Brutalism seven: St Andrew's House

This is the seventh in a series of blogposts about brutalist buildings in Sydney.

In 1972, the Church of England’s Sydney Diocese asked architects Noel Bell Ridley Smith based in North Sydney to design a new school and office building on land behind St Andrew’s Cathedral in the heart of the city.

Its Glebe Administration Board and structural engineers Miller, Milson and Ferris, consulting engineers Addicoat Hogarth Wilson, and property consultants Jones, Lang, Wootton worked with the architects to design the building and secure development approval from the council’s City Planning and Building Department, the State Planning Authority of New South Wales, and the Public Transport Commission of New South Wales.

Preparation for construction included subdividing the site into two lots.

The image above shows a small map drawn by the State Planning Authority of New South Wales rendering in ink the city block bounded by George Street in the east, Druitt Street in the north, Kent Street in the west, and Bathurst Street in the south, on which both the Town Hall and St Andrews Cathedral sit. It should also be noted here that Town Hall House – the city’s new headquarters, designed to bring together employees previously scattered around the city in different buildings – was completed in 1975, at the time the church structure was completed. So, the entire block was undergoing a massive civic renewal. The drawing was compiled from information in the City of Sydney Planning Scheme in June 1972, at the start of this project, and was approved by the state’s chief cartographer.

Above: The site from the air prior to demolition. This picture, looking southwest, shows the small precentor’s house on the corner of Bathurst and Kent Street. “Now that little house was the precentor’s home,” Florence Smith, the architect’s widow, told me when I visited her in October. “The cathedral had what’s called a precentor and he and his family lived in there, and actually the girls from that went to school with me in SCEGGS Darlinghurst.”

Above: The same site from the air looking east.

Above: The Chapter House on George Street, which was demolished to make way for Sydney Square.

Above: The new building on the corner of Kent and Bathurst Streets that had been built a few years before being demolished to make way for St Andrews House. Smith told me that this building “only lasted a few years” before being pulled down.

A building application form went to the council in May 1973 for the 3075-square-metre site. The form specifies a floor area of 41,252 square metres on 10 storeys, including three car parking levels, as well as a landscaped square. The structure would also provide access via an underground arcade, housing 6215 square metres of rentable area, leading to Town Hall Station.

The construction was estimated to cost $8,535,000.

Above: The construction site from a vantage point looking south.

Above: Concrete beams being put in place on the construction site. 

“They were the first of the sort of concrete beams of that particular kind in Sydney,” Smith told me. “And they had to be put up very early in the morning. And my husband got a phone call from the cathedral, ‘We are having a service at the moment and they’re making a noise out there!’ 

“So my husband got in the car with my oldest son and there was no traffic on the Pacific Highway, and he went ‘zoom!’ The only car on the highway. And the police came and said, “You’re speeding. Why are you speeding?” “Well I’m going to St Andrew’s Cathedral.” “Oh, really?” And then my son pipes up and says, ‘Dad was not speeding!’”

Above: The construction site as the building takes shape.

The new building, to be built at 464/480 Kent Street, would accommodate St Andrews Cathedral School, including classrooms for 490 boys. This would have a recreation area on the roof, and a gymnasium with an equipment storeroom and change rooms. The school would include a choir room, practice rooms, a choir classroom, and an office for the choir master.

The building would also comprise St Andrews House, which would contain over 17,500 square metres of floor space to be let to commercial tenants, including the Sydney Diocese, for offices.

Air supply for the building would involve heating in winter and cooling in summer to maintain a minimum temperature in the space of 21 degrees C.

The architects worked with the council’s building office, which was at the time housed in the Queen Victoria Building, to design the forecourt so that it would blend seamlessly (without the need for steps, so that people with mobility issues could easily access the building) with the square next to Town Hall, and with George Street. The steps from Bathurst Street were designed to run the length of the forecourt, also to facilitate public access.

The building, built using exposed insitu concrete and precast concrete, was opened in 1975. Near George Street on the square there is a plaque which calls the square “Sydney Square”. The plaque says that the space was opened in September 1976. It has the name of the then-Lord Mayor, Leo Port, and that of the then-Archbishop of Sydney, M.L. Loane. But in one of the documents in the council archives, which I consulted for the purpose of writing this blogpost, reference is made to “Civic Square”.

