A Criticism of the UTS Business School Building - Frank Gehry

The UTS Business School Building, named the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, or more commonly as "The Paper Bag", is one of the more controversial buildings in Sydney. 

The first Frank Gehry building in Australia, the building has been criticised for a variety of reasons, one being its lack-lustre sustainability record. While the brick facade is sculptural and certainly defies common construction, it is also extremely wasteful, with each of the 320,000 bricks custom made and hand assembled. Not only this, but the bricks themselves had to be manufactured overseas, and transported to Sydney, at great cost to both the university at the environment. In order to hold the custom brick facade together, the bricks have been fixed to a complex steel frame, assembled on the ground before being lifted into place, and fastened to the side of the building. Not only is this process extremely complicated, but it is also wasteful, with a huge amount of material being needed. It is no surprise then that the building exceeded its already massive $150 million dollar budget. 

Further, the spatial layout inside is goverened by the sculptural form of the external facade, resulting in odd and inefficient room shapes inside. While some have claimed this is to encourage "a flexible scale of learning spaces", it can be questioned about whether this was really a deliberate choice, or simple a result of Gehry's distinctive building form. Inefficient room shapes are not the only result of the building facade dominating the design process, with the extruded window frames reportedly having leaking problems due to the irregular facade shape and non-standard construction methods. Naturally, creative architectural solutions should be encouraged, and are vital to the growth of the built environment. But one might question whether it is appropriate for a creative idea for the building form to cause problems for the operation and user experience of the building. 

Despite the wasteful use of material, and the environmental cost of transporting materials and specialist brick workers from overseas, and the inefficient layout of the internal spaces, the Paper Bag has receieved a 5 star Green Star rating. This is predominately due to the good insulation of the building, energy efficient fixtures, and relatively low ongoing operational costs. However, the Green Star system does not take into account factors such as the environmental costs caused by the construction process, nor the relative efficiency of environmental cost to benefit provided. It does raise the question then, if all these peripheral factors were to be considered, is this building really deserving of such a high Green Star rating, and is this the sort of design methodology that should be encouraged? Perhaps further, it also reminds us that the method for evaluating sustainability is still highly debated, and no perfect yardstick yet exists for calculating it in its entirety.