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Architect Peter Lonergan remembers riding the space-age external lift that rose 13 levels to a rooftop restaurant on the curved BMA Chatswood skyscraper designed by migrant architect Hugo Stossel.
“I went up and down a few times with a view to nowhere and my stomach in my mouth,” he said of the 1970s curved commercial block at 815 Pacific Highway, also known as the Panorama building.
A proposal is now being considered by the state’s fast-tracking panel to demolish the building to create what will be the tallest building in Chatswood.
The news has unleashed a wave of “those were the days” memories – and hopes that it might be saved.
For Lonergan, who grew up on the north shore in this era, the building with its rooftop Chinese-style Moon Terrace restaurant was the closest they came to a lunar landing.
View from the north of the Panorama building at 815 Pacific Highway designed by Hugo Stossel in Chatswood.Credit: City of Sydney Archives John Ward Collection
Stossel mania, though, has grown after social media posts by the Northshore Lorikeet and others. Hundreds of people recalled first dates at the rooftop restaurant, trying fried ice-cream for the first time, and the exciting lift ride that featured in a 1970s Go Lotto advertisement.
“It was WOW for a bright-eyed boy from the bush,” wrote one. “I remember the lift and thinking of the movie The Towering Inferno,” wrote another recalling a visit in 1975.
Thanks to research by heritage consultant Rebecca Hawcroft, the city’s go-to expert on modern European architects who migrated to Australia, and a dissertation by architect Paul Georgiades, interest in the Hungarian-born modernist architect’s work has been revived over the past decade.
Architect Paul Georgiades at the Chatswood tower.Credit: Oscar Colman
Born in Hungary but trained in Rome and Vienna, Stossel came to Australia as a refugee from Nazism in 1939. He was an experienced architect before he arrived, having trained in Vienna and Rome and gaining a “good exposure to European modernism”, Hawcroft said.
Hawcroft included Stossel in her 2017 book The Other Moderns, about migrant architects like Harry Seidler, Hugh Buhrich, Hans Peter Oser, Paul Kafka, a master cabinetmaker, and others. Until then, he was very much under the radar, she said.
She has been working with Woollahra Council to identify modern buildings worth saving. Two of Stossel’s in Darling Point, including Broadwaters, 1957, and Yarranabbe Gardens, 1958, are now up for local heritage listing along with works by Seidler, Buhrich, and Douglas Snelling.
Sydney City Council has also proposed listing another two of Stossel’s apartment blocks in Elizabeth Bay, Bayview 41-49 Roslyn Gardens and St Ursula at 5 Onslow Avenue. Meanwhile, a Stossel-designed block of units in Potts Point will be demolished for fewer high-end apartments.
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Hawcroft said: “Before I did my book, nobody knew his work. Although he had designed so many buildings, nobody had joined the dots.”
The Chatswood building is not heritage listed, and if demolished will make way for a 263-metre high 61-storey mixed development, likely including a neighbouring block at 15 Help Street. The property is owned by a trust, directed by Lesli Berger who runs the commercial property company Fivex.
Hawcroft said it would be difficult to argue to retain the BMA Building, given it hadn’t been fully occupied for some time and the need for new housing.
“But the outpouring of memories from so many people show how important buildings can be for people even when not great examples of architecture,” she said.
Georgiades grew up in a Stossel designed home, and says some of Stossel’s residential designs are worth saving. As for the Panorama building, Georgiades said it was a second-rate version of the heritage-listed 1962 AMP Building in Sydney. It fell short of his best work, including the apartment blocks currently being considered for heritage listing.
It would be difficult to reuse the facade, and repurpose the building. “It’s got to go,” said Georgiades who flew to Vienna to interview Stossel after he had retired.
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Lonergan, whose practice won a 2024 architecture heritage award for its update of a 1957 home by Bill and Ruth Lucas, agreed with Georgiades.
The Panorama was “pretty mediocre at best” and difficult and expensive for adaptive reuse.