In his review of the square, Professor John Haskell – who then taught at the University of New South Wales – compared it with Italy’s piazze, looking back in time to find places to compare it to. 

Within the comparatively short time span of European settlement in Australia, Sydney square meets these criteria. The idea of a square hereabouts was mooted by Francis Greenaway in the 1820s, and a century and a half later the square, although different from Greenaway’s concept, is a reality. 

It combines a wide diversity of functions – Town Hall, Cathedral, school, offices and shops and is a busy transport interchange. 

Finally, the juxtaposition of the Gothic revival of St Andrews Cathedral with the splendid Victorian eclecticism of the Town Hall, set against the distinguished modernism of the Diocesan Offices and School (architects [Noel] Bell Ridley Smith) and the Town Hall Tower (architect Ken Woolley) creates welcome visual stimulation.  

But of course, the success of Sydney Square lies not merely in responding to these, but in the particular way it has been designed. In this, Sydney Square exhibits great distinction. 

The space between the Cathedral and the Town Hall is handled very skilfully, with its secondary space giving access to Bathurst Street down a wide flight of steps.  

Entry to the underground railway station is well organised, by way of a sunken shopping arcade and tree-covered court. Indeed, the changes of level and use of monumental steps are some of the chief delights of the scheme, none more ably handled than the access from Kent Street between the Town hall office tower and the Diocesan Offices and School.

In his study of Sydney brutalism, architect Glenn Harper refers to an “ambitious” town plan published in 1971 by the city council, The Sydney Strategic Plan. Under the plan, “the CBD was now conceived as a series of pedestrian focused spaces,” Harper writes. 

“Within Sydney Square (1976) large exposed aggregate precast concrete paving units (3.7m x 2.4m) were set on the diagonal to spatially unify and define a new meeting place between Sydney Town Hall, St Andrews Cathedral, Town Hall House (1975) and St Andrews Cathedral School (1975).

“With floor space bonuses being offered under the Strategic Plan a collection of new plazas were introduced to frame new tall commercial office developments on amalgamated sites.”

Above: This photo of St Andrews House was taken immediately after construction was completed.

“The general population when I spoke to them just said, ‘It’s modern,'” Smith told me. “Because it was so different to what had appeared before. You know, you had your Art Deco in the 30s: you had your Edwardian, and your Federation, and your Arts and Crafts, and then you had your Art Deco, which – to me, I grew up in Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay, so I had Art Deco around me all that time - and I still tend to go towards Art Deco. And then post-war it was just ugly little brick houses and things because of lack of materials, and people coming back from the war and all that, and not [having] enough money. So things went up that weren’t marvellous, which have mostly been pulled down now.”

Smith told me she used to work for the City Council.

“Like, when I was working at the Town Hall and walking down George Street to get something at lunchtime … All your buildings, you know, like Nock and Kirby’s and all those places they were six-storey buildings up like that, you see. And they were all the same sort of style, late-30s or 20s or 40s or whatever. This came as such a contrast.

“You’ve got the three buildings and the electricity building and the Town Hall building and all that and then the little cottage at the end for the precenter, where he and his family lived – with a little wooden balcony at the front of it, tiny little place, which was 1800-something – so all that of course came down for one building. So, the scale. The scale was what hit you in the eye, because everything else was like here,” she said pointing to a building in one of the photographs in front of us on the table, “and then suddenly you see these beams going across and they hit you in the eye. And the sun on them and you go, ‘Ooh!’ They’re huge compared to the other [buildings]. 

"Buildings were basically a browny-colour. Red brick. So the whole of Sydney was red brick, and suddenly you get this cream type of thing.”

In 1992, the school opened a new campus – the Bishop Barry Senior College – for students in years 10 to 12 at 51 Druitt Street. In 2000, the school acquired levels 6,7 and 8 of St Andrews House from the church, and in 2012 it acquired level 5.

