On a busy Sydney street just outside the central business district stands a lone, dark-brown 27-storey tower that almost seems to defiantly welcome its reputation as the city’s ugliest building.
The main building of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), has repeatedly been named as the city’s worst by experts and in online polls, partly because it is so conspicuous.
The building, or “slat-stack”, is so notorious that it has spawned lapel pins and T-shirts. Former UTS vice-chancellor Gus Guthrie characterised it with a quip: “We have a tower, but no one could claim it was an ivory one.”
It has even been criticised by one of the world’s best-known architects, Frank Gehry, who was hired recently by the university to build a new business school. He could not conceal his distaste for its infamous central tower.
The question, then, is what to do with such a celebrated eye sore. The multinational firm Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (Lava) believes it has the answer: cover it up.
Chris Bosse, a director of the firm, which has branches in Sydney, Shanghai and Stuttgart, has proposed applying his pioneering, environmentally friendly concept of lightweight architecture.
The plan would involve covering the tower in a woven fabric mesh, or “skin” - and it could even have ramifications for Singapore in the future.
The skin would not only replace the infamous stark brown slats with a glowing, soft facade of composite textile mesh, but would also include a range of environmental functions, such as collecting rainwater at the base and trapping air to reduce the energy use of the tower.
The tinted windows of the building are now sealed. But the skin would allow the windows to be opened to let in light and air, reducing the need for electric lighting and air-conditioning.
It could also function as a screen at night - an effect created by implanting solar cells into the fabric that can generate enough power to beam images or messages.
“Every city in the world has these buildings that were built in the 1960s and 1970s and are coming to the end of their aesthetic and technological lifespan,” Bosse said.
“The buildings are outdated and are not changing. The question is what to do with them. We want to wrap the tower in a skin and turn it into something new.”
Bosse, who studied at the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design in Stuttgart, said this would not only update the building aesthetically but also enable the tower to be naturally inducted and lit.
“Energy collected during the day can be converted to light and electricity,” he said. “We want to build with less materials, less cost and less of a carbon footprint.”
He was a designer of Beijing’s Water Cube - the award-winning aquatics centre built for the 2008 Olympics. He said Lava’s aim is to learn from nature and apply it to engineering and architecture.
