Opinion 16: Alterations to the Centreway Arcade: Heritage, Trade and the Contemporary Non-project

By Angus Grant

Centreway Arcade, 1987 (Copyright Tim Griffith). RMIT Design Archives

Verschlimmbessern is a German word which describes the peculiar act of making something worse in an honest though misguided attempt to improve it.1 In early 2021, beyond a series of hoardings and CBD lockdowns, such a fate quietly befell the Centreway Arcade. Built in 1911 and renovated in 1987 by Melbourne firm Cocks, Carmichael & Whitford (CCW), the Arcade’s once glib postmodernism was revealed to be now entirely and unexpectedly covered up. Tenants, caught off-guard as they attempted to transition back from Covid 19, mourn a space which has now become unrecognisable, and one which, far from what was once an important counterpoint to the northern edge of Degraves Lane, is now an endless transitional edge. 

Speaking to several of the retailers, the sentiment is one of bewilderment, sadness and mistrust, as propelled by a lack of communication and an increase in rent. A noted lack of engagement with the space has also caused issues in business viability.2 Considering the impacts of this for the building owners themselves, an economic argument for the works seems almost as misguided as an aesthetic one. Blameless, baffling, and so bland as to become almost completely clear, the Centreway Arcade becomes then the perfect lens to view the otherwise obtuse machinations of the built environment. What exactly happened here, and, importantly, what can it tell us of the relationship between commercial space and heritage?

The Arcade Resurfaced

Centreway Arcade, above and below new plasterboard ceiling, 2024. Author's own, 2024.

Entering the arcade from the South, from the cozy warmth of Degraves St and Flinders Lane, one seems expelled rudely up into the limelight, blinking and pushing forward in a daze and at some point coming out the other end. Despite how bright it is at any point in the day, stopping and looking around there is surprisingly little for the eye to land on, nothing at all really to see. Beneath a new white painted plasterboard ceiling I count 24 downlights, 13 shops (8 of which are empty) and one man in my 10 minutes loitering who has stopped to look. At ground level there is almost nothing left of the architects’ original vision of an encapsulated city street, of a space designed to capture pedestrians through references to flagpoles, tramlines, and awnings which shade from an imaginary Western sun. Set in reaction to the ageing Modernist homogeneity of the 1970s city and its city malls,3 the interior is designed as a set piece for the complexity of consumer life, laden with meaning, symbolism, and self-referential humour. Above the atrium, a message reads “We live in a society that sets an inordinate value on consumer goods and services.” Upon reflection, Steve Whitford notes:

The pedestrian is invited to wander, to stop, to ponder, to window shop. There are columns to lean against, steps to sit on, niches in front of shops to stand in and browse. Each element has been designed in isolation and has a power and a presence of its own… Elements are not displaced, but altered to accommodate - a light pole which conflicts with a door is cut off in mid air and suspended over the door. This has an analogy with the city.4

The startling contrast now between the arcade and Degraves Street, the sheer anonymity of it, is nothing however compared to the contrast of what remains untouched above. Perpendicular to the flow of traffic, up a flight of steps, a second level cloister of empty retail spaces sits unaltered beneath the seven story atrium of pastel greens and glass bricks. Hidden above the new plasterboard ceiling and covered in dust, it is a truly remarkable space, and one which earnt Cocks, Carmichael & Whitford an RAIA Award in 1989.5 Regardless of taste, or attitudes towards architecture of this period, it is simply baffling that the amenity provided through the light well is severed so deliberately from the public experience below.

Centreway Arcade Atrium, 1987. This space, above the new plasterboard ceiling, has remained almost completely unchanged (Copyright Tim Griffith).6 RMIT Design Archives

Below the dusty plasterboard and timber framing, below the natural light, it is easy to proclaim this transient setting as overtly liminal, as a textbook fluorescent ‘non-place’ reminiscent of the subterranean backrooms spaces so often aestheticised online.7 Yet an aesthetic liminal critique here is perhaps both the most simplistic and the most disingenuous, as it reduces a group of real people and real businesses to an aesthetic curiosity. Marc Auge’s non-place implies a sort of passiveness, of a sort of found condition to be kept at a distance, to be moved through and observed.8 This setting, however, is not one which has emerged, but one which was actively pursued, documented, costed and built. It is a specific and costly intervention, a deliberate non-project, coy in its timing and brazen in its erasure of an intact and importantly viable existing space.   

