It looks like a crumpled brown paper bag, but the University of Technology Sydney's new business school, designed by Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry, is actually made from humble bricks and mortar. Janne Ryan went onsite with facade engineer Stephen Giblett.

Frank Gehry’s twisted, curved titanium Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain is iconic. He has designed a number of innovative buildings across the world, but his most recent project—known as the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building—is his first in Australia. It is also the first time Gehry has designed a building with the humble brick as hero.

Here there is no twisted titanium. Instead, this building’s innovation is bricks, laid in such a way as to give the impression of a crumpled brown paper bag.

Engineers had to invent a new way of working to make the crumpled brick drape design a reality.

‘There is no building in the world that has bricks like this,’ claims Stephen Giblett, the building’s lead façade engineer.

In the beginning it was embarrassing: I'm a bricklayer, I was only laying 100 bricks, but this is the way the job is. Gus Galati, bricklayer

‘The curvature of these bricks, it's as though you draped a fabric over the top of the frame and all the curvature that you would get out of, say, a flowing dress or something like that, it's that type of form.’

As the building structures discipline leader for AECOM, Giblett worked closely with a number of firms in order to safely build the complicated façade, which also includes unusual glass installations.

'Most people are aware of Frank Gehry's work, they are aware that he does these amazingly curved and amorphous shapes, and we know that most of these have been done out of titanium and other materials that actually work for curving,' says Giblett.

‘But this is a building where he's decided to do it out of brick. Brick is supposed to be sat one brick on top of the other in straight lines or in arches or any sort of form where it makes sense to do it out of brick.’

‘Now, you imagine a bricklayer trying to lay bricks over towards his head on that sort of angle. If you just stacked blocks on these angles, after three or four they are on the ground; wet mortar just wants to collapse.’

‘So we had to come up with a system whereby bricklayers could do up to 10 courses and be safe. Some of the curves, in terms of the angle of the bricks, it's over 25 degrees’.

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Gehry’s driving interest in this building was to celebrate handmade objects, and in this case he specified that the bricks be laid by hand. The challenge was to turn the humble, everyday brick into the key material of a world class contemporary building.

‘It's a normal pressed brick, but the innovation was we put a continuous groove in,’ Giblett says.

A brick normally has an indent or ‘frog’. The innovation for the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building involved extending this ‘frog’ to become a continuous groove. This allowed a stainless steel bar to be inserted, which linked the bricks together. A brick tie rod was then attached to the substrate panel behind.

Because of the unusual angles, every face of every brick had to look perfect for the walls to have the impact they do.

The building, like the Sydney Opera House before it, required engineers to solve complex design challenges and develop new building methods, and in doing so they took what Giblett describes as ‘massive risks’.

‘Engineers don't like taking on massive risks. There is the risk of litigation, there is a risk of something going wrong,’ he says.

‘What we do [normally] is we look for where something has been done before, so we can say this code says this is how you do it, so we just follow this standard, or this other project: it's standing up, it works, we'll follow that.’

However, nothing like this had been attempted before.

‘We had to then take the idea and invent it,’ Giblett says.

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The engineers collaborated with UTS, whose labs tested the method before it went into full production. A new strong but workable mortar also needed to be developed so the bricklayers could safely hand lay every one of the building’s approximately 380,000 bricks.

‘A normal bricklayer does 400, 500, 600 bricks a day, but this job here it’s 70, 80, [and] on a straighter wall may be 100, 120,’ brickie Gus Galati told ABC TV in a recent report.

‘In the beginning it was embarrassing: I'm a bricklayer, I was only laying 100 bricks, but this is the way the job is.’

The curved walls also meant that the engineers had to have clever solutions for waterproofing; uneven walls made water drainage critically important to secure the safety and longevity of the building. A black membrane was pre-applied to the surface behind the bricks so that water drains away as it normally would through a brick cavity.

Other key components of the building, such as the windows and glass curtain wall on western side of the building, had to be adapted to fit the unusual curvature of the wall.

Giblett credits Gehry Partners with finding the solution for the windows.

‘They made these deep box-type windows which protruded out from the geometry so that you could have a nice flat glass surface, and the curvature of the wall then simply curves against the side of the window.’

However, the final words should go to the bricklayers. Galati says the building was the highlight of his career, despite the slow pace.

‘Bricklaying was getting a bit mundane,’ adds brickie Tony Hilton, ‘and now it's showing our skills.’

By Design looks at the places and things we imagine, build, use and occupy, explaining how creative ideas take tangible form through the design process.



