Where Brutalism came from, how it reached Sydney, who built it and for whom, how concrete, climate and landscape shaped it, and what has happened to the buildings since.
Le Corbusier described the concrete of his Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, completed in 1952, as béton brut, or raw concrete. The finish arose in the late 1940s from his complaints about poor concrete workmanship.
Behind all aspects of the New Brutalism, in Britain and elsewhere, lies one undisputed architectural fact: the concrete-work of Le Corbusier’s ‘Unite d’Habitation’ at Marseilles.
Alison Smithson first used the English name in 1953, for an unbuilt house in Colville Place, Soho. The word “Neo-Brutalist” came from Hans Asplund in Sweden, and Oliver Cox and Graeme Shankland were among the English architects who carried it back to London. It stuck to Alison and Peter Smithson partly because they were prepared to take it seriously, and partly because Peter Smithson’s student nickname was Brutus.
The Smithsons’ school at Hunstanton in Norfolk, won in competition in 1949 and completed in 1954, left its steel and brick structure and its services on show. It was the first building completed anywhere to be called New Brutalist by its architects. Reyner Banham’s essay “The New Brutalism” appeared in The Architectural Review in December 1955, and he expanded the subject into a book in 1966. It gave the movement three qualities: the building as a clear and memorable image, clear exhibition of structure, and a high valuation of raw, untreated materials.
Sydney Brutalism runs from about 1960 to about 1987, with more than 270 buildings by 77 known practices in a region running from Blackheath to Newcastle and Port Kembla. It came at least ten years after the significant international projects.
Publications were one route. Zodiac devoted issues in 1958 and 1968 to Le Corbusier and English Brutalism. Robin Boyd’s 1962 monograph on Kenzo Tange, influential in the Government Architect’s office, added Japanese examples.
People were the other routes. Tony Moore, Peter Hall and Don Gazzard all worked in London in the late 1950s and came home. Émigré architects trained in European modernism adapted the approach in their own ways, among them Hugh and Eva Buhrich, Enrico Taglietti and Frederick Romberg, who joined the architecture faculty at Newcastle in 1965. Harry Seidler, drawing on Marcel Breuer and Le Corbusier, was the main source of sustained work outside the Government Architect’s office, with buildings such as the Ercildoune Apartments at Elizabeth Bay (1966).
The first examples were small experimental houses in the bushland of the lower north shore, among them the Lucas House at Castlecrag (1957 to about 1960), by Bill and Ruth Lucas, with its unpainted steel frame, wire glass and undressed timber on a hillside.
The word itself was used sparingly. Seidler and Michael Dysart avoided it. Gazzard applied it in 1964 to a textured brick house at Carlingford, and in 1967 Boyd wrote that raw concrete remained generally unacceptable and that Australia had no New Brutalism. By the mid-1970s the approach had been absorbed into the mainstream of Sydney practice.
Public building gave Sydney’s version much of its consistency. The NSW Government Architect designed 60 of Sydney’s Brutalist buildings, by far the most of any office. Edward Farmer held that post from 1958 to 1973, and at one point the branch was among the largest architecture studios in the southern hemisphere. It gave major jobs to young project architects: Ken Woolley at the Recreational Hall and Chapel at Lidcombe Hospital (1962), Peter Hall at Goldstein Hall at the University of NSW (1964), and Dysart at Kuring-gai High School at North Turramurra (1964).
The office developed model schools, built across the state. Windsor High (1968) and Evans High (1972) assigned each part of the structure its own material: face brick for walls, raw concrete for spandrels and balustrades, smooth concrete for slab edges and box gutters. The reasoning was practical: at Hornsby Technical College the finishes were chosen not out of any fashion for raw concrete but for the value of materials that needed no upkeep. Public schools moved towards a neo-vernacular style by about 1975, while the office kept using concrete for other government work. Its last major projects were Newcastle Police Station, Bidura Children’s Court in Glebe (1984) and the Sydney Police Centre, opened in 1987.
The style became synonymous with tertiary education. Macquarie University was planned on a 61-metre grid, and several architects built its concrete buildings as separate commissions between 1967 and 1971. At Lindfield, David Turner of the Government Architect’s office designed the former Kuring-gai College, whose first stages were finished in 1971 and 1972. He based it on an Italian hill village, and it won the Sulman Award in 1978.
The UTS Tower was planned for the NSW Institute of Technology as one of seven buildings on Broadway. It was meant to symbolise to the community the new significance of technical and advanced education. Dysart’s design dates from 1968. Dysart left for private practice in 1969. The podium was in use from 1975, and Premier Neville Wran opened the tower on 15 October 1979. Dysart described the result as a “respect for materials and economy of means”.
The Housing Commission of NSW used similar means for high-density housing at The Laurels in Sans Souci (about 1974, with Gofers as project architect), and at Rosebery (1967), Waterloo (1976) and Telopea (about 1976). Sirius moved away from the last three, which placed buildings on cleared land. Commissioned in 1975 and completed in 1980, Sirius followed the Green Bans and housed people displaced by redevelopment in The Rocks and Millers Point. Its 79 apartments ran from 17 aged pensioner units to four-bedroom homes. Gofers called the roof gardens “a fifth elevation”.
In 1970 the City of Sydney asked Ancher Mortlock Murray & Woolley, the firm Woolley had joined in 1964, to investigate office space behind the Town Hall. The result was Town Hall House and a new public square. Warringah Shire commissioned its Civic Centre in 1970 from Edwards, Madigan, Torzillo & Briggs, where Colin Madigan and Christopher Kringas were the design architects. Churches, corporations and speculative developers also took up the style. The Sydney Masonic Centre, by Joseland & Gilling, opened as the headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of NSW on 10 March 1979.
