The Masonic Centre, Sydney.
Brutalism - so ugly it's beautiful - is now praised. Geraldine O'Brien reports on the redemption of the architecture they said no one could love.
It's probably one of the most controversial buildings in Sydney, squatting for decades as a big, brutal presence on the corner of Castlereagh and Goulburn streets, and until now, unfinished. By next month, however, 30 years after it was built, the NSW Masonic Centre will finally be completed with a 24-storey tower that was designed in 1974.
When Nick Lucas, Grocon's head of development for NSW and Queensland, bought the rights to the air space above the Masonic Centre, they came with plans for a contemporary glass curtain-wall tower "but we preferred the original design", he said this week. In fact, said Lucas, "we believe the '70s are back in fashion".
This may be bad news for those who would prefer that the 1970s - and in particular, the "new brutalist" style of architecture which had a brief Sydney heyday in that decade - stayed safely buried. Elizabeth Farrelly, the Herald's architecture critic, once described the Masonic Centre as "one of the least endearing buildings on Earth ... no one has ever loved it, nor ever will". Many agreed.
http://www.sydneyarchitecture.com/cbd/cbd4-013.htm
I could not imagine needing a building that big.
Brutalism - so ugly it's beautiful - is now praised. Geraldine O'Brien reports on the redemption of the architecture they said no one could love.
It's probably one of the most controversial buildings in Sydney, squatting for decades as a big, brutal presence on the corner of Castlereagh and Goulburn streets, and until now, unfinished. By next month, however, 30 years after it was built, the NSW Masonic Centre will finally be completed with a 24-storey tower that was designed in 1974.
When Nick Lucas, Grocon's head of development for NSW and Queensland, bought the rights to the air space above the Masonic Centre, they came with plans for a contemporary glass curtain-wall tower "but we preferred the original design", he said this week. In fact, said Lucas, "we believe the '70s are back in fashion".
This may be bad news for those who would prefer that the 1970s - and in particular, the "new brutalist" style of architecture which had a brief Sydney heyday in that decade - stayed safely buried. Elizabeth Farrelly, the Herald's architecture critic, once described the Masonic Centre as "one of the least endearing buildings on Earth ... no one has ever loved it, nor ever will". Many agreed.
http://www.sydneyarchitecture.com/cbd/cbd4-013.htm
I could not imagine needing a building that big.
