VOICE - Situated Writing
photographed by alamy
SIRIUS BUILDING, THE ROCKS, SYDNEY
TYPE : HOUSING
ARCHITECTURE: BRUTALIST
COMPLETED: 1980
Highlights
The Sirius Building is an apartment complex located in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia designed in 1978-79 by Dutch architect Tao Gofers for the Housing Commission of New South Wales. The project was built as public housing for local community members as a result of the Green Bans movement of the 1970’s, in which building workers protected local communities by refusing to work on environmentally or socially harmful construction projects. Commissioned to include units for families and elderly residents in an attempt to have a diverse demographic, this building remains a prominent and unique example of Brutalist architecture in Australia.
The Building Features
Reflecting the diversity of its residents, the Sirius has a unique pyramidal shape composed of stacked concrete boxes topped with rooftop gardens. There are 79 apartments in the building and they include a mix of one, two, three and four bedroom units. Most of the units had either balconies, roof gardens or private courtyards. The building includes three community areas, children’s play areas, and a large viewing platform at the top. The units for elderly residents were accessible and even included distress call panels that could be activated in case of accidents or emergencies.
However, the public/social housing in Sydney was an exciting testing ground for new design and innovation, more precisely 'Brutalism'. Designed by Theo "Tao" Gofers, with a prime position, Sirius is one of the most publicised controversies coming to this typology in recent years.
Threat and Controversy
After threat of demolition, a failed request to add the building to the State Register Heritage list, and its last resident moving out in 2018, the building’s fate seemed uncertain. In June 2019 it was announced that the state government sold the building to Sirius Developments Pty Ltd for $150 million.
The minister was careful to focus on the criteria of ‘aesthetics’ and ‘rarity’ that were
the basis for the Heritage Council’s recommendation, and deliberately avoided
making definitive arguments about the economic and financial impacts of listing
the building on the Register. Following this decision, the government proceeded to
publicly list the property for sale in early December 2017.
The Housing Minister stated that the building would remain but the interiors would be refurbished and adapted to include 89 units, and retail and commercial spaces. The proceeds of the sale will be directed towards new social housing projects, but the Sirius will no longer be a public housing building.
To summarise....
The iconic Brutalist building has been sold for $150 by the state government to the Sirius developments Pty Ltd for further refurbishment.
However there have been a social unrest and controversy to remove the residents for redevelopment on the site
The building was refused to be listed on the heritage listing by the NSW government in 2017
The government decision against the advice of the heritage council ending up being sold. Most of the residents are elderly or seniors that had lived for several decades on this iconic brutalist public housing building.
Australian Associated Press. (2019, June 28). Sydney’s Sirius building to be refurbished after being sold for $150m. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/28/sydneys-sirius-building-to-be-refurbished-after-being-sold-for-150m
Iconichouses. (2019). Sirius Building at Risk. Iconichouses.org. https://www.iconichouses.org/icons-at-risk/sirius-building
The Building Critics
Early Days of Sirius
Criticism of the Architect and the building
"Sydney should be ashamed of itself," architecture critic Norman Day wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1979. "The 79 units – from single to four bedrooms – could have been more than just housing in the Rocks as if designed by a group of droogs from Clockwork Orange."
The Sirius architect, Gofers responded
"People used to complain and I'd say 'Yes, they're complaining now, but in five years' time they'll be all right'," Gofers says. "Maybe I was being naïve, but I expected people to appreciate what I'd done. I probably was naïve. Some of it was quite vicious. But then Jack stood by me the whole way."
Bleby, M. (2016, November 11). Tao Gofers, the closet showman behind Sydney’s Sirius building. Australian Financial Review; Australian Financial Review. https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/management/tao-gofers-the-closet-showman-behind-sydneys-sirius-building-20161007-grx54i
The View of Brutalism
Contrary to the simplistic rejection of brutalism as a rigid and deliberately anti-human style of state architecture imposed from above, many of its advocates had emphasised from the outset the importance of habitation in adjusting and appropriating a building to human usage.
As Banham (1955) argued, the brutalist interest in 'anti-art' or 'anti-beauty' in his 1955 essay was a way of challenging the standards of classical aesthetics: "what pleased St Thomas (Aquinas) was an abstract quality, beauty - what moves as new brutalist is thing itself, in its totality, and with all its overtones of human association" (Banham, 1955: 358)
Reyner Banham. (1955, December 9). The New Brutalism by Reyner Banham - Architectural Review. Architectural Review. https://www.architectural-review.com/archive/the-new-brutalism-by-reyner-banham
BANHAM, R. (2011). The New Brutalism. October, 136, 19–28. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23014862
The Architecture
This building is one of the most well-known examples of late brutalist architectural style in Australia.The architect, Tao Gofers, was employed by the New South Wales Housing Commission and it is clear that his design incorporates some of the repetitive geometric elements of Japanese metabolism architecture.
The NSW Housing Commission to construct the Sirius apartment building as a compromise development which would be acceptable to the Residents Action Group, and provide a way to end the ongoing development ban over The Rocks district in 1975
This theorisation of the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of brutalism provides one way of approaching the design and social role of the Sirius apartments as an important contribution to the politics of public housing in inner city Sydney.
This work can be most accurately seen as experimentations in concrete construction, rather than being explicitly driven by an ethics of social concern or the progressive social outcomes that guided the early designs of the Smithsons (Rodrigo 2015: 238).
Brutalist influences to an Australian context during the 1960s and 1970s involved a complex interaction of factors such as the ‘rediscovery of the Australian landscape’, ‘the Australian city’ and a renewed appreciation of the role of the country’s civic and educational institutions (Goad 2015: 208-209).
Butler, C. (2019). Public housing on ‘The Rocks’: brutalism, heritage and the defence of inhabitance. Acta Academica, 51(1), 4–27. https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa51i1.1
Gillespie, K. (2017). Brutalist Architect Tao Gofers Pleads to Save the Sirius Building. Vice.com. https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbqw7a/the-architect-behind-the-sirius-building-explains-its-importance
