Manchester Unity Building

Look up at the corner of Collins and Swanston streets. That ornamental tower with the flagpole rising above the roofline serves absolutely no purpose. It is completely empty inside. A void. And that is the genius of the whole thing. In nineteen thirty-one, Melbourne had a height limit of forty metres for buildings. But towers and flagpoles did not count. So the architects designed a decorative tower that soars twenty-four metres above the roof, more than half the height of the main building, and got away with it on a technicality. On Friday and Saturday nights, it was floodlit, making the Manchester Unity Building the most visible landmark on the skyline.

This Art Deco Gothic masterpiece was built in eleven months and twelve days, which is astonishing for a building of this complexity. Site works started at midnight on the first of January, nineteen thirty-two. Floors went up at the rate of one per week. By late July, the roof was done and work started on that cheeky tower. The Premier of Victoria opened it before the end of the year.

The building was commissioned by the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows, a fraternal organisation, who purchased the prime corner site in nineteen twenty-eight for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Up on the twelfth-floor rooftop, there was once a Japanese garden and cafe, complete with a mosaic floor, graceful palms, Japanese maples, flower beds, a fountain, and a pond. It operated from nineteen thirty-two until about nineteen forty, when wartime sentiment toward all things Japanese rather killed the mood. The rooftop garden is long gone, but the building is now open for guided tours, and you can ride the original lift to the top for views that make you understand why Melbourne fell in love with Art Deco.