View along Eastern Avenue: the long low wing with thin cantilevered slabs and roof, sandstone panels behind columns, and the ribbed metal stack rising behind. Parked cars in the foreground.

Fisher Library

Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown

Ken Woolley with Tom O’Mahony, in the office of NSW Government Architect Edward Farmer. Undergraduate wing opened 1962, stack finished 1971. Modernism.

Size
Wing about 54 m long. Docomomo gives it as five storeys, then three, and the stack as eight or nine. No height found; the drawing is estimated
Material
Reinforced concrete frame, bronze-clad columns, sandstone panels. Docomomo gives the stack cladding as copper or bronze
Status
NSW section 170 heritage register, held by the university. Still its library

The project for a replacement began in 1953 as enrolments grew. The old Fisher Library in the Quadrangle dated from 1909. The first stage, opened in 1962, was an undergraduate library for about 2,000 readers, with open-access stacks and individual carrels. A separate bookstack followed, with few openings to keep light off the books. Wikipedia dates the south building to 1967 and Docomomo gives completion of the stack section as 1971, by O’Mahony, Neville and Morgan. It was meant as a research library for senior scholars and staff, and became open to all readers.

Docomomo describes an international modern building with a reinforced concrete frame and cantilevered floor and roof slabs, and says the design “clearly shows the influence of Mies Van de Rohe”. The building appears to float on its terrace. The first floor is glazed, and the second has a roof terrace formed by extending the external frame. During construction it was nicknamed “the tea-house of the August moon”, after a film of the time and its Japanese look. The air conditioning plant, the largest of its type in Australia when built, is expressed as a separate element on the roof.

It won the Sulman Medal and the RIBA Bronze Medal in 1962. It was a focus of the Eastern Avenue precinct, developed through the late 1950s and 1960s, and the two stages are still joined by a vestibule that keeps its terrazzo, stone walls and hardwood balustrades.

Read about Modernism in Sydney

Sources

  1. Fisher Library, University of Sydney (1962), Docomomo Australia
  2. Fisher Library, Wikipedia
  3. Sir John Sulman Medal, Wikipedia