Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 4

Media item: article, part 4 of a multi-part series

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 part covers the tower floors and the roof. The series index is at Manchester Unity Building — Melbourne Open House, with a duplicate record at MUB Open House: Part 1.

Why there is a tower at all

The answer is regulatory before it is architectural, and it is the single most useful fact about the building's shape.

Melbourne operated a building height limit for much of the early twentieth century. For a commercial building of ambition, the effect was a characteristic form: rise as a solid mass to the limit, then step back into a tower above it where a tower was permitted. See Melbourne, Australia: Manchester Unity Building.

That is exactly the Manchester Unity Building's profile. The stepped massing and the tower are not purely a stylistic decision — they are a regulation, given architectural expression. The building then made a virtue of it, using the setbacks to emphasise the vertical lines running up the facade. See Have a Deco at a Classic and Art Deco oasis in the heart of Melbourne.

The limit was later removed, and the towers that followed were built to a completely different logic. Which is why buildings of this generation still read as a coherent group in the skyline — see Manchester Unity all lit up again and Our City: Manchester Unity Building.

What the upper floors were for

Consulting suites and offices.

This was the standard arrangement for a prestige city building in the 1930s: retail at the bottom — see Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 3 and The new shopping centre opens today — and offices and consulting rooms above. The upper floors of a Collins Street building were where medical and dental practitioners took rooms — close to public transport, in the professional quarter, and addressed well enough to reassure patients.

220 Collins Street has housed medical and dental practitioners since it opened, and the tower floors are part of that. It is a genuine continuity rather than a marketing line. Who practises there now is at Our Team and Dentists & Registered Specialists, and the range of work at Our Services and Specialist Care.

The floor plates shrink as the tower rises, which suits small professional tenancies and is useless for anything requiring open floor area — one reason buildings of this shape were adapted to consulting and chambers use rather than to modern open-plan offices. See Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 7 on adaptive reuse.

Roofs, and what actually happens up there

The roof of a 1930s commercial building is not a leisure space. It is plant, structure and access, and on a heritage building it is also the most exposed part of the fabric.

What a roof has to accommodate:

• Lift motor rooms, sitting above the shafts they serve — which is why lift overruns push a building's actual apex above its top occupied floor. The lobbies those lifts serve are in Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 2.
• Water tanks, historically for supply and fire service
• Ventilation and, later, air-conditioning plant retrofitted long after 1932
• Access for maintenance — walkways, anchor points and edge protection, all added under modern safety requirements
• Lighting equipment, where a facade is illuminated. Fixing new equipment into significant fabric on a registered building is a permit matter — although this building's own registration makes minor like-for-like repairs permit exempt, and expressly exempts the removal of extraneous items such as air conditioners, pipe work, ducting, wiring, antennae and aerials, and making good afterwards. See Let there be light for Manchester Unity's brighter future.

And the roof is where water gets in. Parapets, flashings and drainage are the commonest points of failure in a building of this age, and water penetration behind glazed terracotta corrodes the fixings holding the cladding on — which is the central conservation problem for this building. See Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 5 and, for the repair sequence, part 6.

Retrofitting modern plant onto a heritage roof is a genuine design problem: the equipment is heavy, it must not be visible from the street, and it cannot be fixed through significant fabric. The services problem inside the building is described in Inside the Manchester Unity Building.

The view, and why it is part of the significance

Something worth naming, since Open House visitors go up for it.

Views from and to a heritage building can form part of what is protected. A registration may identify the setting and the building's contribution to the skyline as significant — which is why the visual relationship between a landmark and its surroundings can be a planning consideration when something new is proposed nearby. How that case is made in writing is the subject of Manchester Unity Building — Penny Craswell, and how it is recorded, Manchester Unity Building — John Gollings.

A landmark is only a landmark while it can be seen. That is not sentiment; it is a live issue in a city that has built substantially taller around buildings of this generation.

For patients

Smile Solutions is on Level 1, not in the tower. Access is via the building's lifts. See Our Location and Contact Us.

This is a 1932 building on the Victorian Heritage Register, and heritage listing constrains what can be altered. If you have specific access requirements — a wheelchair, a mobility aid, a pram, a companion, an assistance animal or an interpreter — phone ahead on 13 13 96, and say what you need rather than what you have. If it is the appointment rather than the building that is the difficulty, see Dental Anxiety.

The series

• Manchester Unity Building — Melbourne Open House — series index, and what Open House is
• 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 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
• The complete archive index is Our Media

Common questions

What was the height limit, in numbers, and how does this building sit against it?

The figures are on the public record. Heritage Victoria's entry records that the city height limit of 132 feet — 40.2 metres — was introduced in 1916, and that between 1922 and 1933 seventeen new buildings challenged the limit, among them the Capitol Building, Temple Court, the Nicholas Building, Myers, Hotel Alexander, the T&G Building, Coles, the AMP Society, the SEC headquarters and this one.

The building sits exactly on it: the bulk extends to 40.2 metres, which was the height limit for central Melbourne at the time. The tower above it is recorded as a 78 ft tower, and the reason it was allowed is the useful part — towers were permitted to break the city's height limit as long as they did not contain occupiable rooms. Source: the Victorian Heritage Database entry for place 728 (Victorian Heritage Register H0411).

What is on the eleventh floor?

The former offices and boardroom of Manchester Unity, and the registration describes them in unusual detail. The walls are decorated with sliced timber veneer panelling. The boardroom table was constructed in situ and is nearly six metres long, its top finished with a rosewood veneer and a rosewood inlay border and a moulded and carved edge. Twelve monogrammed leather chairs also survive, and the record considers it likely that the table and chairs were designed by Marcus Barlow's office as part of the total design of the building.

Heritage Victoria treats the furniture as significant in its own right: the survival of a boardroom table of this scale and grandeur from this period, complete with chairs, is unusual in Victoria. The eleventh floor is a private tenancy and is not open to visitors.

Was it the tallest building in Melbourne?

The record disagrees with itself, and the honest answer is to show that rather than pick a side. Heritage Victoria's plaque citation for this place says the buttressed tower ensured it was the tallest building in Melbourne when completed in 1932. The statement of significance on the same record says it was one of the tallest building in Melbourne when it was completed in 1932.

A public contribution published alongside the record, which is a reader's submission and not Heritage Victoria's own text, disputes the claim outright: it says the tower added to the APA building in 1929–30 rose to 250 ft — 76 m — making it some 13 m taller, and that the APA was demolished around 1969 and largely forgotten. Nothing on the record resolves it. Treat ‘the tallest’ as contested and ‘among the tallest’ as safe.

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.

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 architectural and planning material above is general background rather than a summary of the item; statements attributed to the registration are drawn from the Victorian Heritage Database entry for place 728 (VHR H0411), public contributions on that database are readers' submissions rather than Heritage Victoria's own text, and Heritage Victoria is the authoritative source. 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.