9 January 2025

A lesser but quite nice work by @dentoncorkermarshall in Flinders Street from 1989, which has suffered a bit since then. As in the first photo (possibly 1989), it once had bright yellow fins, and a stylised cornice. My photos from 2015 show how faded the yellow was by then, and the cornice was gone, and they were setting up to add four floors in an ordinary hey overbearing dark curtain wall. I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t paint the original black. It was built as a carpark, with a skin of offices in front, to avoid the then usual of leaving the cars on display. This was DCM’s early heyday of success, when square grids were their thing, in this case 3x3m, but they also referenced the mainly traditional facades of flinders street, with an expressed thickness in solid masonry, that long gone cornice, and a row of balconies. I seem to recall this was built by the developers of 101 Collins Street to preserve their views. 1st pic from the 2000 monograph on DCM by Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper.

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