Wunderlich Ltd was one of Australia’s most significant building companies creating architectural elements for many Sydney buildings including the Sydney Town Hall and the terracotta facade of the Commonwealth Bank in Martin Place. Over the lifespan of the company, Wunderlich produced materials in many styles including ornate Neoclassical Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Gothic designs, often being ahead of movements and trends. To this day many Australian homes still have Wunderlich stamped metal ceilings intact.
By the 1950s and 60s, however, changes in design and production had led to a decline in the company’s fortunes and in 1969 Wunderlich was taken over by CSR Building Products. In 1979 CSR sold the company’s factory in Redfern, with all the original buildings set to be demolished. In November that same year, the company gave the Museum $20,000 to rescue the collection of the Wunderlich factory before it was lost forever.
Most of the artefacts in the Museum’s Wunderlich collection came from the spectacular Art Deco showroom created by the company in 1929. This was one of the first substantial Art Deco interiors ever built in Australia, featuring a clerestory supported by eight massive pillars in glazed architectural terracotta. The Museum employed the assistance of industrial archaeologists to help preserve and document the site before its demolition. The archaeologists were racing the bulldozers to preserve what was left of the site and worked quickly to save anything they could, including the eight terracotta columns.
As the then director John Wade described: ‘Under the walls and ceilings of the 1920s showroom, team members found a treasury of Art Deco, including tiled columns capped with copper, pressed metal ceilings above low slung acoustic ceilings and, outside the showroom almost hidden by a display of roofing tiles were walls ornamented with terracotta medallions and elegant brick work.’ Examples of all these architectural components were saved by the team, along with numerous catalogues and architectural plans.
Unfortunately, limited resources at the time meant that after the urgent rescue mission the collection went into storage where it remained uncatalogued and difficult to access. Now almost 30 years later it is again being worked on as part of the Museum’s Total Asset Management Project. Currently one of the biggest jobs for Museum staff is to sort through the 600 terracotta tiles that made up the columns in the Art Deco showroom, and to solve the giant jigsaw puzzle of putting them back together. One of the columns was in part reassembled for the international Art Deco exhibition shown in Melbourne last year.
This project has not only ensured the collection is properly conserved, it has also given a new insight into a great Australian company whose designs help to tell the story of the stylistic and social changes in Sydney through the 19th and early 20th centuries.