Ridley Smith, one of the partners in the firm that designed the building, died in 2013. In his obituary, it says that he worked on many churches in New South Wales as architect. David Claydon published a book about Florence and Ridley Smith in 2014 titled ‘Unafraid of Beauty’; Claydon has headed the Church Missionary Society of Australia and also Scripture Union in Australia, the South Pacific and East Asia.

Smith told me she regrets the way older buildings are easily demolished to make way for new structures.

And this is what I was saying before, that students in the future doing architecture will say, “Well, where’s an example?” Like, when my husband was going through Sydney Uni they had examples everywhere of different eras of architecture up til that point. So, the professor would just say, “Well, go to such-and-such a suburb, [and] you’ll see it.” Or, “Go to Haberfield and see what Richardson and Wrench did in Haberfield.” And of course, apparently a lot of those are coming down now because of the freeway. And they were a certain type of architecture. In Burwood you’ve got the Appian Way, which is curved, and that’s heritage listed, you can’t do anything to it. And I thought that Haberfield was heritage listed but, no, the [WestConnex] is going through and that’s it.  

I suppose I’m old enough to sort of think, “Yes, we’re losing my era.” Because it’s being destroyed by it all being pulled down and [then] put up all this modern stuff. But what is the word ‘modern’? See, on Saturdays, on Foxtel channel, they have real estate, selling places. And they’ll say, “This is modern. This is modern.” And I think to myself, “In the 50s we were all saying, ‘That’s modern’.” You see, so you’re using that same word all the time through but each generation of kids growing up think, “Oh, this is modern and nothing else has been modern.” But it’s been all modern all the way through.

Smith recalled the housing firm Pettit & Sevitt from the middle of last century, who were the first firm to sell homes based on models that you could visit and see constructed on lots.

Pettit & Sevitt were the first ones who did it and they were very, very modern. And I remember Ridley and I going with his parents to have a look at a place on Carlingford Road. And they got out of the car and said, “Well, that’s not a house!” And Ridley said, “Well, that’s the way it’s going these days. That’s how we’re going to build houses.” And they walked in and they said, “This is terrible! This isn’t a house!” because to them, being so much older, they couldn’t … The concept of something new like that they couldn’t do it. And so when we built our first house in Warrawee it was very, very modern [for] that era. You know, cathedral ceilings and windows everywhere. 

And our house in Warrawee, my mother-in-law she couldn’t take it. She said, “Why is this lounge-room so big and sectionalised?” And I said, “Well, I teach music so that’s up that end, and then you can sit here with the fireplace here.” You know, [a] modern sort of fireplace going up. And all that sort of thing. So, the word ‘modern’, the concept in your brain, it depends on where you’ve grown up.

Smith worked on the Sydney Opera House in the quantity surveyor’s office doing calculations:

“We were on the floor because the drawings were so big. You know, we had our comptometers here” indicating to her right, “And you did calculations on them, like a computer, yeah.”

But she said that the building represented a huge change for Australia aesthetically at the time because of the way things had been done previously. “You see, the Opera House also, let’s face it, was so … Because of the British background … “ We talked about the emigres from Europe who had brought Modernism to Australia. She added, “in the 50s and 60s we were still terribly, terribly Anglo-Saxon.” She told me she had once gone to Dick Dusseldorp’s house with her husband:

I remember going to their house out in Castlecrag, because he got Ridley to get a fountain specialist to design a fountain for him. And that was a very modern home. See he came from Holland. He was Dutch. And he came with all sorts of new ideas.

I mentioned that Dusseldorp had been a project manager on the Snowy River Scheme.

Yes. That’s it, you see, you’re right. You see, ‘project manager’, that was a new thing. “Project manager?” And architects were saying, “Well, we manage it. Why do we need a project manager?” And you often had clashes between the two and you still do actually. But you see he brought his ideas from Holland with him. So that’s a richness of culture coming into the country.

On the website of St Andrews Cathedral School, it says that the new building was the school’s ninth building. At the time it was constructed, the school had around 380 boys enrolled.

Glenn Harper was awarded the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship in 2015. He used the time this bequest allowed him, to write and document The_Brutalist_Project_Sydney, which includes an Instagram feed.

Above: The entrance to the school.

Above: The entrance at the corner of Kent and Bathurst Streets leading to the underground shopping arcade that goes to the train station.