Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:
The former Sands & McDougall building facade is an outstanding and early example of Art Deco architecture in South Australia. The facade is highly intact and demonstrates many of the key attributes of the style, including vertical form; concentration of ornamentation at the top of the building; and stylised decorations made from coloured-pressed Portland cement, copper panels, and metal grilles to the upper storey windows. The Art Deco remodelling of the facade transformed the nineteenth century classical building, eschewing the past and expressing optimism for the future.
The first and oldest surviving art deco façade in South Australia was saved in 2020 from being obliterated by a 15-storey office block project for King William Street, Adelaide city.
A backlash and official intervention meant the Sands and McDougall building frontage and canopy was incorporated within a three-storey podium on King William Street, providing an entry to the office tower.
The Sands and McDougall façade was designed in 1933 by Adelaide architects Philip Claridge, Lionel Gregor Bruer and Norman G. Fisher for the Melbourne stationer, bookseller, printer and account book manufacturing firm that set up an office in South Australia in 1882. The façade for the 1933 building, that housed a printing press, had geometrical patterns, shells and circular motifs on the parapet, fluted panels between the windows, and metal grilles on the second floor windows.
Australian developer Charter Hall lodged plans with the State Commission Assessment Panel (SCAP) in July 2020 to bulldoze the Southern Cross Arcade and neighbouring Sands and McDougall building to make way for a 15-storey office tower with ground-floor retail space. In August 2020, the South Australian Heritage Council decided to provisionally list the building at 64 King William Street from local heritage to a state heritage place, describing its “highly intact” façade as an “outstanding and early example of art deco architecture in South Australia”.
Adelaide city council confirmed it would not support demolishing the Sands and McDougall building – regardless of whether its state heritage listing was confirmed. South Australian government environment minister David Speirs then rejected a request from Charter Hall to intervene in a Heritage Council decision and fast tracked the listing of the Sands and McDougall building’s façade and canopy onto the state’s heritage register: “It’s my view that the developer didn’t place enough significance on the status of local heritage listing.” Art Deco and Modernism Society’s Adelaide chapter president David O’Loughlin, also president of the Australian Local Government Association, was “absolutely delighted” by Speirs’ decision.
Under new design for the building, by Cox Architecture, the newly state-heritage-listed Sands and McDougall building façade was incorporated into the new building design. The architects sought to “provide a sense of the former footprint of the (Sands and MacDougall) building within the entrance foyer” by including a lounge area directly behind the retained façade. The façade would be activated with a new entrance door visible both from outside and within the foyer. The podium treatment along King William Street was lifted to three storeys next to the heritage façade.
It was acknowledged that the “heritage façade and canopy will form a prominent entrance to the office tower and will ultimately assist in providing a level of recognition and identity to the office tower above.”
