THE EXTRAORDINARY DESIGN LIFE OF MICHAEL DYSART
Tone Wheeler

You might expect the creator of the often reviled UTS Tower to disappear into obscurity after its completion. But that was far from reality for its architect, Michael Dysart, who died late last month. It was just one building, albeit controversial, in a long career of inventive, innovative and influential architecture.

Dysart possessed three interwoven talents: a creative desire to explore new ideas; an architect’s eye for making forms for his ideas; and wit and charm, to overcome the forces against different ideas. With those skills he originated new ways of designing schools, homes, churches, medium-density housing and hotels. It was the way he challenged the possibilities in each environment which saw him vaulted into the pantheon of Australia’s most significant architects.

Born in 1934 in Brighton UK, his mother was Irish and his father, a builder, was English-French. The family migrated to Australia at Michael’s instigation, when he was just 15, where he attended Katoomba High School, and commenced architecture at The University of Sydney in 1953. By 1955 he had won a traineeship at the NSW Government Architect (NSWGA).

The ‘the design room’

He joined ‘the design room’, a special studio for innovative thinking, set up by Harry Rembert within the NSWGA’s office, that became a hot house of design creativity. He was the fourth of an illustrious group: Peter Hall (who completed the Sydney Opera House), Ken Woolley (Sydney's Architect Supreme) and Peter Webber, later Government architect, Land and Environment Court Commissioner, Professor of architecture, and esteemed author.

Most noteworthy is the progressive approach taken by the NSWGA to set up a dedicated studio, that morphed into ‘special projects’ over the next 30 years. Alumni over several generations included Andrew Andersons, Lionel Glendenning, Colin Still, Bruce Eeles, Alec Tzannes, Brian Zulaikha, Peter Tonkin, as well as noted heritage architects Ian Stapleton and Colin Brady. They produced outstanding architecture, winning major architectural awards (a rarity for a government office anywhere in the world). Many had successful careers afterwards in the private sector.

Robb College

Even before graduation in 1958, Dysart was entrusted with the design of Robb College at the University of New England, requiring a dining hall, accommodation and Master’s residence. The scheme, innovative in masterplanning for implied courtyards, drew from many sources as it evolved over 5 years.

The dining hall is in basalt and concrete vaults, and the rooms were in a rectangular form comprised of alternating panels of brick and windows, surmounted by a curved concrete parapet reminiscent of the work of Le Corbusier. Sadly, latter building was demolished in 2018.

Project homes

In 1958, whilst working for the NSWGA in the design room, Michael Dysart and Ken Woolley won the Australian Woman’s Weekly Family Home competition. Fortuitously, Harry Rembert was supportive for them to continue in both roles, and key innovations in the design of project homes were the result.

It was a golden era of high quality architecture brought to project homes. Dysart and Woolley worked for the market leader, Pettit and Sevitt, jointly designing the ‘Lowline A’ and Split Level models, the prototypical houses. Dysart’s fellow designers of ‘quality mass produced housing’ included Lionel Glendenning, Nino Sydney, and Terry Dorrough.

Dysart broadened the firms he designed for to include Aspect, Habitat, and Program homes. His designs were driven by two key ideas: a better fit in the Sydney topography, and interiors reflecting new-found domestic freedoms. Whereas traditional homes, such as A V Jennings, had level floors in “boxes”, these “designer” homes had open plans, with spaces defined over split levels, with and generous sunlight, and indoor-outdoor relationships for views and interactions with the bushland of Sydney's rolling topography.

External walls were highly textured in “clinker” bricks or bagged and painted in Grecian-inspired white, inspired by the architecture of Japan and Finland’s Alvar Aalto. Skillion roofs with sloping ceilings and dark-stained exposed timber beams gave vaulted spaces, for a more natural fit in the bush settings. He encouraged building in a new way, based on Australian carpentry traditions and some of his project homes were highly detailed with brass fixtures, handmade timber towel rails and copper gutters. Dubbed “The Sydney School”, they forever influenced suburban houses.

Polish War Memorial Chapel

In 1964 Dysart displayed his versatility in form making in his design for the Polish War Memorial Chapel at Marayong in Sydney, with the “clever and memorable” building formed from a series of triangles narrowing and rising towards the steeple at the back.

