The Manchester Unity Building — Costa Rolfe

Media item: article

Date published: 1 June 2013

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

The archive preserves the headline and the date. What follows is general information on how the building was constructed — the part that is invisible from the street and explains almost everything visible on it. The practice occupies Level 1; see Location.

The building is a steel frame in a ceramic coat

The Manchester Unity Building is not a masonry building. It looks like one, which is the point.

Heritage Victoria's register entry describes it in a single clause: the twelve storey building "has a concrete encased steel structure and is clad with moulded terra cotta faience", producing an overall effect "of a modern commercial Gothic style". So the load path is the encased steel frame, and the cream faience — glazed architectural terracotta — is a cladding carried on it rather than a wall holding the building up.

This distinction governs everything else:

The sequence

How a building of this generation actually went up:

1. Excavation and foundations, in a constrained city site with neighbours on both sides.

2. The steel frame, erected floor by floor. This is the fast part, and it is why steel-framed buildings of the 1920s and 1930s were raised at rates that still seem surprising — columns, beams and connections arrive prefabricated and are assembled rather than made on site.

3. Floors, cast on the frame.

4. The cladding, fixed to the frame as it rises, working upward behind the erection.

5. Services — electrical, plumbing, lifts, ventilation — threaded through as the structure closes in. The lighting scheme has its own history at Let there be light and Manchester Unity all lit up again.

6. Internal fit-out — partitions, plaster, joinery, terrazzo, metalwork — the slowest and most labour-intensive stage. Labour of love covers the modern equivalent.

7. Commissioning, and the lifts and escalator tested — Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 2.

The critical thing to grasp is that these overlap. Cladding follows the frame up, and fit-out follows the cladding — so several trades work on different floors at the same time. That overlap, not any single fast operation, is what produces a rapid overall build.

Building it in 1932

The construction is remembered partly for the speed at which it was raised, and it happened in the middle of the Great Depression — when almost nothing else in Melbourne was being built. See The new shopping centre opens today.

Why speed mattered to the client. A friendly society was financing this from members' funds — Heritage Victoria records that the building was designed "to meet the corporate needs of the Manchester Unity Group, a friendly society with 28,000 members in 1932". Every month of construction is a month of capital tied up in a hole in the ground, producing no rent. Finishing early is a direct financial return, and it was also a public demonstration of competence and solvency at a moment when both were in question.

Why speed was achievable. Prefabricated steel; moulded cladding made off site; repetitive floors; and, as Heritage Victoria records, a builder who ran the job in shifts around the clock with double the usual labour force. It is worth being plain about the last one: unemployment was at levels not seen before or since, and a large construction project in 1932 had no difficulty finding workers.

And the safety context was not modern. Construction of this era ran without the protections now taken for granted — edge protection, fall arrest, load limits, licensing. Any admiration for how quickly these buildings went up should carry that qualification.

The height limit, and the shape it produced

Melbourne operated a building height limit, and this building is that rule made visible. Heritage Victoria's record gives both halves of it: "The city height limit of 132 feet (40.2metres) was introduced in 1916 and between 1922 and 1933 seventeen new buildings challenged the limit", and "Towers were permitted to break the city's height limit as long as they did not contain occupiable rooms."

So the main block stops where the rule stops — "The bulk of the building extends to 40.2metres, which was the height limit for central Melbourne at the time" — and the corner tower is what the exemption allowed, an unoccupiable ornament that carries the building's whole silhouette. "Prominence is given to the corner by the tower, which soars above the main bulk." The vertical emphasis below it is not the setbacks but the cladding, "intricately moulded to produce continuous narrow columns and shafts rising up the facade, serving to emphasise the verticality of the building." See Melbourne, Australia: Manchester Unity Building and Our City: Manchester Unity Building.

What survives, and what does not

A useful way to think about a building of this age.

The frame is the most durable thing in it. Structural steel, kept dry, lasts indefinitely.

The cladding is the vulnerable part — not because ceramic is weak, but because its fixings are steel and water reaches them.

The services are the shortest-lived. Wiring, plumbing, lifts and ventilation have all been replaced, probably several times. A 1932 building running in 2026 is a 1932 frame and skin around entirely modern systems — including the surgery services described at Surgery Portfolio and Our Technology — and threading those through heritage fabric without damaging it is typically the largest single cost of any restoration. See Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 6.

The interiors are the most altered, because tenancies refit and buildings do not — Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 7.

Elsewhere in this archive

Common questions

This item is about a building, not about dentistry. The three questions below are answered from Heritage Victoria's Victorian Heritage Register record for the place (VHR H0411; Victorian Heritage Database place 728), which is public and free to read. There is no clinical content on this page, and none has been invented to fill the section out.

Was it really built as fast as people say?

Yes, and the register gives the dates. "Site works commenced at midnight of the 1st January, 1932. Eleven months and twelve days later the building was officially opened by the Premier of Victoria." In between: "By early May 1932 the sub-basement, basement and ground floors were ready for shopfitters and other finishing trades to move in. The other floors and the roof were added at the rate of one a week, and by late July the roof was laid and work started on the 78 ft. tower." Heritage Victoria attributes the rate to two things — the builder "employing twice the normal number of building workers who worked shifts, night and day", and a management innovation: "The building programme was controlled by the use of a works progress schedule. This was an innovation to the local building industry." It was also a spectator sport: "a trip to the city to watch construction was a regular event for many Melbournians."

Why does the tower step back above the main block?

Because of a rule, not a stylistic preference. Heritage Victoria records that "The city height limit of 132 feet (40.2metres) was introduced in 1916", that "The bulk of the building extends to 40.2metres, which was the height limit for central Melbourne at the time", and — the part that explains the shape — that "Towers were permitted to break the city's height limit as long as they did not contain occupiable rooms." The corner tower is therefore an addition that could legally exceed the limit precisely because nobody was going to work in it. Seventeen new buildings challenged that limit between 1922 and 1933, which is why several Melbourne buildings of the period share the same block-then-tower profile.

Was it the tallest building in Melbourne?

Heritage Victoria says so, and its own record carries a challenge to the claim — which is worth showing rather than resolving. The statement of significance calls the building "one of the tallest building in Melbourne when it was completed in 1932", while the register's plaque citation is more absolute: the tower "ensured it was the tallest building in Melbourne when completed in 1932". Against that, a public contribution published on the same database entry, headed "Not the tallest", argues that the tower added to the APA building in 1929–30 "rose to a height of 250ft (76m) was 13m taller", citing an Argus article of 29 January 1930, and notes that the APA building was demolished around 1969 "and so has been largely forgotten". A public contribution is not Heritage Victoria's own finding — but it is on the record, and the safe form of the claim is that this was among the tallest buildings in the city in 1932.

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. Directions are on Location; enquiries go through Contact Us. The clinical services in the building are listed at General Dentistry and Specialist Care.

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

This is an archive record of a published article and its date — not current clinical advice. The general construction material above describes typical practice of the period rather than a documented account of this building; the quoted passages are from Heritage Victoria's Victorian Heritage Register record for the place, VHR H0411, held on the Victorian Heritage Database as place 728, which is the authority to consult. 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.

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