Frank Gehry was inspired by the idea of a cross-disciplinary business school, writes Roy Green, Dean of UTS Business. He wants it to be special.
A Frank Gehry-designed building is a tremendously exciting prospect. But this project’s journey is as thrilling as its destination. Let’s be clear: this building didn’t start with an architectural concept – it started with our vision to become a world-class business school in a world-leading university of technology. To derive this vision, we spent several months in 2009 in a strategic conversation, canvassing everything from how the post-crisis world would re-shape business to what kind of structures and programs would help us build a more ‘integrative’ approach to business education.
In-principle university approval had already been given for a new business school building, providing us with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reposition ourselves with a distinctive offering in an increasingly competitive and globalised world. A design competition was being prepared as part of the ambitious UTS City Campus Masterplan for the Dairy Farmers warehouse site in Ultimo. This was exciting in itself, but a further thought occurred in our strategic conversation with consultants 2nd Road: how inspirational it would be to attract an architect of Frank Gehry’s calibre to manifest our vision of the future in a uniquely creative building.
We were able to make contact with Gehry himself through his long-time friend and associate Maureen Thurston, a partner at 2nd Road, who said she would ‘give him a call over the weekend’. Gehry was interested. He requested a one-page statement from the faculty setting out its future strategy and expectations for the building. Having received this, he responded with a simple text message: ‘I’m up for it.’ Vice-chancellor Ross Milbourne lost no time in cancelling the design competition and inviting Gehry to Sydney for a private visit to view the site. It was on this visit that, when asked by the vice-chancellor whether he liked the Dairy Farmers site, Gehry replied: ‘I like the problem.’
Frank Gehry famously bases his designs on inspired sketches. Here’s the story behind ours.
On Gehry’s second visit to Sydney in December 2009, he contracted food poisoning. It curtailed his activities somewhat, and his meeting with the faculty had to be cut short. The following day, despite his illness, Kerry O’Brien interviewed him for The 7.30 Report, and we had a few other light meetings. We had a final discussion before he got on the plane in the coffee shop at the Park Hyatt.
Gehry was getting better, and beginning to be his old self again: sketching, talking and thinking about the essence of the building, its metaphor and exactly what it was all about. ‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about our discussions.’ We had been talking about trees. ‘This is going to be a tree house, with a trunk and a core of activity, and houses in the branches for people to connect and do their private work.’ That was the moment genius struck. The result was this sketch of the unifying idea Gehry would employ for his design: a tree house, a ‘growing, learning organism with many branches of thought – some robust and some ephemeral and delicate’.
Craig Webb, Gehry Partners’ Chief Designer, looked at the sketch and said: ‘We can work with that’. And it has been the guiding principle of the work being undertaken on the building ever since.
Design philosophy
So far, Frank Gehry has visited Australia three times – four if we count his public lecture almost 30 years ago, which took place by extraordinary coincidence in another iconic Sydney building – the UTS Tower. Gehry himself likes to say that he was ‘waiting by the phone’ for us to call and that he busied himself ‘with a couple of other things’ in the meantime. We have visited some of the buildings with which he busied himself – such as the Disney Concert Hall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stata building, Princeton Library and Weatherhead School of Management – and in the process, we learned more about the Gehry philosophy of design, some of which is particularly relevant to our project.
‘Design from the inside out’
This means starting with the ethos, needs and aspirations of the client, in this case the school and university. Currently, we operate at three locations including our main city campus – a reconstructed heritage site in Haymarket, where the separation of discipline areas is reinforced by a disconnected architecture and where, as a consequence, opportunities for interaction and collaboration are highly constrained.
By contrast, our faculty strategic conversation has placed emphasis on more integrative thinking, on producing students with boundary-crossing skills as well as specialised domain knowledge, and on a more creative element to business education, especially the extent to which we can connect our discipline areas with other faculties and discipline areas, such as design, engineering and IT, communication and the humanities. This emphasis also aligns with the direction of the UTS Strategic Plan, and discussions with the vice-chancellor, the University Council and our external partners in industry and the community.
‘The work is liquid until it is not’
Everything in the design discussions to date has focused on the internal functionality of the building, and this work continues in liquid form until it is crystallised as the final design, prior to the construction phase. Form truly follows function in the Gehry design philosophy, as for the early Bauhaus architects, but in a more organic style that questions and supersedes their idea of a ‘machine for living in’.
