Why this Sydney office block should make you feel like dancing

“Imagine you are dancing in the space.” That’s the advice from John James, the 94-year-old mastermind of the Reader’s Digest building in Surry Hills, to the Sydney architects who are finalising the $23 million update of his 1960s design.

James, limber from years of yoga, doesn’t take much encouragement to show us what he means.

“I like to dance, in space and in my mind,” he says at a meeting in the Surry Hills office of architects SJB, up the hill from the Reader’s Digest building on Waterloo Street.

He stands up, his hands curl, his legs and arms curve, and his light green Thai shot silk shirt picks up the colour of his eyes.

Just as his building embodied the “plasticity of concrete”, as 2024 gold medallion architecture winner Philip Thalis put it, James’ dancing seemed to defy the stiffness age can bring.

James designed the building when he was 33. It was an age of peak creativity for him, he says, and many artists, such as Michelangelo, when he painted the Sistine Chapel.

The headquarters of the Reader’s Digest publishing house in Sydney took four years to complete. Its opening in November 1967 also marked the end of James’ 14-year career as an architect.

“Domestic architecture was a let-down compared to this, and there was nothing in the offing that was like it. And the Digest was unfashionable in the era of glass boxes,” he said. “Nobody else liked my building.”

Today, people love it or hate it, or at least find it something to argue about. In 2016, it won NSW’s enduring architecture prize which recognised the design by James, sculptures by Douglas Annand and rooftop garden by Bruce Mackenzie.

SJB’s principal Adam Haddow admires its “beautilism”, a play on the Brutalist style mixed with Gothic that some say is fugly.

Back then, though? “They shrugged their shoulders,” James said. “Eccentric,” they called him and the building.

James went on to have many careers, too varied for more than a Reader’s Digest abridged version.

Widowed after his wife of 72 years Hilary, 95, died six months ago, James, now living in Bega on NSW’s south coast, came to Sydney in December to talk about his last hurrah in architecture.

He showed no bitterness, only delight at being asked to give his feedback on the adaptive reuse project by Haddow and architect Matthew Byrnes of Design 5 – Architects.

They are working to transform the 4200 square metre heritage-listed building into a “honey pot for creative activity” in Surry Hills, Haddow said. A de facto Town Hall for Surry Hills, they hope.

James encourages the architects to be playful, to add colour, curves and the unexpected.

“We were nervous about going too organic with this,” said Haddow, also national president of the Australian Institute of Architects. “So if you are saying you are happy for us to play with it, we’re happy to play.”

SJB interior designer Charlotte Wilson said they wanted to encourage collaboration among the tenants and opportunities for chance encounters.

James replied that walking down a corridor was more than a journey. It was an adventure. “It needs to be bent with a patch of deeper red in unexpected corners to create excitement,” he said, referring to the original design.

Think of the design as like an Aladdin’s Cave, he urged, “not a shopping mall”.

It was the first office building in Sydney built to house a computer; in those days, the machine took up an entire floor. The building included a viewing window from the main entrance, so everyone could watch.

Its brutalist concrete exteriors contrasted with interiors that had fountains, 1960s pops of colour, gardens, soaring ceilings, modernistic light fittings and Mackenzie’s roof garden.

James had insisted on the gardens to “enliven the dreary offices of those days” and bring some green to the then working-class suburb.

Annand’s anthropomorphic sculptures were nearly its undoing. When a prudish American Reader’s Digest executive visited the near-completed building, he was appalled and told James to take them down or be fired. Many of the sculptures were hidden for decades and will now be placed in their rightful spots.

James’ design was like nothing else seen in Australia, a bit like the man himself.

He recalled a visit by a jury of the NSW Institute of Architects sometime in the early 1970s.

“I showed them the building. I talked about proportions, and the humanist philosophy of the building, we walked through the corridors and at the end, the only question the architects asked was, ‘What was specification of the white concrete you used?’”

He was devastated. “I had done my dream. I was getting caught up with small people, small minds, and there was nothing in the offing that was coming around that was at least like it. The people who worked there loved it and felt at home there.”

‘Designing is not a 9-5 process. It’s all day, in dreams and in the wastelands.’

John James

He attributed employees’ happiness to his use of the Fibonacci sequence, with forms that reflect the flow of water and the growth of trees. “It reflects all that is natural around us. I do believe that people love that building because they recognise the truth in that philosophy.”

Disappointed, the family left Australia for Europe. They spent five years living in the grounds of Chartres Cathedral, France, and James documented the secrets behind medieval cathedrals in a dozen books, including Master Masons of Chartres.

“When you examine the cathedral closely, you discover to your immense surprise that the design is not a well-controlled and harmonious entity, but a mess. We tend to think of a great work of art like Chartres as having been thought through to the end before it was begun.”

Returning to Australia, in between dozens of academic lectures around the world, the Jameses became therapists, pioneering a technique where adults place small objects in a tray of sand.

James said, “The choices display our unconscious desires and needs. It is the best tool we have to heal trauma. It is architecture of the mind.”

At the meeting at SJB, James’ former student and architect Peter Lonergan said many people did not understand the depth of creativity and thought that architects invested in their work. “To be pushed away is really, really hurtful,” Lonergan told the meeting. “What you’re doing today with John, reconnecting with John, I think it’s so important, it’s respectful, it’s the right thing to do.”

James urged the architects to break out of the straight edges and rigid spaces.

“The building requires more than that,” he said. “It is perfect for dreamers (artists too) but as designed the interior is just a collection of square boxes.

“To overcome that I would need to sit with the designers and spend days talking and fantasising until greatness emerged. With walks on the beach and irrelevant and funny films to break up the energy. Designing is not a 9-5 process. It’s all day, in dreams and in the wastelands.”

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