Sydney Brutalism will make you reconsider the polarising design

It’s the mark of a timely book that when you see it, you’re amazed it didn’t already exist. There is much great brutalist architecture in Sydney, but it’s scattered and easy to forget about. When you see it gathered within the covers of Sydney Brutalism by Heidi Dokulil, you think: Ah yes, there you are.

Brutalism continues to be polarising. Everywhere brutalist buildings are at risk of demolition – stuck in the dangerous “middle-aged modern” bracket of buildings from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, it’s too old to be fresh but too young to be safely “historic”. Brutalist buildings are often widely hated: with their blocky, monumental concrete forms they’re frequently regarded as ugly, forbidding and better off gone.

But in fact the ideology of brutalism has always been less about brutality – or the sadistic intentions of architects looking to brutalise their occupants – and more about brutal honesty – the unfussy expression of the “truth” of structure and material, the direct expression of form emerging from function. There’s a reason that this tends to be the language of civic and municipal, rather than domestic, architecture – because it’s the language of big government and the welfare state. If your university education was free, it’s likely that some of it happened in or near a brutalist building. The style is also characteristic of totalitarian governments, especially in the former Eastern bloc, and this is one of the sub-flavours of its current, still-emerging cult following – as a form of “authoritarian kitsch”.

Did social media save brutalism? There’s a fairly good argument that it did. Fan blogs and appreciation accounts abound. Instagram’s cats_of_brutalism is a personal favourite, with its deadpan collapsing of scale – cats recast as languid Godzillas lolling among monumental brutalist buildings remade as intricate toys. It’s funny, droll and cool: a hundred thousand followers can’t be wrong.

What this means is that there’s a market. Recent years have seen a flurry of handsome books on brutalism – big, heavy hardback tomes embodying some of the heft of the buildings themselves. One characteristic of brutalist architecture is that it’s exceptionally photogenic – arguably it lives its best life on the pages of a book and is easiest to love in pictorial form. Sure enough, Sydney Brutalism is full of sumptuous black-and-white and colour photographs.

The book is a valuable contribution to the literature, and it’s also a good read – walking the line between laborious historical detail and flip contemporary populism. This liveliness is achieved in part through the extensive use of interviews, with architects, historians and commentators – apparently more than 40. This is an impressive degree of primary research for what is ostensibly a coffee table book, and it’s a smart move – bringing in the expressiveness of the spoken word and a vantage point in the present day to look back to earlier brutalist works. The focus on the ongoing, evolving life of these buildings extends to how the style is “rebooted” through the work of contemporary Sydney antecedents such as William Smart, Polly Harbison and Angelo Candalepas. One might quibble over definitions – whether Candalepas’s gorgeous Punchbowl mosque really does have the raw and “brutal” honesty of structure and form that defines the movement, whether the Sydney Opera House actually qualifies as brutalist, whether it’s irritating for the book to refer to such buildings as “bruts” – but the point is that it enables such arguments to be had. 

Sydney Brutalism reportedly had its origins during the public campaign to protect the Sirius building, the public housing block designed by Tao Gofers and completed in 1980, but later threatened with sale by the New South Wales government and demolition for the redevelopment of its prime site in the Rocks. A huge public outcry ensued – mostly because it was so offensive to see public housing being sold out from under its longstanding tenants, but also because a surprising number of people discovered a fondness for its brutalist architecture.

The chapter that tells the story of the Save Our Sirius campaign is one of the strongest – telling a tale of social and political history through an architectural lens. Here the style is journalistic reportage, recording how, through the publicity of the Save Our Sirius campaign, “a whole new generation now knows the history of a building that is an echo of a better time, when the government built public housing in the centre of the city”. The saved and refurbished Sirius building, remade into 75 luxury apartments by architects BVN, is expected to open in March 2024.

Other edifices haven’t been so lucky. Dokulil reports 20 of Sydney’s brutalist buildings have been “destroyed or defaced” since the 1990s, while others are on the condemned list. They include the Bidura Children’s Court in Glebe, by the NSW Government Architect’s Branch – a hugely influential office that designed and constructed some of Sydney’s most significant brutalist buildings, among them the sublime Kuring-gai College and the Captain Cook wing addition to the Art Gallery of NSW, as well as the much-hated UTS Tower. The Government Architect’s Branch deserves a whole history of its own – at one stage it was one of the largest architecture offices in the country, with more than 800 employees – and this chapter is a bit on the sketchy side. But it’s valuable to acknowledge how such “public works”, or works in the public interest, were once procured by state governments.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 24, 2024 as "Sydney Brutalism".