Snapshot East Melbourne

I posted this on Walking Melbourne and ended up writing some thoughts about what style it is and I thought I would re-post them here. It is an interesting little building, quite different to most of the 1930s apartment blocks in East Melbourne.
Called Bradoc House it was built in 1933 and is on George St between Simpson St and Hoddle St.

The info from the East Melbourne Historical Society http://emhs.org.au/history/buildings/ea ... adoc_house says it is Tudor-Byzantine with Spanish influence, but well, that just sounds a bit silly to me. I guess the white and dark colours is a bit Tudor, but is is also Spanish Colonial. I have no idea why Byzantine, I guess maybe the tower could be and the way the forms are massed together, and it has some hints at crenelations, but once again this all could come from a Spanish colonial influence as well. If anything it makes me think more of Romanesque style than Byzantine. Personally rather than Tudor-Byzantine I would say it has Spanish Colonial and Arts and Crafts influences. I don't think there are really hard and fast descriptions for 20th century architectural styles, especially in periods that experimented with a lot of revival styles. What do others think?

Snapshot Adelaide - Colonial Mutual Life Building

I have quite a few photos from Adelaide to post. It has a pretty amazing array of older buildings from the classically inspired galleries and libraries on the North Terrace to small bluestone houses. The most noticeable and celebrated buildings tend to be nineteenth century, however, I found a large number of twentieth century buildings that also caught my eye.

This is the Colonial Mutual Life building on  King William St. It was apparently built in 1934 and became the city's tallest building until 1969. In a relatively low rise city like Adelaide it still towers above many buildings. I'm not sure exactly what you would call the style, I have seen it referred to as neo gothic, and certainly you can see the paired arched windows with delicate columns that are taken directly from gothic architecture. It has a relatively minimalistic use of decoration in comparison to most buildings that I would think of as neo gothic. Perhaps neo gothic filtered through the more streamlined aesthetic of art deco? The small columns look like twisted columns from a distance, but up close you can see that they are actually decorated with a very art deco zigzag pattern. The capitals are also very art deco, with the usual gothic style flowers or leaves reduced to simply geometric shapes and lines. 

The building appeared to be empty, though apparently it does have heritage protection (and hopefully that counts for more in Adelaide than it sometimes does in Melbourne!) This site suggests there were plans for it to become a hotel, but it also says that it will be completed by 2009 and it clearly isn't.

Some close up details of the delicate decoration, which does get a little lost in the mass of of the very large facade.

Snapshot, Melbourne

Interior of the lift at the Athenaeum Library in Collins St.

St Kilda snapshot

Monument to Councillor Edward O'Donnell, St Kilda.


Here is a notice from The Argus, 15 February 1934, p.8 (from the NLA via the new search engine Trove), which calls for public subscriptions to help erect the monument.

Click to enlarge.

Snapshot, Melbourne University.

Another Melbourne Uni building, the chapel at Newman College to be exact. Another building I walk past so often I almost don't see it any more. It is pretty wonderful, I have been to several concerts inside and it has great acoustics. Even though it is in a Gothic style it still has a very mid-twentieth century feel to it. The clean lines and massed stone, a very modern re-interpretation of Gothic. Its large almost rectangular mass and the way it stands apart from the other college buildings reminds me of the Sydney War Memorial in Hyde Park. It was designed by the architects Connelly, Dale and T. Payne and consecrated in 1942, over twenty years after the college by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin had been completed.

War Memorial in Sydney, Image from Art Deco Sydney.

Snapshot, Melbourne