Cromwell Building, and postmodern Pavilion

10 July 2024

This great stonking pile was called the Cromwell Building, and once stood on the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth. Five floors of projecting pilasters, deep set windows, big circular windows in the ‘attic’ floor, and two stubby towers.

It was built in late 1891, and designed by a team of DC Askew, who with Twentyman did the Block Arcade at the same time, and Wight & Lucas, who did a great series of Mannerist banks, so together they piled up details in a very mixed up Mannerist way.

Found a great ad from 1892 for the office of a cure all sanatorium. The @library_vic has a couple of great photos of the Fox Art Academy, which was there 1935-40. The main photo is 1954, when Coles & Garrard Optometrists was a main tenant.

It was demolished c1970 for a much larger brown brick office block also called Cromwell (pic 1971 Museums Vic), which was itself demolished about 25 later, rather surprisingly for something much smaller, 3 levels of retail called the Pavilion, completed in 1995. It had a cute parasol column (seen in 2014 streetview) which was pretty much a copy of the ones at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building, but that bit was gone by 2016.

26 November 2024

A little bit of Lost Postmodern Melbourne : Giant mushroom on bourke street. One of the wierder buildings in the city. The ‘Pavilion’ was built 1995 with a bunch of stairs and escalators meant to make all 4 levels of shops accessible but just made all the entrances confusing, and now the upper levels are just offices. This column was no doubt channelling the famous columns of the 1936 #johnsonwax building in Wisconsin, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. His design was famous because he had to prove that the very thin things would support the roof by piling sandbags on top of a test one until it collapsed. They’re still standing today, unlike our much fatter version, which was cracking up by 2013, then gone by 2016.