Victorian Arts Centre

Performing-arts centre in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. Architect: Roy Grounds. Melbourne Concert Hall, opened 6 November 1982. Theatres complex includes State Theatre opened 12 May 1984, seating 2000; Playhouse opened 8 May 1984, seating 809; and George Fairfax Studio opened 4 May 1984, seating 250-400.

The largest and most comprehensive arts centre in Australia, the Victorian Arts Centre stands on a site that has been a centre of entertainment since circuses began to perform there in tents in 1870. From 1901 to 1953 circuses performed in permanent buildings, including the Olympia, which was leased as Melbourne's largest cinema in 1911. A dance hall, an ice rink and the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Playhouse Theatre were also on this 4.5 hectare site and its surroundings, across the Yarra River from the Flinders Street railway station. In 1943 a committee of architects appointed by the Victorian government proposed that the site be reserved for a new art gallery, including an auditorium to hold 1000 persons, to be built after the Second World War. In 1945 the government passed an act to reserve the site but political turbulence in Victoria delayed its proclamation until 1955. 

The two-stage building project began in 1959 with the appointment of Roy Grounds, a notable Victorian architect. He was then much admired in architectural circles for designing houses within simple plan forms such as a triangle or a circle, within which he skilfully manipulated all the functional requirements. His preoccupation with wrapping simple external form around complex internal function also manifested itself in his overall design for the arts centre. His scheme was for two buildings - a strong rectangular form for the National Gallery of Victoria and an elongated teepee-shaped copper-sheathed spire above the theatres and concert hall, which would be underground.

The gallery, built on a foundation of basalt rock, opened in 1968. After it was built it was discovered that the foundation material on the adjacent site was not basalt as expected but silt from Port Phillip Bay and fill dumped there during the 19th century. On such a site, so close to the bay and the Yarra, it would have been enormously difficult and prohibitively expensive to construct a building more below the water table than above it. It was decided to raise the theatre complex partially out of the ground and build the concert hall on a different site. The Melbourne City Council assigned the small triangular Snowden Gardens to the government for the concert hall. It was separated from the remainder of the complex by a busy road but the foundation was basalt, which allowed two-fifths of the building's height to be below ground.

The concert hall was finished two years before the theatres building, which had to be completely redesigned. This fills every corner of its awkwardly shaped site with accommodation below ground, but above two hemicylinders linked by parallel straight sides are to be seen, surmounted by a mast of lacy steelwork. The concert hall appears above ground as a simple cylindrical form but below ground it is a pear shape. Thus, Roy Grounds in his final major work repeated his strong predilection for simple external forms irrespective of the internal function. This approach is more successful visually in the Sydney Opera House.

When the interior finishes and furnishings of the concert hall and theatre buildings were being decided, the current architectural style was off-form, pre-cast or bush-hammered concrete and natural timbers of various types with fabrics and carpets of muted colours. There were already bush-hammered columns in the foyers and prismatic concrete diffusers all over the interior of the concert hall as part of the architect's concept for the interior. Late in the project, the Victorian Arts Centre building committee decided to employ the designer John Truscott to obtain a more traditional quality in a contemporary manner. He was forced to decorate rather than influence the architectural form. He covered walls and ceilings and foyers with leather, mirrors, brass and glossy surfaces to reflect sparkle from carefully placed electric lighting and make subterranean spaces with rather low ceilings seem spacious. The major revision of the interiors in the theatres building occurred in the principal public spaces as timber panelling had been determined for the State Theatre auditorium at the acoustic design stage.

The State Theatre is in traditional opera-house form, with a large proscenium stage and a three-level auditorium with side boxes. The acoustics are good and a mellow orchestral sound emanates from the pit. The stage is the best in Australia, with 1067 square metres of space, a fly tower incorporating 111 lines and facilities for trucking in complete settings from each side and the rear. It opened with the Australian Opera's production of Fiddler on the Roof. The Playhouse is the major performing space for the Melbourne Theatre Company, which opened it with a production of Euripides's Medea. It has a modified thrust in front of a proscenium stage of 321 square metres, with fly tower. The seating, on two levels, fans out close to the stage, giving an impression of intimacy, but behind this the auditorium is more narrowly rectilinear.

The George Fairfax Studio opened with the Playbox Theatre Company's production of Jack Hibberd's A Stretch of the Imagination. It is fairly typical of the flat-floored, box-type spaces that have become popular as experimental theatres, or studio theatres for professionals, amateurs and students. Comfortable pull-out 'bleachers' seat 250-400, depending on which of the six staging modes is chosen - theatre-in-the-round, corner stage, thrust stage, centre stage, end stage or proscenium stage. There is an access walkway halfway up and all round the walls. The theatres building also houses restaurants and gallery space, and the concert hall building houses the temporary exhibitions of the Performing Arts Museum.