Manchester Unity Building — Melbourne Open House

Media item: article

Date published: 1 July 2011

This page records the media item. The original article is the property of its publisher and is not reproduced here.

This is the first entry in a multi-part series covering the Manchester Unity Building at Open House Melbourne. The remaining parts are listed at the end, and each takes a different part of the building. A second record of the opening instalment is held at MUB Open House: Part 1.

What Open House is

Open House is an architecture festival in which buildings normally closed to the public open their doors for a weekend, free of charge.

The format began in London in 1992 and has spread to dozens of cities worldwide, including Melbourne. The principle is simple and unusually effective: most people experience architecture only from the footpath, and a great deal of what matters about a building — its plan, its structure, its interiors, its views — is invisible from there.

What typically opens: government buildings, corporate headquarters, private houses of architectural note, infrastructure, places of worship, and heritage buildings whose interiors are otherwise inaccessible.

The queues are the story. Buildings that people walk past daily attract hours-long queues when the door is open, which says something about how much latent interest in the built environment exists and how little of it ordinary access satisfies.

Why a working building takes part

There is a cost to it. A building open to thousands of visitors on a weekend needs stewarding, crowd management, insurance and staff.

Owners do it for reasons that are mostly about the building's long-term survival:

• Public support is what protects heritage buildings. A building people have been inside is a building people will argue for. Advocacy follows familiarity.
• It demonstrates that heritage and commercial use are compatible — which matters, because the strongest argument against heritage listing is that it sterilises a building. A working, tenanted, profitable heritage building disproves that in person. See Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 7 on adaptive reuse.
• It builds the case for the money already spent. Restoration is expensive and largely invisible from the street; opening the doors is how an owner shows what was done — see Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 6.
• It is a public good. A building on the Victorian Heritage Register is protected because it is held to matter to the State, and access is the practical expression of that. See Our City: Manchester Unity Building.

Why this building rewards a visit

The Manchester Unity Building is a good Open House subject for a specific reason: the exterior is famous and the interior is not.

Most people in Melbourne can identify the building from the street — the cream faience, the vertical piers, the stepped tower. See Manchester Unity Building, Art Deco oasis in the heart of Melbourne and, after dark, Manchester Unity all lit up again. Far fewer have been past the arcade. The lift lobby, the upper floors, the tower levels and the roof are private, and there is no ordinary circumstance in which a member of the public sees them.

Completed 1932. Architect Marcus Barlow. Commissioned by the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows, a friendly society, as its Victorian headquarters. On the Victorian Heritage Register.

How to get inside the rest of the year

Since Open House is one weekend:

• The arcade is publicly accessible during trading hours — it is a through-block pedestrian route, and you can walk it any day. Its 1932 opening is recorded at The new shopping centre opens today.
• The upper floors are private tenancies. Access is by appointment with a tenant.
• Smile Solutions is on Level 1 — see Our Location — and patients see part of the building most people do not. The practice is not a tourist attraction and the visit is a dental appointment — but the building is genuinely part of it. To make one, see Contact Us; for what a first appointment involves, General Dentistry and Understanding Your Treatment.
• Heritage Victoria's Victorian Heritage Database holds the registration and its statement of significance, publicly and free.

The series

• Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 2 — the entrance foyer and lift lobby
• Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 3 — the arcade and its shopfronts
• Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 4 — the tower floors and the roof
• Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 5 — the faience cladding, close up
• Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 6 — the restoration, in sequence
• Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 7 — the building today, and adaptive reuse

And elsewhere in this archive: Have a Deco at a Classic (origins), Inside the Manchester Unity Building (the interior), The new shopping centre opens today (the 1932 opening), Our City: Manchester Unity Building (heritage protection), Party time to mark milestone (the Oddfellows), Manchester Unity Building — John Gollings (how buildings are recorded), — Penny Craswell, — Leonard Joel, The Manchester Unity Building — Costa Rolfe, Melbourne, Australia: Manchester Unity Building, Mothers in Unity, Unity in Smiling: Suzanne Carbone, and the complete index at Our Media.

Common questions

What is actually worth seeing inside, according to the registration rather than the publicity?

Heritage Victoria's statement of significance names the specific things, and several are technical rather than decorative. The building "was the first in Victoria to have escalators", and the record finds it technically significant for "the surviving original Otis-Waygood escalator between the ground floor lobby and mezzanine." It was "also one of the first Victorian buildings with automatic cooling, and rubbish and postal chutes on every floor", and "Australia's largest diesel generator, located in the sub-basement, provided an emergency power supply."

On the decorative side, the record describes "extensive use of various Australian marbles as cladding to the walls", and a ground floor lobby whose "ceiling and cornices have high-relief depictions of Aboriginals, Australian flora and fauna as well as transport, building and primary industries" — while "cornice plaster panels in the corridors of all the floors carry depictions of the friendly society's role in welfare provision." It also notes that of the three original lifts, two were converted to automatic operation but "the beautiful inlaid timber and panelled interiors to the lift cars have been retained." Heritage Victoria's overall finding is that the place is aesthetically significant "for its intact interiors."

If it is protected because it matters to the State, does the public have a right to go in?

No, and it is worth separating the two ideas, because they are easily conflated. Registration under the Heritage Act 2017 regulates works — what an owner may alter, and when a permit is needed. It is not an access regime, and the building's upper floors are private commercial tenancies whatever their heritage status.

What is permanently and freely public is the record, not the rooms. Anyone can read the full statement of significance, the history, the register plan, images and the permit exemptions for VHR H0411 on the Victorian Heritage Database, and download the lot as a report. Beyond that: the arcade is a through-block public route during trading hours, Open House opens the interior for a weekend when the building is on the programme, and the rest is by invitation. Programmes and access arrangements change annually, so check the current Open House listing rather than this page.

Was the building always meant to have public space inside it?

Yes — that was the commercial proposition. It was built for the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows, described in the registration as "a friendly society with 28,000 members in 1932", and the ground and lower floors were retail from the outset. Heritage Victoria records that the escalators "provided access to the basement and the first floor directly from the main arcade entrance at Swanston Street" — so the arcade was designed to move the public up into the building, not merely through it. The register's history also notes that construction itself was public entertainment: "newspapers carried regular reports on the progress of the building, and a trip to the city to watch construction was a regular event for many Melbournians."

Practical details

Smile Solutions, Level 1, 220 Collins Street, Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne VIC 3000. Phone 13 13 96, or theteam@smilesolutions.com.au. Monday–Friday 8.00am–6.00pm, Saturday 8.30am–1.30pm, Sunday by appointment. See also Our Team.

If you have specific access requirements, phone ahead on 13 13 96. This is a 1932 heritage-listed building and what can be altered is constrained. If the appointment rather than the building is the difficulty, see Dental Anxiety.

Every practitioner's registration can be verified free on the AHPRA public register at ahpra.gov.au.

This page records a published article and its date. The material above is general background rather than a summary of the item; Open House programmes and building access change annually, and Heritage Victoria is the authoritative source for heritage information. The building is not a claim about clinical care. This is not a diagnosis or a treatment plan. Third-party published content is not reproduced.

Smile Solutions trades under ABN 28 193 514 103.