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design
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The complexity of the brickwork required
Bowral Bricks to develop five special bricks,
unique to this project and never made
elsewhere at any time.
The most unusual of these is the K brick which
is shaped to project on one side from the wall,
thus projecting shadows on the walling. Like all
the brickwork on this project, these units are
laid in a one-third bond, that is each brick
overlaps the underlying unit by one-third of its
width.This avoids the formation of strong lines
running through the perpendicular (vertical)
mortar joints. (Conventional brickwork is
usually laid in a half bond.)
The 380,000 bricks required for the project
were manufactured at Bowral over four weeks
in mid-2013.That may seem a lot of bricks but
the plant produces about half a million units
every week so this special run was readily
accommodated.
Gehry wanted a colour that echoed that of
Sydney sandstone. Surprisingly, the colour
chosen for this project is a popular standard
in the Bowral range, Limousin Gold.
The final challenge was laying the bricks, and
Ray Favetti had no illusions about the project’s
degree of difficulty.“It’s hard,” he told ABC
Television’s 7.30.“All I can say is it’s like a snake
trying to crawl up a wall, you know, wriggling
up the wall, a brown paper bag that’s been
crushed and then just released to try and find
its natural form.”
Because of the complexity, progress was
painfully slow.“A normal bricklayer lays 400,
500, 600 bricks a day,” explained Favetti’s
supervisor, Gus Galati,“but this job here, 70, 80,
and a straighter wall, maybe 100, 120.”
Gus describes the bricklaying for the Dr Chau
Chak Wing Building as “the highlight of my
career. I can bring my grandchildren here and
say,“Look, I done this 40 years ago, 20 years
ago, and that was a stressful job that I done,
but, yeah, this will be the highlight of my
career.”
DJRD’s Daniel Beekwilder concludes that
“Frank Gehry has a long history of using
different materials in a different way.The use of
brickwork as a plastic facade material is an
amazing idea and Gehry Partners has
demonstrated how brick can be used in an
unconventional way to create a facade that
appears to have a lot of movement.
“In terms of my ideas on brick design, the
building has obviously changed the way I look
at the material and it will be interesting to see
how other people continue to push those
boundaries.”
The special shape bricks were
made by Bowral Bricks. From left:
Centre Rebate, K Brick, Offset
Rebate and L Brick. Not shown is
the Solid Brick.A specially-
engineered wall tie keys into the
rebate and anchors the bricks
to the inner steel wall,
restraining the brickwork until
the mortar hardens.