John Perry, Associate Principal at fjcstudio, will present the creative partnership of Pier Luigi Nervi and Harry Seidler in realising one of Sydney’s most influential modern buildings, Australia Square. He will trace Nervi’s “Sistema Nervi,” material, mould and repetition, and its alignment with structural art’s efficiency, economy and elegance, framing the tower’s breakthroughs.

The talk highlights the design and construction decisions that defined the project: achieving lateral stability without external columns, developing coffered exhibition-floor slabs, and advancing a precast strategy for columns and floors that enabled large-scale buildability. These were not just aesthetic gestures but the architecture itself: form, structure and method resolved as one.

John will also reflect on Seidler’s accounts of how Nervi shaped both concepts and execution, showing how their first-principles thinking and pragmatic construction produced a building that remains technically rigorous and visually compelling 70 years later.