MOH 2008 HAS CONCLUDED

Born in 1890, Marcus Barlow was one of Melbourne's most successful commercial architects of the first half of the twentieth century. An early and vocal promoter of the bungalow as a house type, Barlow championed in 1917 the new house form as 'A Servantless House'. The partnership of Grainger & Barlow (1914-1917), then Grainger, Little & Barlow (1917-22), and subsequently Grainger, Little, Barlow & Hawkins (1922-24), designed many such houses and had them published in the popular press.

By the late 1920s, Barlow had shifted the focus of his practice to commercial office design. With FGB Hawkins as a partner (1924-27), he designed the highrise Renaissance palazzo of Temple Court, Collins Street. Barlow's masterpiece was the Manchester Unity Building (1929-32), a modern Gothic skyscraper completed during the Depression and an icon of limit height inter-war office building in central Melbourne. The vertically streamlined Century Building followed in 1938-40 and then, further up Swanston Street, the MU Oddfellows House (later Jensen House) of 1941.

A designer whose choice of style and construction followed a pragmatic reading of modernity and fashion, Barlow epitomised the commercially shrewd professional practitioner. He died in 1955 aged 65.

Source: "A guide to Melbourne architecture", by Philip Goad, 1999, p. 245. The Watermark Press, Sydney.