I'm not sure when I first noticed this view of the Manchester Unity building on the corner of Collins & Swanston Sts in Melbourne. The photo is taken from the City Square, over the shoulders of
Burke & Wills, memorialised by Charles Summer in 1865 following their 1860-61 ill-fated exploring expedition to cross Australia south to north from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria.
While the Manchester Unity building, designed by Marcus Barlow, has been here since 1932, the poor old explorers have been in a few locations around Melbourne in their 140-odd years before finding this home on the edge of the City Square in 1994.
References:
Burke & Wills Wed: the online digital research archive
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Surely Melbourne's most attractive highrise building. Just today I noticed someone looking up at its magnificence.
ReplyDeleteI think the colour of the terracotta makes it stand out from the other city buildings and, of course, it has very prominent location opposite the Town Hall.
ReplyDeleteI have seen a very similar building in Sydney, is it by the same architect? Or even the same architecture?
ReplyDeleteI'm not aware of the building but that doesn't mean there isn't a similar one in Sydney. Perhaps someone can fill us both in.
DeleteAnd, of course, it's just as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside. I'm glad it hasn't been turned into a bunch of apartments or tone down to make way for some bland, anonymous office block.
ReplyDeleteFabulous inside and pretty much still used how it was when originally built.
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