SOS

Until recently, not much notice was paid to Sydney’s Sirius building. You would not find the modular concrete housing-commission flats, designed by little-known architect Tao Gofers, in any of Sydney’s architectural histories and guidebooks. Most locals would encounter Sirius only from the elevated vantage of the nearby Sydney Harbour Bridge, where they might pause in traffic to survey the building’s cascading roof terraces and curious mauve-coloured metal vents, or glance at the “One Way! Jesus” sign propped against an upper-storey window. Sirius was considered more a curiosity than a landmark, an unusual-looking public-housing complex endowed with improbable harbour views.

That all changed in 2015, when New South Wales’ Coalition government announced its intention to sell Sirius and facilitate the building’s replacement with private luxury apartments. In 2016, the then minister for heritage, Mark Speakman, followed up by rejecting the Heritage Council of New South Wales’ unanimous recommendation that the building be heritage listed.

The prospect of imminent demolition has awakened interest in Sirius, its architect and remaining occupants, and has mobilised a crowdfunded campaign to save the building from the wrecking ball. As I write, contractors for the Department of Family and Community Services are installing tall fences – ostensibly for safety but effectively to repel the tour groups that now mass in front of the building. This follows an earlier attempt to deter visitors by blacking out ground-floor windows.

Completed in 1979, Sirius incorporated a number of forward-thinking features, including prefabricated façade panels, accessible roof gardens, generous community spaces and modular apartment layouts that accommodated different household types. But the building attracted controversy due to its monolithic appearance and height, with its tallest concrete shafts protruding above the deck level of the nearby Harbour Bridge. Commentary at the time was mostly derisive. Melbourne architect and critic Norman Day likened the building to a “half-built chicken crate” and “a series of tiny concrete boxes stacked on top of each other like so many grey playing cards”. According to Day, Sirius “could have been more than just housing in the Rocks as if designed by a group of droogs from Clockwork Orange”. Inspired by experimental brutalist and metabolist architecture from the 1960s, Gofers had designed Sirius at the tail end of an era. By then the brutalist Thamesmead housing estate in London, futuristic backdrop to Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange, had already been deemed a failure, as had other prominent brutalist projects. Day was a leading proponent of the colourful, eclectic and anachronistic postmodern architecture that was newly in vogue.

Apologists will tell you that “brutalism” is commonly misunderstood as a pejorative term, as it derives not from the word “brute” but from béton brut, French for “raw concrete”. However, when English critic Reyner Banham popularised the term’s use in his 1955 essay ‘The New Brutalism’, he made it very clear that the double meaning was intended. Wrote Banham, “What characterises the New Brutalism in architecture … is precisely its brutality … its bloody-mindedness.” Far from inadvertent, the oppression and bleakness often associated with brutalist architecture is at least partly ideological. “Despite its mostly social(ist) mission, there is an element of unabashed cruelty in the depiction of the ‘city of tomorrow’, with its repetitive, industrially produced housing blocks and ambitiously over dimensioned infrastructural systems,” Dutch architect Reinier de Graaf has explained. “Good intentions are dressed up in harsh vestments, as if to convey the brutal truth that progress comes at a price.”

Unpainted, board-finished grey concrete is a defining characteristic of brutalist buildings. Laypeople tend to find the material cold, dour, even depressing. Few would be aware that concrete’s affordability, plasticity and strength powered one of modern architecture’s most productive periods, leading to a host of spatial and structural innovations. The so-called brutalist architects of the ’60s and ’70s favoured the use of unadorned concrete because it needed no additional treatment or ongoing maintenance, allowing for generous and sculptural forms that harboured softer and warmer materials within.

Now concealed behind tall fences and black plastic, Sirius’ interior is far more welcoming than its concrete façade suggests. Plush red carpet leads from a spacious ground floor lobby to a lofty, timber-lined community room with floor-to-ceiling windows. Seen from inside, it is clear that this is a thoughtfully designed building and not the supermarket car park that it has been likened to by one government minister. Nearly all the apartments have their own dedicated courtyard, garden or balcony space, and most have extraordinary views. Moreover, Sirius’ architect never intended for his building to be clad in sombre grey. The gleaming balconies visible in early design drawings are unmistakably white. “Just before they poured the vertical walls the quantity surveyor came to me and said that we were $200,000 over budget,” Gofers recalls. “But he offered a solution: we could save that money by changing the concrete mix from white cement to grey.” Faced with the building’s demolition, he can only look back at that compromise with regret.

The history of Sirius is intertwined with that of the “Green Bans” and state heritage protection. In 1971 the state government began evicting public-housing tenants from the Rocks neighbourhood. Swathes of the inner-city precinct were slated for demolition, with its historic worker housing to be buried beneath a cluster of commercial towers. Residents and union officials responded by rallying together to enforce a so-called green ban that halted local building work and helped to usher in statewide planning reform and heritage legislation. In 1975, the ban was lifted to permit the construction of Sirius, which was intended to rehouse displaced tenants and bolster the area’s social housing. As it turns out, plans to redevelop this area were not averted by the green bans but postponed, with the cluster of commercial towers once envisioned for the Rocks updated and relocated to nearby Barangaroo.

In March 2014, the Coalition government resumed the relocation of housing commission tenants and announced the sale of all remaining public housing in the Rocks and adjacent Millers Point, including the 79 apartments in Sirius. The funds raised from this private sell-off were to be used to build public housing elsewhere. Within three years almost all tenants had been removed and 185 properties – most of which were built more than a century ago and are heritage listed – sold for a total of $397 million. While new owners have converted boarding houses into private dwellings, the area’s social transformation largely remains concealed behind stone walls.

The demolition of Sirius, on the other hand, would provide a conspicuous symbol of this transformation. It could also prove an indicator of heritage battles to come. Last year, in explaining his decision to deny Sirius heritage

protection, Mark Speakman reasoned that “whatever the heritage significance of the Building … this is outweighed by the undue financial hardship its listing would cause to its owners, by diminishing what would otherwise be its sale value … which would potentially represent foregone funds for additional social housing”. The legality of Speakman’s justification is currently being tested in a case brought before the Land and Environment Court and funded by the Save Our Sirius campaign.

Acting Justice Simon Molesworth has heard that the NSW Heritage Act’s “undue financial hardship” clause was never intended for government use, and that an incorrect test of hardship has been applied. If unchallenged, the very broad interpretation of hardship employed by the government in refusing Sirius heritage listing could provide a precedent for assessing potential heritage items based on market value. And as the ongoing sell-off of Sydney’s social housing attests, the market can prove very difficult to resist.