Architecture

The Scots College’s new $60 million student centre has generated valid criticism, but the architecture itself has merit. By Elizabeth Farrelly.

High marks for Scots College’s new student centre building

The Scots College John Cunningham Student Centre.

Credit: Taylor

One of the great joys of pessimism is the pleasant surprise, like when that mole is not melanoma after all, or the boss tells a joke that’s actually funny. Sydney’s new, much-discussed baronial castle in Bellevue Hill – aka The Scots College John Cunningham Student Centre – is such a surprise. Privileged, yes. Elitist, blindingly. It is also, as a building, surprisingly good.

Sydney has castles. Most are clumsy and ill-proportioned, like the famous Innisfallen Castle – built in 1905 for MP Henry Willis – overlooking Sugarloaf Bay in Castle Cove. Yet however faux, squat and unscholarly, such castles are treasured as glorious eccentricities within our increasingly same-same housing-scape.

Not so the Scots castle, having drawn opprobrium from two separate directions. On the one hand is the slew of negative press that focuses largely on the JCSC’s price tag – which is, at $60 million, every bit as grandiose as its architecture. On the other is the standard professional critique, architecture being a profession that loves to despise what it sees as pastiche.

Both lines of argument are valid. During construction, and despite an annual revenue well over $100 million, Scots received some $17 million in public funding towards a building whose purpose, to enhance mental health and learning support, seems less than core. That’s the equity argument. The architectural view is predicated on the belief that architecture should strive to be authentic, whatever that means exactly. Both contentions are legit, but neither is the whole point.

Having trained in architecture, I share the profession’s reflex aversion to the fake, and the converse yearning for authenticity. I’m also on record as believing that the entire education system should be public, a view from which I do not resile. My expectations, therefore, were low. Yet I was pleasantly surprised. I like the building.

John Cockings, founder of JCA Architects, also sounds gently surprised by what he has created here. “I trained as a modern architect,” he muses. We both understand that this goes to the authenticity thing. Modernism regarded style as the devil’s work. You could be stylish. In fact it was expected. But to work in a style? That was despicable, unless of course it was the modish “international style” – the style that wasn’t.

That was the view promulgated by the “great” moderns like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe a century ago and adopted as professional orthodoxy. What’s weird is that now – despite having been ridiculed by critics such as Robert Venturi in the ’60s, declared dead in the ’70s by Charles Jencks and, in the ’80s, lampooned without mercy by Tom Wolfe and others; despite being subsequently reviled by the profession as narrow, reductivist, oppressive, universalising, humourless and monocultural – “great man modernism” is still, however tacitly, the reigning authority.

The great man theory of architecture is essentially auteurism, which almost always pivots on a central male genius, brilliant and bullish – somewhere between Kingsley Amis and Picasso – whose breathtaking originality drives all before it, inspiring the minions and sweeping away obstacles such as regulation, cost and client like so much chaff.

What’s ironic is that this unwritten thesis, founded in a rhetoric of originality, has produced a numbing, worldwide sameness. It’s why office buildings in Singapore, Dubai and Nairobi look identical; why even my visually trained master’s students cannot pick between Melbourne, Sydney and Perth waterfronts; why virtually all new dwellings now have flat roofs, open plans, minimalist decor and planar façades.

So Scots, in rejecting our synchronous world to consciously revive tradition, is in fact rebelling against orthodoxy. To mark the school’s 125th anniversary, in 2018, principal Ian Lambert sought a building that would last a century, maybe two. In a world of throwaway architecture, this in itself gets an eco tick. Similarly laudable was the school’s decision to retain rather than to demolish the undistinguished ’80s neo-brutalist library already on the site, to reinvigorate what Cockings describes as “good bones”.

Questions of context and collegiality, despised by modernism and therefore ignored by the brutalist library, also came into play. The new building would sit within a loose semicircle of low-rise school buildings that define the western flank of the Kirkland Oval rugby field. It had to play nicely, unlike its predecessor, with the middle school’s neoclassical colonnades to the south and the Italianate verandahs of Aspinall House to the north.

Instrumental to the style choice, too, was a major donation from alumnus John Cunningham, whose family goes back to the 15th century Craigends House in Renfrewshire, Scotland. That house, grandly rebuilt in the Scots baronial style in 1857 (and demolished in 1971), became the school’s inspiration.

Scots baronial, as one strand of John Ruskin’s impassioned 19th century gothic revival, synthesised Scotland’s medieval and renaissance tower houses and their later, often French-influenced additions (a result of the longstanding Scots–French alliance against the English). Typified by round towers, conical turrets, pointed gables and fine stone-mullioned windows, it reached its apotheosis in the work of Victorian architect David Bryce, who designed Craigends.

Cockings’ task wouldn’t be easy. To fit this very pointed and vertical style onto the strongly horizontal columns and slabs of the existing brutalist building was challenging in the extreme. Had he known just how challenging, he says, he might have thought differently about keeping the old.

Still, Cockings decided, “If we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly.” Already in London on a conservation course, he headed north to meet Alastair Disley, the Scots baronial authority at the University of Edinburgh.

The result is a scholarly rendering, with real stone arches (not stone-clad concrete), a circular “wheel stair” with stone treads cantilevered from the cylindrical wall, structural stone mullions two-storeys high, bronze windows, stepped lead flashings and pretty conical turrets clad in fine Welsh slate.

It may sound, and look, like a kind of Hogwarts, an intense romanticisation of school life. Then again, what’s wrong with that? Name a child who doesn’t yearn for the intricacy and ancientness embodied in J. K. Rowling’s equally scholarly reproduction of medievalism. It seems especially appropriate that this building houses the school library, a place, surely, for dreaming and imagination.

As Lambert notes, “It’s important we don’t become just functional robotic people who just use things, but we’re reflective and thoughtful and can inspire … I think that’s really important in education … [and] I hope that when I’m gone, some other crazy person will keep living that out in front of the boys.”

As to the pastiche question? That’s all about what we mean by “fake”. The Scots baronial of the 19th century was already a fake of earlier styles – as was all of the classicism of the time (fake renaissance, and all renaissance as fake Roman or Athenian). As, of course, is every traditional building in Australia.

Traditional architecture simply reflects a desire for the authority of the canons and a respect for accumulated wisdom on building, weatherproofing, environmental response and place making, which is why traditional buildings are so often nicer to be near. But if everything that draws on the past is fake, another word for it may be just “sensible”.

That leaves us with the question of equity. Yes, it is an expensive building. Its messaging, further, reinforces the authority of lineage and the confidence that comes with wealth and permanence. There’s nothing wrong with this – except that our wealthy nation restricts it to the ultra-rich.

My view is that education isn’t just about equity. It’s also our key to culture-building. Nothing is more important. Our system, therefore, should offer such education to, and instil such confidence in, every child, free.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 5, 2025 as "Deliberately baron".

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