Big in Melbourne

Architectural Review, The, March, 1997 by Michael Spens

In Melbourne there was a surge of high building in the 1980s, when 'big' meant up to 60 storeys or thereabouts. The inhabitants of Melbourne first abhorred the concept, then grew to like the way the most elegant, the Rialto, glimmered and flickered in the fickle Melbourne weather. By then Collins Street was changed forever anyway. The towers clustered around the Central Business District were visible a long way off, over the undulating landscape that provides a carpet for Melbourne's suburbs. A relationship then occurred between centre and suburban realm that has the simple diagrammatic meaning of the city crown.

Now the part-developers of the Rialto, Grollo, have appointed Denton Corker Marshall to design a single, Big Building, bringing the whole ensemble to a dramatic climax with a planned 137-storey tower, in the millennial mode of today. This however has to be the ultimate tower, and terminates Collins Street with a massive extension to the harbour edge. The Melbourne Tower will be the ultimate monument in a city of monuments.

DCM's Melbourne Tower, as proposed, is a silver-blue, light-reflective obelisk tapering elegantly to its summit from its formally landscaped shoreside base. Here it is rooted in the antithesis of a podium: a 35m high open parkscape, where ordered ranks of trees, as with Melbourne's renowned boulevards, emphasise the simple grandeur of the eight massive columns (four pairs) which thrust down through an eight-level cylindrical car park to the bedrock below.

In planning terms, the building is essentially three superimposed towers, each of which is separated by triple level sky lobbies, served direct by shuttle lifts. Tower One (Offices) has three banks of double-deck lifts from the ground lobby: express lifts go to Sky Lobby One, at the base of Tower Two. Here, access is given on to three banks of six lifts. Tower Three (Hotel) is served by four shuttle lifts. The Hotel and related apartments are themselves reachable by four shuttle lifts, rising from their separate lobby at ground level, plus two shuttle lifts for the apartments. The Hotel itself has a complete and fully equipped conference and business centre, plus 17 levels of accommodation providing up to 350 hotel rooms. Above Tower Three are two multi-level sky lobbies with public observation areas (a Melbourne innovation since the 1980s), and shopping and restaurant/ recreational facilities. The climax of the building is the soaring Light Pinnacle. This glazed structure, 111 m tall, is stacked with telecommunications and satellite equipment. The very summit is tipped with an open panorama deck, accessed by internal lifts from Sky Lobby Three. Like a contemporary Eiffel Tower, this could be one of the great experiences of the twenty-first century.

An appealing characteristic of the Melbourne Tower is the absolute clarity of its elegantly tapering structure. As John Denton's diagrams show, the core, rising from an independent pad at bedrock level, is strengthened by transfer slabs at intermediate points above. The four pairs of corner columns rest on independent pads at bedrock level. A glass skin is layered over the face of the perimeter structure so created, extending two metres beyond on all four faces. The perimeter frame of the tower is simply structured with four ladders transferring diagonal loads through to the corner columns at the plantroom levels.

The structural clarity will be evident from long distances, as expressed by the paired columns and the diagonal bracing trusses at plantroom levels. The corner condition is further enhanced at the climacteric level above Tower Three by the public observation lifts externally tracked on each corner of the building, between the paired columns as they reach the summit Pinnacle. This Pinnacle acts as a great beacon glowing by day and night, far out to sea, to Tullamarine Airport, or the outlying communities in the Dandenong hills, at Geelong, or Mornington and the Heads at the entrance to Port Phillip Bay.

After the clambering excesses of the 1980s, it might be claimed that Melbourne could not readily accommodate further high buildings. The presence of a 680m tall tower on the Collins Street extension must be the exception. When in the 1850s, St Patrick's Cathedral close to the opposite end of Collins Street was redesigned by William Wardell, the church authorities had decided that the building which it was to replace may have been sufficient for a provincial town, but was 'entirely inadequate as a cathedral for the most thriving city of Australia'. So Wardell gave them the greatest ecclesiastical building in the Southern Hemisphere. The citizens of Melbourne, and of Victoria, have long recognised the threat to their civilised preeminence from Sydney. In a recent survey of opinion about the Melbourne Tower, over 85 per cent of the sampled population supported its construction, which has political and civic support. So now a rather provincial cluster of '80s towers awaits redemption by the millennium.