave us free rein. Creativity without limitations. A priceless gift to bring into the “real world,” one we were about to inhabit upon graduating: a world of compromise, competition and commerce.

After graduating, our experiences and creativity bore many and various fruits. Renato Giacco worked with Colin Madigan at EMTB, where he went on to apply the inspired geometry of Buckminster Fuller in the design of the Australian National Gallery. Tom Barber moved to the United States. He helped design and build the first wave of the new renewable energy-generating wind farms in California. He then devoted the biggest part of his professional life to uncovering a plethora of Buckminster Fuller-inspired tensegrity structures.⁹ Geoff Watson went to work with Neville Gruzman as his most senior architect for many years.

As for me, it was Peter Kollar’s influence that had, as it turned out, the greatest effect. In 1967 Peter gave me, out of the blue, a book by Adolph Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy. It showed clearly how Indigenous wisdom, across all continents and throughout all ages of human evolution, is drawn from a pervasive human insight into reality, irrespective of geographic position on the planet or religious origins, disparate cultures and traditions. 

This is of interest to us today, when we are increasingly drawn into a collaborative position to resolve global problems—when arguably we have been compelled to think globally, as “Bucky” sought in the 1960’s to inspire us to do. Is it that we have been impelled to recalibrate two thousand years of “individuation,” both personal and national, so as to grow into a deeper conscious identity and symbiosis with our living planet? 

In his seminal work The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan prophesied that the birth of electronic media would usher a new Age, an information-interconnected Global Village… Did he also foresee our “modern” culture becoming less exploitative and more responsible towards the living environment which we inhabit? 

Thank you Peter, for entrusting me with that insight, and opening me up to the possibility of new patterns forming: patterns that encompass a greater vision and resonate with that ancient wisdom, at a time when our current culture has become toxic and discordant to our planet’s survival.

Sasha Ivanovich FAIA

July 2023 

With input from Renato Giacco