Top architect takes yellow brick road

The business school building in Sydney will be a tree-house design with 'branches' and a crinkly facade. Photo / Bloomberg

Frank Gehry, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect of projects including the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, this week unveiled the design for his first Australian building.

The 16,030sq m University of Technology, Sydney, business school building will cost A$150 million and will be spread out over 11 floors. The building, on the site of the former Dairy Farmers Co-operative about 3km from the city centre, will have a "tree-house" design, incorporating a core structure, with "branches" spreading away from it, Gehry said. It will be made from yellow bricks and sharp-angled sheets of glass with a "crinkly" facade.

"The brief was that business schools needed to open themselves up to creative processes," Gehry said. The building seeks to fulfil the "yearning for opening that up".

Construction on the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, named after a Chinese businessman who is donating A$20 million to fund the project, and a further A$5 million in scholarships, is expected to start in 2012. It will be ready for the 2014 academic year, UTS said. Community consultation on the design started yesterday.

Toronto-born Gehry, who established his practice, Gehry Partners, in Los Angeles in 1962, has designed buildings including the Walt Disney Concert Hall in that city - once criticised for resembling a pile of "broken crockery". He is known for his "deconstructivist" style, a post- modern architectural method that uses fragmented shapes and distorted structures.

- Bloomberg