In 2020 the Italian magazine “Domus” published an article by Tommaso Piccioli on “Sydney School, the virtuous case of Australian modernism”
Born as a spontaneous movement between the 1950s and 1980s, it produced a particular type of architecture halfway between vernacular, brutalist and modernist, in the beautiful setting of the Australian bush.
In the history of modern Australian architecture, the period from the 1950s to the 1980s saw the emergence of the phenomenon referred to as the “Sydney School”.
The name reflects the understanding that a certain set of buildings and architects, mainly confined to the Sydney region, displayed distinctive design choices that were driven by the natural environment and employed simple, ‘minimally processed’, low-cost materials. While there continues to be a discussion of the Sydney School in Australian architectural scholarship and the professional press, there have been few attempts to comprehensively survey and consistently identify the scope of this school as an architectural movement.