Category: Melbourne

There is a specific sound that the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has been developing over the past several years — warmer than a British orchestra at the same tier, more harmonically transparent than the Central European model, possessed of a particular qual…

Melbourne’s theatre culture is often explained through comparison — more productions per capita than London’s West End, more theatre companies per resident than Sydney — as if quantity were the point. The point is not quantity. The point is that Melbourne h…

The address is not incidental. The Koorie Heritage Trust occupies Levels 1 and 3 of the Yarra Building — now increasingly known as the Birrarung Building — at Federation Square, the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets, directly above the river that the…

Alfred Felton died in 1904, having made his fortune in wholesale chemicals and hardware — a practical, unglamorous accumulation of Victorian-era capital. He had no particular public profile as a collector. What he left behind was a bequest divided between c…

The book that Robin Boyd published in 1960 sold ten thousand copies within three years, which is an extraordinary figure for a piece of architectural criticism in any country, let alone one that had never particularly encouraged its architects to argue loud…

There is a particular quality of light that visits the paddocks along Templestowe Road in Bulleen — diffuse, grey-gold, softened by the Yarra’s proximity — that makes Heide feel less like a museum than like a place where something was genuinely at stake. An…

Federation Square opened in 2002 to a reception that was, charitably, divided. The sandstone and zinc facades — fractured into a system of approximately 450,000 triangular and rhomboid panels — struck some observers as aggressively strange, others as insuff…