NowMelbourne

Architecture

Architecture in Melbourne

Melbourne laid a gold-rush grid and filled it with Victorian pomp, then spent the last twenty-five years arguing with that inheritance in colour and pattern. Its public buildings take more risks than its towers.

• Melbourne School of Design

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  Completed 2014

  John Wardle · NADAAA

  The architecture faculty of the University of Melbourne, built to teach by being looked at. Wardle and the Boston firm NADAAA wrapped studios around a full-height atrium crossed by a suspended timber tutorial pod and left the structure, services and joinery exposed, so the building is a working diagram of how it stands up. A single coffered timber roof spans the whole atrium. The school treats itself as the first thing on its own syllabus.

• Melbourne Recital Centre

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  Completed 2009

  ARM Architecture

  A concert hall on Southbank, blunt outside and warm within. ARM punched the grey street facade with a scatter of oval windows, then lined the main hall in plaster mouldings shaped by digital modelling into a rippling pattern tuned as much for sound as for looks. The two are the same surface. The hall hides its craft behind a deadpan front, a very Melbourne way to build.

• Southern Cross Station

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  Completed 2006

  Grimshaw

  The city's western rail terminus, rebuilt under a roof that became its whole idea. Grimshaw drew a rolling dune of a roof across an entire city block, its curves shaped to draw diesel fumes up and out through natural ventilation rather than trap them, carried on tree-like columns above the platforms. The roof reads as landscape from the towers around it. It won the Lubetkin Prize as a piece of infrastructure that solved an engineering problem by becoming a form.

• Federation Square

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  Completed 2002

  Lab Architecture Studio

  A civic square and arts complex over the rail yards on the Yarra, built to give the city a centre it never had. Lab clad the buildings and the plaza in a single skin of sandstone, zinc and glass set in a fractal pattern of triangles, deliberately jagged against the Victorian city and hugely divisive when it opened. The open square is the real building. It was hated on arrival and is now where the city gathers, the arc civic buildings hope for.

• Royal Exhibition Building

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  Completed 1880

  Joseph Reed

  A great hall built for an international exhibition and kept for a century of them, in the Carlton Gardens north of the centre. Reed crowned a Renaissance Revival cross-plan with a dome modelled on Florence's cathedral, timber and brick over a nave big enough for a small nation's produce. Australia's first federal parliament sat under it in 1901. It was the first building in the country given World Heritage listing, on the strength of surviving when almost every other exhibition hall was pulled down.