Most of you will probably notice the Hornet on the truck first. Johannes and Bryce might initially be drawn to the truck itself. For me it’s the building behind; my hometown favourite.
The Toorak/South Yarra Library. Toorak Black.
Billy Thorpe was a seminal figure in Ozrock’s coming of age. I’m not so much a fan of his music, but towards the end of his life he wrote two highly readable memoirs; ‘Sex and Thugs and Rock’n’Roll’ – an extraordinary true tale of music and murder in Kings Cross in the 1960s, and ‘Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy)’ – the followup chock full of hilarious anecdotes.
Thorpe takes a pew in the automotive hall of fame for one of these anecdotes.
In 1965, a 19 year-old Billy walked into British and Continental Motors in William Street, Sydney, after having seen a red Aston Martin DB4 GT through the window. He made an offer on the car, and was of course snubbed by the sales staff. So he went to the bank, withdrew £8,000 in cash and returned to the dealership.
He drove home from British and Continental to retrieve some clothes then straight onto Brisbane, some 900 kms north. At 8:45am the next morning, he guided the DB4 through the gates of his old school Salisbury High, smoked the quadrangle with its rear wheels in front of 1,800 students then sped off while flipping the bird to his former headmaster who had told him he’d never amount to anything.
By the early 1970s Thorpe has moved to Melbourne and taken a house in Hawksburn Road, South Yarra.
One day, a dope tree about ten feet tall and six feet in diameter found its way to the house. It yielded four briefcase-sized blocks of hash. This concoction was duly named Toorak Black for its dense colouring and for the suburb next to South Yarra sitting just up the road.
The resin needed curing, but with a tour booked the house would be vacant. So the booty was instead buried around the corner on a block of land that had been vacant for years.
Billy went away for six weeks.
When he returned to the vacant block, instead of his stash Billy Thorpe found a giant hole being filled by the Toorak/South Yarra Library.
The Toorak/South Yarra Library is a clumsily-named architectural masterpiece.
Its design was led by local resident Barry Patten of the firm Yuncken Freeman. The structure is essentially two flat rectangular planes; with floor to ceiling glass curtains uninterrupted around all four sides apart from thin I-beam girders holding the roof aloft.
Its avowed minimalism belies a genuinely humanist space.
This is how I remember it in the late 1970s when visiting for my fix of Tintin and Asterix. I can still feel its soft warm energy in memory.
The use of red here might seem counter-intuitive, but it was very adroitly applied. The intensity of the hue was superbly balanced by the extra generous headspace.
To the credit of its custodians, this building has not suffered in the subsequent years nor has its amenity altered. The plan is unchanged; an uninterrupted U-shaped space around a large entrance. To the right is the study area, the left the children’s space and downstairs the servicing. It’s just a little bit more cluttered now.
Tragically, the red is gone.
I walk past Toorak Black daily.
And it can make a superb setting for the occasional curbside classic parked out front. Like this lovely E30 BMW. A smart shape, even in four-door. A leap in styling sophistication over its E21 predecessor.
The great thing about these C107s is that they are yet to fully emerge from sportscar beater status and seeing patinated examples is still the rule not the exception. This one I see a lot.
My preferred Boxster, but not a preferred Porsche. This is the first gen with the 996 nose and fried eggs and I think it’s the best of its breed. For me, the more modern this model becomes, the more it looks like a Toyota.
Loved seeing this so much, I going to run an AMC piece next.
I always thought I’d be happy with just a Sportabout, but I’ve caught a superb four door which has me thinking I need to own both.
Come Christmastime, the windows join the party.
Plenty of 105 coupés around here and this one I see the most. I spoke to its driver once, and she really didn’t come across as an enthusiast. This was just the car her husband has given her to use. I get the impression she does like driving it though.
This window dressing is a recent thing, and I’m not a fan. I get it because first and foremost it’s acting as a sunshade on the north-facing entrance.
But the image chosen is entirely underwhelming.
The council recently used the library as a base to gather demographic and qualitative information about the suburb and its residents.
