The University of Technology in Sydney now has a very Seussian new building with two drastically different façades, which will, always and forever, be known as starchitect Frank Gehry's first building in Australia. The Dr. Chau Chak Wing certainly has enough crazy curves to live up to the designation, and indeed, was imagined by Gehry as a "cluster of tree houses," according to the UTS website. The flamboyant 11-story building has one façade of 320,000 undulating beige bricks that were laid by hand; the other side resembles shards of bluish glass.
Most of the buildings in the Australian city are Victorian-era or modernist in the Mies Van der Rohe vein. "I think when the university hired me they expected a shiny metal building," Gehry told the Australian newspaper. Clearly, he decided to go a different route.
Some critics have compared it to a crumpled paper bag, but the Guardian Australia goes a bit further: "The surprise is that Gehry's curves carry through the skin to the inside. As you run your hands along the plasterboard interior walls, it feels like the slightly alien shapes a fetus makes on the protruding belly of an expectant mother – disconcerting but fascinating at the same time."
Okay then! Photos, below:
· Frank Gehry Contorts Brick Façades on UT Sydney Business School [Design Boom]
· All Frank Fucking Gehry posts [Curbed National]
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