The Realisation of the Sydney Technical College and Technological Museum, 1878-92 Aspects of their Cultural Significance

Previous explanations of the architectural style of the Sydney Technical College (1891) and Technological Museum (1892) have attributed their design to the emerging influence of the American Romanesque and the architecture of Henry Hobson Richardson. This paper argues differently: the designs by William E. Kemp, Architect to the New South Wales Department of Public Instruction, drew heavily upon ideas that had originated at the Sydney International Exhibition via the display of Alfred Waterhouse's drawings of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and upon other information conveyed by Professor Archibald Liversidge. The pair of polychrome brick and terracotta buildings broke from the classical sandstone traditions and incorporated Australian imagery. Their cultural significance and heritage value derives both from their break with tradition and from the tangle of social, political and economic issues that marked the fourteen-year period from their inception in 1878, when the New South Wales Government voted (sic) 2,000 to establish a Technical or Workingman's College, to their completion in 1892.