Sydney’s concrete differed from Le Corbusier’s in finish. Good béton brut here meant an even surface, whether board-marked, smooth or precast, and the original roughness was tamed, especially for the more commercial uses.
Brutalism in Sydney was architecturally ambitious and wonderfully varied in its textures, but it is also a story about concrete craftsmanship.
Wall finishes included board-marked, bush-hammered, pitted, exposed aggregate, rope-finished and pigmented concrete, along with ribbed block and clinker brick. At the former State Bank offices in Surry Hills (1976), the hammered finish on each column needed two labourers working by hand.
Most of the significant buildings had structural advice from Miller Milston & Ferris, whose John Ferris (1925 to 2015) had a particular interest in post-tensioned concrete. Their 48-floor Qantas International Centre (1970 to 1982), with Joseland & Gilling, used precast floor beams, blade walls and in-situ truss beams to keep the window edge free of columns.
At Warringah, most external walls are in-situ concrete 230 or 305 millimetres thick, bush-hammered to expose the coarse aggregate. Three precast, prestressed piers 12.8 metres high carry the top level. It was a testing ground for the practice’s National Gallery and High Court in Canberra. Town Hall House was an early tall office building with a load-bearing precast wall system, and its panels use an acid-washed buff aggregate that approximates the Town Hall’s sandstone. The Masonic Centre was built to a very high standard of off-form construction.
Deep windows were among the local features: slots set well behind the structure, usually with sun shading. Seidler’s Milsons Point offices (1973) and the former Avon factory offices at Frenches Forest (1968) separate structure, sun control and glass into distinct layers. Town Hall House has small windows under curved hoods, with vertical blades on the east and west. Its windows are much smaller than the glass areas of buildings only ten years older, to keep out the heat.
Some early work was softer than its British models. Textured brick, terracotta tiles and dark-stained timber appear at the Johnson House in Chatswood West (1963), the Wentworth Memorial Church at Vaucluse (1965) and Dee Why Library (1967). This strand draws on Scandinavian modernism and on the Sydney School, and on the rediscovery of the Australian bush landscape.
Landscape architects shaped the later buildings. At Dee Why, Bruce Mackenzie surveyed the site first, and the building was placed to preserve as much as possible of the rock outcrops and remnant bushland. At Kuring-gai, Mackenzie and Allan Correy kept much of the bush and used native plants in the courtyards and on the roof decks. At the former Department of Mines laboratory in Lidcombe (about 1977), concrete projections for fume cupboards face north and catch the light from remnant Cumberland Plain forest.
Symmetry was not a starting point, and functional parts were arranged to suit the topography. Sirius steps with its site. The original intention was a white finish to echo the Opera House, and the budget left it grey.
By mid-2016, 36 of Sydney’s Brutalist buildings had been demolished, were pending demolition or had been severely altered, among them the Goodsell Building, the Sydney Entertainment Centre (1983) and the Sydney Convention Centre (1988). Others changed on the surface. Goldstein Hall was painted, the former King George Tower lost its glazing and sun shading, and coatings now cover much of the Masonic Centre’s off-form concrete.
The state decided in 2015 to sell Sirius as part of its sale of public housing, and by October 2016 all but seven of its 99 residents had been moved. The National Trust nominated it for listing. In December 2015 the Heritage Council recommended the State Heritage Register, on grounds of aesthetics and rarity, and also noted its social significance and link to the Green Bans. Minister Mark Speakman declined in 2016, citing the funds a sale would raise. The government told the court that listing would cut the sale value by about $70 million, equivalent to 240 social housing units.
The Save Our Sirius campaign raised money for a legal challenge, and the CFMEU placed a green ban on demolition. In July 2017 the Land and Environment Court found the refusal invalid. In October 2017 Minister Gabrielle Upton refused again. The last resident, Myra Demetriou, left on 1 February 2018.
In June 2019 the government sold the building for $150 million to a company backed by JDH Capital. BVN, chosen through a design competition, kept and restored the facade, added copper-clad pods, and opened the base to the street. There are now 75 apartments. The project received a National Commendation in the 2025 National Architecture Awards.
The old Building 2 beside the tower was demolished in 2016, and UTS Central opened on the site in August 2019. When Dysart died in 2026, the UTS design lecturer Jesse Adams Stein said: “Sydney people love to hate brutalist buildings, but they also love to love them.”
When the City of Sydney reviewed its modern buildings, only five in the city built between 1945 and 1975 were heritage listed. The Central Sydney Planning Committee approved further listings in June 2020, including Town Hall House and the podium of the Masonic Centre. The City then restored the Town Hall House facade between September 2023 and June 2025, repairing the concrete and the sun blades. More than ten buildings across Australia were added to state and local lists in the five years to 2023.
The Kuring-gai campus, which UTS left in 2015, reopened in 2019 as Lindfield Learning Village, a public school.
The State Heritage Register Committee recommended listing the Warringah Civic Centre in June 2024. The Land and Environment Court approved demolition of the Bidura remand centre and children’s court in 2018 and dismissed the council’s appeal in March 2019. In 2024 it was still awaiting demolition, under a City of Sydney fire order. The owner lodged a new State Significant Development proposal in late 2025, and break-ins and vandalism continued at the site through 2026.