This council also happens to have one of the most magnificent messaging boards in the world.
Bring these statistics to life on the face of this building.
This example is from Herwig Scherabon, a model depicting household values in London. Not that you’d have to understand its social message straightaway.
In the first instance, it’s just a great graphic pattern far more in keeping with its canvas.
Toorak Black is ageless. There is no fatigue in the facade at all; no peeling corners or pockets of decay. It exudes a material integrity missing in today’s swathe of cladding and veneer. It can be impenetrably impermeable, or it can reveal a resinous translucency in the low winter sun.
Its capacity to influence its surroundings does have its limits, though. For example, it simply cannot forgive this Jaguar XJC its chrome wheelarches.
My second best get is this Velar. Everything in the shot conspired to make it work including the clean overcast lightbox and the sensuous surfacing.
My best get so far. Magic hour during winter, when dusk overlaps with opening hours and the ceiling is called in to help fight the dying of the light.
This building is so magic, it can forgive a whaletail on a narrow body 911.
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Further Reading
The twincam jewel inside the Alfa Romeo 105 Coupe
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I share your love with minimalist design done well. And this one was. As well as your write-up.
I invariably feel good in a well done building like this. I’m sure it’s a combination of inherent impact these buildings have as well as the fact that they were (sort of) the new thing when I was a kid, hence my association of them being “better”, as I tended to see new as better then.
Thanks for the backstory, especially its name. Very amusing.
Always been a fan of the Hornet sedan. Yes, the Sportback is nice, but not as distinctive and unique as the sedan. I was quite smitten when I first saw it. Wow! A Rambler? Who would have thought?
Too bad they cut it down into the Gremlin. But that was worth the laughs too.
This building is really lucky. It’s built across a park and flanked by side streets so there will be no building up around it. I imagine to some its just a large black box, but it has the blessing of the National Trust which helps.
The Sirius Building in Sydney is from the same period – more brutalist but just as humanist as Toorak Black, more so really. It didn’t manage to earn that same blessing. Probably because it was low-rent housing with high-income views
What an outstanding public building. And I’m quite impressed how it’s managed to survive essentially unaltered – both on the interior and exterior.
The building itself looks like it was designed specifically for that long, low and silver Mercedes SLC to park in front of it.
I agree with you about the window graphics, particularly on a building where the windows, and the openness they convey are the main design element. The industrial-themed decal (whatever it is) looks plain yucky… the housing-values graphic design is a much better fit, but still the building is better without. Consider yourselves fortunate though – here in the US a library using a set of window decals would probably choose giant images of Dora the Explorer or the Dog Man cartoon series instead.
I wouldn’t mind Dora or Dog Man. Better than an oil refinery.
Pretty sure those Hornets got assembled in South Melbourne by AMI alongside the Toyotas of the era I had one of the Toyotas a 71 Corona sans the virus it was a good car but no Ramblers.
They were locally assembled, but only the four door sedans with the big six/automatic – typical Australia! From the road tests I read, they’d have been a hard sell against the local big three, and you didn’t see a lot of them around.
Great read and the building has aged very well. Amazing the variety of cars you captured. Off topic slightly .. IMHO Aussie rockers do not get enough credit. I was turned on to Mental as Anything, the Saints, the Church, Hoodoo Gurus and Cold Chisel in the 80’s by a college friend who’s sister did foreign study and game back with musical booty . The black and white “mountain” pattern is eerily similar to goth rockers Joy Division Unknown Pleasures album cover from 1979.
Yep, thought of this cover when I picked the art.
Going further off topic, but carrying the Oz rock theme to the last decade, I sent a couple of Rogue Traders CDs to a mate in America, and he had one stolen from the CD player in his truck when it was in for a service! He asked me to get him another…..
And my daughter had Billy Thorpe’s “Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy)” as her theme song at her high school graduation. Staff begged with her to choose something else, but she stood her ground! Crazy? No, but just different enough that people who got to know her would notice it (Asperger’s Syndrome).
