Legendary American architect Frank Gehry once proclaimed that “98 per cent of architecture is pure shit.”
His latest building, dubbed the ‘paper bag’, is The University of Technology’s new twisting, curving, brick structure and set to become Australia's latest architectural icon.
Frank Gehry is responsible for creating some of the world’s most recognisable buildings, including the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Spain, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
“I think that you have some real icons here and a lot of good thing going. I tried to fit into that, I wouldn't do this building anywhere else,” he said at the opening of the building in Sydney today.
Construction of the building’s curved brickwork has been a technical feat.
There are 320,000 custom designed bricks, a large number of which were hand-laid.
The atypical design made construction a slow, painstaking task.
But Governor General Peter Cosgrove described it as “the most beautiful squashed brown paper bag I've ever seen.”
UTS knew that it was taking on a challenge when it hired the architect.
“When we first said, what will the building look like, Frank's comment was, 'Trust me', and we did but it was well into the project before we got to see what the outside was going to look like,” said UTS Deputy Vice-Chancellor Patrick Woods.
But Frank Gehry was modest about his work saying that the building greatest architectural achievement was being built on time and on budget.
The idea came to Gehry after a visit to the site when he scribbled a design for a treehouse shaped building.
By the end of this month almost 2,000 business school students will take over the building.
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