The Gehry team is committed to measuring the costs of the project so that it does not run over budget, and the constant three-way dialogue between the aspirations of the client, the interpretation of the architect and the reality of finite resources means that liquid cannot become crystal until the right moment: too early and attachments may be formed where ‘hearts get broken’; too late and the building doesn’t get built. Choosing this moment is part of Gehry’s genius, as is made clear in the Sidney Pollack film Sketches of Frank Gehry. Until this point, to avoid media controversy and misunderstanding, Gehry Partners’ policy is to keep the designs confidential to the client.
‘Making the building porous’
Our aim is also to make this a porous building, both internally and externally. Internally, there will be public and collaborative spaces where interactions can happen between colleagues, students and business-school partners. Academics will have their private ‘think spaces’ but we hope to make the collaborative spaces so inviting that they will choose to use them.
Equally important is the building’s relationship to the outside environment and how it connects with the city, its urban landscape and its communities.
An inspiration for Gehry is the High Line in Manhattan, and its parallels with the Ultimo Pedestrian Network (UPN) between Central Station and Darling Harbour. Like the High Line, the UPN will consist of a string of raised pedestrian walkways converted from old railway tracks. One of Gehry’s first questions about the building was: ‘Where is the entrance?’ Will it be at the UPN level or at street level? ‘The good news is that you can have your cake and eat it too,’ he said. The new building will have the potential to combine a street-level entrance connecting us with the city and an elevated entrance that integrates us with the university and UPN.
Unifying idea
The University Council engaged Gehry to undertake a concept design for the new building soon after his first visit to Sydney. It was on his second visit last December, following an interview on The 7.30 Report with Kerry O’Brien, that he sketched the unifying idea – the metaphor – he would employ for the design. It would be a tree house, with a trunk, a core of activity and tree houses in which people can meet, connect and undertake their academic work.
‘Thinking of it as a tree house came tripping out of my head on the spur of the moment in your presence and was not contrived,’ he wrote later. ‘But on reflection, the metaphor may be apt. A growing, learning organism with many branches of thought – some robust and some ephemeral and delicate. Anyway, it’s a start.’
Indeed it was a start, and elements of the tree house can be seen in the design as it progresses towards crystallisation, which will happen towards the end of this year. In the interim, the vice-chancellor has led a number of trips to Gehry Partners’ studio in Los Angeles, the purpose of which was to understand the Gehry process of design. We examined many of his models, developing an understanding of the relationship between the blocks that represent the building’s physical construction and the technology that goes into making those buildings a reality.
We also saw the architect’s current and recently completed projects in model form, including the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim, the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation building in Paris, and the Novartis headquarters in Basel, Switzerland. Much of what we saw helped guide us in our conception of how the design will evolve and, in the end, manifest itself in the final construction. The ideas behind the striking Novartis building in particular have influenced the vice-chancellor’s vision of open office spaces, glass and natural light.
One thing that is clear on examining all of Gehry’s buildings is that no two are alike. While there is a Gehry style common to all, a very different set of structures and finishes emerges from each to create the final result.
Schematic design
We have now moved from the concept design phase to schematic design. This phase will involve at least four visits in the latter half of the year from Gehry Partners and a likely visit by Gehry himself in December to formally crystallise the project, which has been given a completion date of late 2013.
We were doubly fortunate in being able to make the further announcement of a $25 million gift to UTS from Chinese business leader Dr Chau Chak Wing, with $20 million for the building itself and $5 million for scholarships. This is the largest single donation for a university building in Australia’s history and provides further affirmation of our vision and partnership with Gehry.
Significantly, while Gehry is deeply involved in all his projects, he has said about the UTS project: ‘I want to make this special.’ He intends to combine his experience of earlier partnerships with educational institutions, in which he was often the initiator of the conversation around business and design, artistry and creativity, with the ideas already emerging from our faculty.
Gehry sees business itself as a form of artistry and creativity but bemoans the fact that businesspeople are never taught that way. As he told the faculty: ‘I’ve always thought that businesspeople are artists – they work intuitively, like artists. That’s how we work… If you are going to come into the business world that I know now, it’s all messed up, right? Business is searching for how it can contribute to the world, and it’s great to have a businessperson – for me, anyway – who will free-associate. You need an environment to nurture that. That comes from you, too, not only from me. For me, it’s wide open. That’s why I came here.’
There is still a great deal of work to be done. Getting the building right is an almost inconceivably huge and complex challenge. And we are fortunate to have leading the process a vice-chancellor who is committed to its success. More than that, we have to deserve the building that we create, to fill it with faculty who are prepared to give of their talents, intuition, artistry and ideas, students who are searching for answers in a fast-changing world, and partners from the business community who are actively engaging with the academy.