Schools

Rapidly rising population in the 1960s, as well as the progressive “Wyndham Scheme” curriculum, required more and bigger schools. Dysart asked for the work, wanting to change “double-loaded corridors” of closed-up rooms into natural cross-ventilated spaces (since air conditioning was banned).

Two radically different approaches resulted: the “donut design”, single-sided rooms accessed from external corridors around an internal courtyard, for privacy and security, and shaded indoor-outdoor connections; and the “chimney” design which exhausted summer heat through towers, not for winter smoke, but ventilation.

The Department of Education opposed both ideas. Dysart sought out the bureaucrats for Friday beers in a bid to overcome their resistance, eventually getting the “donuts” approved and under
budget, to everyone except Dysart’s surprise.

He developed 43 new high schools in three years. Some won architectural awards – Taree Technical College, the Blackett in 1965 and Ryde High School was highly commended in the Sulman in 1967. Crucially, natural cross ventilation became a vital component in designing for sustainability in schools.

Teaching

In these seminal years, Dysart, with his design room colleagues, were influential teachers, acting as roving tutors at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), inspiring many, including well-known architect Bruce Eeles, who was to carry the torch of modernism forward for the next 60 years, as well as providing testament to Dysart’s teaching skill.

The UTS Tower

Dysart is best known for the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) tower, designed in 1968, and taking almost 10 years to build out the complete scheme of podium and smaller tower (now demolished). Close to the CBD, its heavy brutalist structure was often criticised, but was highly radical for its time, being the first “town and gown” project in a high-rise building.

Large column-free spaces for foyers and halls were created using a new technology of post-tensioning, using cables within concrete slabs, with end cappings expressed externally to break up the solid surfaces. The exposed aggregate concrete, or “concrete skin” as Dysart called it, reflected the colouring of Sydney sandstone, weathering better than other brutalist buildings.

Now seen as a “brutalist icon” – it is surrounded by buildings of differing styles by four “star” architects – its simple engineering aesthetics can be perceived as a strong statement of its time.

As an architectural aside, the main lecture hall was the venue for the 1980s ‘International Series’ of architect’s talks, organised by the late Professor Neville Quarry, including Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaus and Future Systems, and a particularly memorable one on ‘cartoons’ by Michael Graves.

Cooperative housing

Dysart left the NSWGA's office to form his own studio in 1969. He wanted to expand his ideas from the mainstay work with Habitat project homes into grouped housing, searching for a third way outside market based, or government built projects. Again, it was an idea from left-field: he single-handedly formed a cooperative to fund a communally minded project.

For the Baranbali cooperative in 1971 he found a site and designed a 10 storey building of 40 units near Moore Park and UNSW, close to the where he was teaching. The scheme had a commercial laundry for income, and communal areas including a kitchen and ‘gathering areas’.

Dysart's energy and skills were vital in overcoming many obstacles, including finding finance for an unusual building type, and taking over construction and finishing the project, when the builder went broke at ground level stage. The project was all sold, and Dysart embarked on another at Kareela.

The most famous of his cooperative projects were two in Canberra: 72 houses at Urambi in Kambah and 105 for the Cook-Aranda Housing Cooperative Association. Both designed and built between 1974-77, they had bush settings, with conjoined townhouses, seemingly ‘growing out of the ground’, grouped together around shared facilities, stepping down the steep sites, and retaining outlooks into the existing trees. All ideas well before time.

The schemes have communal facilities, meeting rooms with fireplaces, outdoor gathering areas, and communal gardens for growing food. All in a highly developed landscape setting designed by Dysart, that increasingly enclosed the schemes. The residents were active in the design, in one case deleting a car park area to save a grove of trees.

Despite Dysart’s connections with the brilliant planner, John Mant, who had made cooperative housing a part of the Whitlam Governments manifesto in 1972, the schemes were bitterly opposed by Canberra’s the all-powerful planning authority, the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC).

With Mant, it was Dysart’s singular skill to overcome their resistance in an appeal to Minister Tom Uren. These projects were so successful once built, that the NCDC submitted the schemes for Australian Institute of Architects Awards, which they both won.

