A decade-long appetite for shimmering glass towers is giving way to heavier and more tactile materials, with architectural practices now reaching for brick, concrete, stone and rammed earth in buildings designed to stand for a century. That is according to property publication Domain, which cited climate urgency and fatigue with glass curtain walling as the forces opening the way for a more durable architecture, one in which engineered timber and hybrid construction could emerge as ways to deliver the qualities long associated with masonry.
One project already testing that thinking is SJB’s Surry Hills Village, which pairs an exposed mass timber frame with a mottled brick exterior, a contemporary reading of the warehouse character of the inner-Sydney precinct. Emily Wombwell, a director at SJB, said the commercial building had been conceived as a robust yet flexible structure in which timber carries the internal expression whilst brick holds it to its surroundings.
“Brick is everywhere in that part of the city,” Wombwell said.
The retreat from glass is partly a reckoning with craft, according to Peter Miglis, a director at Woods Bagot, who argues that prefabricated curtain wall systems have produced skylines of sheer, anonymous glass at the expense of material depth. Where a single trade can assemble a glass facade, he said, a building loses the layering of skill and intent that gives it character.
“Now there’s a yearning for solid buildings that age with grace,” Miglis said.
Heavier materials also carry a performance argument, because masonry and concrete hold significant thermal mass — the capacity to absorb, store, and slowly release heat through the day.
Patrick Nolan of Kennedy Nolan said thermal comfort in masonry buildings could be achieved with far less energy than in fully glazed or lightweight structures, provided the design accounted for orientation, shading and ventilation. The environmental case is more complicated, however, because concrete carries a high embodied carbon cost that the sector has yet to resolve through fly ash and alternatives to Portland cement.
Mass timber is where Nolan looks for a way through, suggesting that if timber or hybrid construction could match masonry’s structural and cultural offerings, the result would be genuine newness in the architectural cycle.
Whether engineered timber takes on that role more widely remains an open question, though projects such as Surry Hills Village show that timber and masonry already share structural and expressive work rather than compete for it. Nolan said demand for heavy buildings appeared to be long-lasting and that a change in architecture was both inevitable and welcome.
“It would be difficult to justify returning to fully glazed facades,” he said.