Nice choice Pete
The Church is one of the best bands ever…period, not just Australian.
I thought that Rambler on the truck was a gun metal Fiat 130 coupe at first glance.
I see that, they share the same sharp thick c-pillars. Caught this one with primer over its rear arches.
I prefer the calm old red library to the frenetic updates, too. The green Alfa’s my favorite car of the bunch.
Great building, even greater write-up. Love the red and white interior – reminds me of upmarket early 1980s JDM sedans. I’m an outlier here, but I really like the industrial window graphic; reminds me of 60s space-age posters. The Velar looks magnificent against the building but provokes an interesting thought: the building is timeless, doesn’t need to change and hadn’t really been changed; the Velar is also timeless but fashion will no doubt dictate changes that it doesn’t need and it may end up losing its timelessness to become just another SUV.
They’ve done timeless classic already. The new ones look good new; how good they’ll look when they’re not new….
CC effect. I spotted a very well worn and original looking Hornet on the freeway this morning. It was a glorious shade of 70’s brown. We are only about 25 miles from Kenosha, but I don’t think I’ve seen a Hornet on the road in 20 years. He merged in front of me and slipped into traffic. I really wanted to get a picture, but I was alone and didn’t think it would be safe.
So… did anyone ever find the hash?
I feel as if have just attended a witty evening lecture and drinks at the National Gallery, enlivened by a slide show of photo compositions. I raise my glass of champers to you. I have been enlightened.
The black-and-white night photo is enlightening most of all. It gives the strongest sense of what you are describing as the intent of the building.
As for the red interior, I can smell that photo. ’70’s nylon carpets, warmth and a spacey glow from the fluorescent roof, books to find, the excitement of an evening trip to our ’70’s library as a little kid.
You almost convince me that I like the Trak library, till outside in the chilly night air, I remember that I don’t.
Mies van de Rohe inflicted much severity on city landscapes internationally, perhaps expecting swoons, but getting them only from the architects and enlightened. I do understand and enjoy great functionality in good modernist architecture, where structure is visible and is all that holds things up, without cladding “hiding” the real pillars or arches or somesuch. It is very much the case here: the span inside is very large. But the forbidding black steel and transparency is so at odds with the messiness of our real lives, and houses. I couldn’t study in a machine for living.
And it is a design language so easily misused, the cheap knock-off happily adopted by the developer for its per-sq-metre minimalism. It is misused to this very day. Perhaps it that corruption which has diluted the alchemy that you are still able to see.
Or perhaps, dear Don, they unwittingly built the furnace underneath atop Billy’s hash, and the warmth inside has long come with its own special effect for frequent visitors when it was till quite new?
For the interest of CCer’s, the same Melbourne firm who designed this also built an underground bunker of a building for the central Catholic archdiocese, so it could be said they unwittingly dug up some hash and intentionally buried some bishops in (almost) the same year. Depending on your politics, a good thing, and, depending on your politics, a good thing if the reverse had happened.
The Velar for me, failing which, a Velar – from 1970. The Porsche photo is for sure the best one, and that infernal spoiler on every one in the ’80’s could be digitally retired.
Up with your very best posts, Proff.
While I am more of a pre-war building kind of guy, I must admit that this one was very nicely done and has aged quite well.
And you remind me how attractive the 2 door Hornet was. Was that the most perfectly styled vehicle ever to come from AMC. And a weird thought – there is more than a little 1963 Chrysler evident in that profile shot. Exner Lives!
An enjoyable tour!
Great article! Pity most American children will never hear of Asterix though.
Thanks for this. I somehow missed that when I spent a year in Melbourne in 1986-1987, Toorak and area were too posh for this impecunious visitor back then.
Oh, Mr Turtle, it is too posh for this impecunious Melbourne resident in 2020 – why, I can’t even afford to DRIVE down Toorak Rd as my bank account is too low – but am just humbled we get reports from the palace of Professor Dr Don Andreina of what is happening there.
Hahaha. By the way, there’s even a “Toorak Tractor” in one of the pics:)