Their significance was further recognised more recently with the award of the Roy Grounds Enduring Architecture Award for work 25 years or older. Urambi Village is now on the AIA’ Register of Nationally Significant 20th Century Architecture. You can take a virtual tour of a townhouse here. And there is an excellent article on the Cook-Aranda project here, but please note that some local indigenous people find the current naming problematical.

Woolloomooloo housing

In 1977 Dysart was commissioned to bring these medium density housing ideas to a Housing Commission redevelopment in Woolloomooloo, a legacy project of Tom Uren's intervention through the Department of Urban and Regional Development. Dysart reworked the townhouses, a familiar Sydney form reinterpreted, into a four-square plan on a much more urban site. Still standing and in continuous use, it is strong evidence of a time when there was conviction and action on public housing.

Hotels

In the 1980s, Dysart sought larger, more commercial work with his firm, Davis, Heather and Dysart (DHD), winning several commissions for hotel designs. He landed his first big fish with a new hotel at the Circular Quay end of George St - The Regent Hotel (now Four Seasons).

The design was radical in two ways: the meeting and conference rooms in the podium, usually “hidden” by being buried or obscure, were re-configured to be more prominent. Dysart described the public rooms: “The idea was to create a theatre for the people” and “The nice thing about the Regent is that it has a degree of style and elegance, but it is still accessible to people”.

And the tower was reimagined: rooms are staggered in a continuously faceted façade, windows oriented towards views, alternating with solid walls for protection against low angled sun. Every room was a corner room. As at the UTS tower, external walls are washed aggregate, this time closer in colour to the prevalent sandstone in The Rocks, its jagged form a striking outline against the sky.

Once again, Dysart was rethinking how a building would be used and how it was configured. The openness of the hotel and the quality of the rooms caused a rethink across Sydney's premier hotels: the Hilton, Menzies, Boulevard, Sheraton-Wentworth, Hyatt-Kingsgate and Gazebo scrambled to catch up. A contemporary story on Dysart’s views on the design is here.

The firm won a competition by the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority for The Old Sydney Inn, also in The Rocks. The project combined a 1920s warehouse and new buildings around a glazed atrium into a 180-room hotel. Likewise, the nearby Clocktower project combined infill buildings behind a 19th C heritage building, for which a completely different program was developed. Dysart’s firm, with 90 people at this stage, designed the Hilton Hotel in Cairns.

Other commercial projects included a competition win for the Australian Golf Club in Rosebery, a series of interlocking pyramids, designed and built in 1984-5; and a resort on St Bees Island with a 400-room hotel and 200 luxury houses, that was sold and closed in 2019.

One other project won by DHD, but rarely recorded, is Grosvenor Place, better known by Harry Seidler, brought in by SFIT (Superannuation Fund Investment Trust). Dysart and Seidler then worked together in the 80s; DHD were responsible most of the design of the reworking of the ground level Futures Stock Exchange in Naval house and Johnsons Corner, (after their retention was demanded by the Sydney Cove Authority and Sydney City Council).

And finally

Dysart bemoaned the sudden loss of work in the early 1990s that destroyed his business, from which he barely recovered. Nevertheless, small projects continued, his final project being alterations and additions to his family holiday house in Wagstaffe on the NSW central coast. This house won the AIA’ small project award in 2009. A return to, and confirmation of, his modernist roots at the age of 75, and there is a transcript of a talk on the house here.

Despite this extraordinary career, Dysart was not widely recognised outside the Sydney design cognoscenti. Yes, he was a Life Fellow of the AIA and was awarded an AM in 2013 for services to architecture, but there is no book on his work, he missed out on the AIA Gold Medal, and Graham Jahn’s Guide to Sydney Architecture omits him completely.

You catch the flavour of the man in the transcript of an excellent interview with Michael Bogle from 2011, and is this half hour illustrated talk at the Academy of Science.

Michael Dysart is survived by wife Dinah and daughter Rebecca.

• Image 1: Michael Dysart 2012 / UTS Tower 2018 (Photographer: Vanessa Couzens)
• Images 2-12: Provided by Tone Wheeler
• Note: a shorter version of this obituary was published in the Sydney Morning Herald.