Perth Council House

Jeffery Howlett, Architect.

1960.

1-29 St Georges Terrace, Perth WA 6000

Council House, the home of the City of Perth since 1963, arose from a competition held in 1959. The building has engendered controversy and acclaim, becoming in its subsequent 50 year history an iconic building for Perth. Despite providing an excellent example of Modernist office design; in the mid 1990s the State Government pushed to demolish the building, saying it did not fit within a proposed ‘heritage’ plan for the area. A spirited campaign by architects spearheaded a public debate about what was considered heritage. This inspired within the community a desire to save the building. The campaign was successful and Council staff returned to the refurbished building in 1999. Council House now occupies a special place in the heart of many West Australians and was entered on the State Heritage Register in 2006.

One of the most distinctive elements of the building is the pattern of T-shaped sunshades placed uniformly against the four glazed walls of the building. According to Lindsay Waller there was only one possible dimension that would allow the Ts to go around the corner and repeat themselves. This dimension was arrived at empirically and was set out by Waller after numerous geometric experiments. The result is an apparently floating cage of Ts creating a continuous mat of  sunscreen which folds seamlessly around the corners of the building. They perform an additional role as fire isolating spandrels between the floors.

John Calegari worked as the Foreman for JB Hawkins & Son, and oversaw the construction of Council House, from the first day of surveying until the last day of final maintenance in 1964: ‘Perhaps the most exacting job I had was attaching about 460 ‘T’s to the building. The Ts had been made in the Monier factory and were then covered in small mosaic tiles. A big crane put each T in place. Jim Taylor and I spent 7 months balancing on a plank, chocking each T in place while the labourers cemented them in. It was my job to make sure each one was lined up perfectly. Each day I had to check this using a piano wire attached to an outrigger on top of the building, with a hundred kilo lead weight in a 44-gallon drum of water, at the base of the building.'

As sunshades, the shallow Ts cannot be regarded as highly effective. However, as a modern filigree, a crisp carapace of sparkling abstract figures, the Ts bestow on the building a civic and celebratory demeanour that emphatically lifts the building from the banality of many contemporaneous office buildings. 

In the early 1990s, after just 30 years of life, Council House was earmarked for demolition by the State Government, its consultants, and the City of Perth, with the neighbouring colonial buildings proposed to remain in a newly refurbished ‘Heritage Precinct’ as part of Premier Richard Court’s vision for Perth.21 The WA Chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) aggressively opposed the plan to demolish Council House. This may seem paradoxical after its predecessors argued equally forcefully that it not be built on its site. The issue for the RAIA moved on from that of site selection and became the protection and acknowledgment of a key part of Perth’s recent past; its most celebrated modern building. The RAIA joined with CityVision, a voluntary urban advocacy group, and other concerned citizens to argue against the demolition. Their arguments embraced a view of heritage which recognised that heritage buildings were not only from the distant past but were being created on a daily basis as the ‘heritage of tomorrow’ and were reliant on their distinctive qualities and cultural importance. Council House clearly had such qualities, as recognised by experts external to the state and local governments.

for more information visit: 

https://www.perth.wa.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/50%20Years%20Council%20House.pdf