Manchester Unity
91 Swanston Street
www.mubb.com.au

Built: 1929-1932
Architect: Marcus Barlow

Inspired by the Chicago Tribune Tower (1922), the Manchester Unity Building represented a new faith in commerce and progress in inter-war Melbourne. Manchester Unity was the tallest building in Melbourne in 1932 and the first building in Victoria to have escalators as well as the largest diesel generator at its time in Australia to power three high-speed lifts.

Open to MOH: Level 11 - The Boardroom
Times: 10 am to 5pm
Access restrictions: No disability access, three steps up to enter hallway in foyer, then three steps down to reach boardroom entrance.

The pinnacles of the Manchester Unity Building made it the tallest building in Melbourne when it was finished in 1932. Built during the Depression using round-the-clock eight-hour shifts, the termination of Manchester Unity's corner tower in Commercial Gothic Modern style has its inspiration in Raymond Hood's competition-winning design for the Chicago Tribune Tower (1922).

The building is faced in a gold-brown glazed faience and elaborated by figures of benevolence and charity. As if in commercial challenge to the municipal clock tower of the Melbourne Town Hall and the spires of St Paul's, the size of the limit-height building proclaimed that the new force in the urban skyline was commerce.

The ceiling and upper walls of the ground floor arcade reveal the mores of the day, with sculptural tableaus of industrious Victorians. Outside, the street canopy is a fine example of the sophisticated move from posted verandas to decorated cantilevered canopies.

Perhaps Marcus Barlow's crowning achievement as an architect, it was joined by Barlow's Century Building (1938-40), thus creating one of Melbourne's most distinctive limit-height streetscapes between Swanston and Little Collins streets.

Source: "A guide to Melbourne architecture", by Philip Goad, 1999, p. 129. The Watermark Press, Sydney.
Manchester Unity

Manchester Unity