Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 7

Media item: article, part 7 of a multi-part series

Date published: 2 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 final part of the series, and it covers the building today: tenancies, adaptive reuse, and why continued use is the point. The series index is at Manchester Unity Building — Melbourne Open House, with a duplicate record at MUB Open House: Part 1.

Adaptive reuse, and why it is not a compromise

The most effective protection any heritage building has is a viable use.

This is the least romantic and most important idea in heritage practice. Buildings that earn their keep are maintained: roofs are repaired, gutters cleared, fixings replaced, and problems caught while they are small. Buildings that empty are neglected — and neglect destroys far more heritage fabric than demolition does. Water gets in, fixings corrode, finishes are lost, and the repair bill grows until demolition becomes the rational commercial decision. See Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 6 and part 5.

So a 1932 building full of shops, offices and consulting suites is not heritage compromised by commerce. It is heritage funded by commerce. The retail half of that is in Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 3 and The new shopping centre opens today.

What adaptive reuse actually requires:

• Accepting the building's constraints instead of fighting them. Floor plates shrink as the tower rises; ceiling heights and window positions are fixed; services must go where the fabric allows — see Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 4. Uses that suit those constraints succeed; uses that need open floor area do not.
• Reversible fit-outs. A tenancy that can be removed without loss to what is underneath — see Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 2.
• Servicing without butchery — the largest cost, and invisible afterwards.
• Negotiated compliance. Fire, egress and accessibility upgrades, each weighed against significance — see Our City: Manchester Unity Building.

Why consulting suites are a good fit

Worth setting out, because it explains the building's continuity rather than merely asserting it.

220 Collins Street has housed medical and dental practitioners since it opened in 1932, and the fit is structural rather than sentimental:

• Small, cellular rooms are what the building has, and what consulting requires. A surgery is a room; an open plan is useless for it. What is provided in those rooms is set out at Our Services and General Dentistry.
• The location is right — trams on Collins Street, Flinders Street and Melbourne Central stations a short walk, and the professional quarter close by. A city practice is reachable without a car from most of Melbourne, and reachable in a lunch hour. See Melbourne, Australia: Manchester Unity Building and Our Location.
• Referral relationships work better in proximity. A case involving several clinicians is easier to coordinate when they are in the same building or the same street — see Specialist Care, Complex Dentistry, what happens when multiple specialists collaborate and Everything under one roof.
• The building was designed for it. Consulting suites were part of the original brief — see Manchester Unity Building.

Which is the honest version of ‘heritage building' as a practice's address: not a decorative claim, but a set of practical reasons that have held for ninety years. Who works there is at Our Team and Dentists & Registered Specialists.

What that means for a patient, plainly

The trade has two sides, and it would be dishonest to give only one.

What the building gives you: a central, transport-connected location; small quiet consulting rooms rather than a warehouse; and a well-maintained, restored place of genuine architectural interest — see Have a Deco at a Classic and Inside the Manchester Unity Building.

What it costs you: this is a 1932 building on the Victorian Heritage Register, and heritage listing constrains what can be altered. Doorway widths, floor levels, lift dimensions and bathroom layouts were designed to the standards of the period and cannot always be brought to modern accessibility standards.

So 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. ‘I cannot manage stairs' or ‘I need to stay in my chair' is more useful than a diagnosis. Arrangements that are straightforward with notice are difficult improvised on the day — use Contact Us.

Worth asking about: step-free entry, lift access, accessible bathrooms, whether treatment can be provided in the chair you arrive in, a quieter time of day, and a longer appointment if you need breaks. Those adjustments are described at Dental Anxiety and Oral health care for children with special needs. If the visit is urgent rather than routine, see Emergency Dentistry.

And allow a few extra minutes. Lifts serving many tenancies run slower at 9am than a map suggests.

Seeing the building without an appointment

• The arcade is publicly accessible during trading hours — a through-block pedestrian route you can walk any day, free.
• The upper floors are private tenancies.
• Open House opens parts of the building that are otherwise closed, for one weekend, when the building takes part. Programmes change annually.
• Heritage Victoria's Victorian Heritage Database holds the registration and statement of significance, publicly and free.

The whole series, and the rest of the archive

• 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 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

Elsewhere in this archive: Have a Deco at a Classic (origins and Marcus Barlow), Inside the Manchester Unity Building (the interior), The new shopping centre opens today (the 1932 opening), Our City: Manchester Unity Building (how heritage protection works), Party time to mark milestone (the Oddfellows and friendly societies), Art Deco oasis in the heart of Melbourne (the style), Let there be light for Manchester Unity's brighter future (the illumination), Manchester Unity all lit up again, Manchester Unity Building — John Gollings, and the complete index at Our Media.

Common questions

What was on this corner before the building, and was it already a landmark?

It was, under a different name. Heritage Victoria's record states that the Manchester Unity IOOF purchased the property at the north-west corner of Collins and Swanston Street in 1928, and that the site was previously known by Melbournians as Stewart Dawson's Corner, where it was a popular meeting place rivalled only by the entrance to Flinders Street Station.

That matters for the location argument above. People were already arranging to meet on this corner before there was a building on it worth meeting outside, and the practice's address inherits that rather than having created it. Four years passed between the purchase and construction: site works commenced at midnight of the 1st January, 1932. Source: the Victorian Heritage Database entry for place 728 (Victorian Heritage Register H0411).

Why does Heritage Victoria call the building socially significant, and not just architecturally significant?

Because of where it sits and what it stands opposite. The register records the place as being of architectural, historical, social, aesthetic and technical significance to the State of Victoria — five separate grounds — and spells the social one out in a single sentence: the building is socially significant as a landmark in both positioning and scale, and it challenges, for scale and presence, the Melbourne Town Hall located opposite.

That is a claim about the street rather than about the building's design: a friendly society put a commercial tower on the busiest corner in the city at a scale that answered the civic building across the road. It is also the ground least dependent on fabric, and the one a visitor can still read from the footpath. Source: the Victorian Heritage Database entry for place 728.

Can a tenant put up a sign, or does every sign on a registered building need a permit?

Not every sign, because this place has a published signage policy that removes the permit requirement where a sign follows it. Heritage Victoria's specific exemptions state that all signage produced in accordance with Signage Criteria Manchester Unity Building produced by Manchester Unity Building (undated), a copy of which is held by the Executive Director, is permit exempt.

The reasoning is recorded as well. The policy covers both exterior and interior areas and exists to ensure a consistent and appropriate approach to placement and size of signage on the building, because there are many areas of the building with original purpose-built signage and directory cases — the signage is itself part of what is significant. Anything outside those criteria is a permit matter, and nothing in this declaration prevents the Executive Director from amending or rescinding all or any of the permit exemptions. Source: the Victorian Heritage Database entry for place 728.

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 Location.

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; statements attributed to the registration are drawn from the Victorian Heritage Database entry for place 728 (VHR H0411), permit exemptions can be amended or rescinded, Open House programmes and building access change annually, and Heritage Victoria and that database are the authoritative sources. 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.