There are two possible explanations for what has happened here. One, more logical, more innocuous - that the works done to the arcade are simply an overzealous risk-mitigation strategy on behalf of the new building owner - measures designed to bring the building up to meet current codes and compliances, perhaps as a result of a trip, slip or claim. Safety flooring, bright lights, new locks and roller shutters on the ground floor tenancies, a new ceiling to stop the leaking atrium when it rains.9   

The other extension to this, and indeed a risk mitigation strategy in its own right, is a reaction to the presentation of the building itself. As it had stood, the CCW interior was a clear candidate for heritage protection and on several lists of places at risk.10 If protected, it would have become the first post-modern interior in the CBD to be specifically listed on the Victorian Heritage Register (VHR). Despite the building being listed at a state level by the National Trust and named under a Heritage Overlay by the City of Melbourne, these protections did not extend to the interior itself.11 As it stood, the alterations to the Centreway Arcade were entirely permissible, and, given their speed and timing, can be read cynically as a direct reaction against the perceived threat of subsequent protection.  

Furthermore, such a strategy is not without precedent - most notably in the case of the Palace Theatre, Bourke Street, where original interior fittings and surfaces were stripped in clandestine works just days before a 2014 City of Melbourne vote on their protection.12 In the subsequent VCAT approval of a 12-storey development at the location, council members noted that despite the accepted significance of the interior, recent demolition works had “limited that legibility.”13 Perhaps the fear that the Palace Theatre case would embolden developers into similar action is justified. Without any comment provided by the new owners here, however, one can only speculate on the motive behind the works.

Between Retail and Heritage

To understand this perceived risk, or threat, is to understand a conflict which is latent in many more buildings of this age and type - specifically, it is a conflict between retail space and architectural space, as compounded by the perceived function of heritage as an agent within this. It is also the reason that both the Centreway Arcade and the Palace theatre interiors were not listed, whilst the external built envelopes were.

Put simply, heritage and trade act at different speeds. In a commercial setting, spaces are seen as malleable, hard working assets, necessarily responsive to shifts in future market value and perceived currents in taste. For all but the most basic of retail interiors, each new tenancy provokes a ‘refresh’ of the internal experience,14 and the fluidity of built fabric and planning in allowing for this prefigures a precarious and symbiotic relationship between the architecture and its ongoing use. This relationship has been explored and exploited by architects since at least the middle of the 20th century, and is a lucrative bastion of work for large European firms such as OMA, Foster & Partners, Bjarke Ingels Group, etc.15 Speaking of the recent works to the Kaufhaus des Westens department store in Berlin, OMA design lead Ellen van Loon notes:

You can decide the position of main entrances, main circulation routes, escalators, voids etc., but the rest has to be adaptable. Retail changes every five years and investments like the transformation we proposed for KaDeWe need to work for 20 or more. 16

Note the pointed use of the word investments. There is an inherent syncopation to the pace of retail and architectural alterations, one in which for most cases the pre-existing state of the building fabric, ‘heritage’ or otherwise, loses out. Indeed, heritage and trade have always measured time differently. Writing a letter to the Paris Prefecture in 1979, the director of the Galeries Lafayette, Etienne Moulin, states this point perhaps most clearly. Having demolished the department store’s grand, ceremonial staircase several years before in order to increase retail space, Moulin pleads to the city that they abstain from their campaigning, lest that the heritage protection of the interior and the grand stained glass dome slow him down.17

Galleries Lafayette, Paris, internal atrium. The grand, sweeping staircase was removed to facilitate an increase in ground floor retail space in the 1970s. Author's own, 2024.

Since its inception, to quote Moulin, commercial activity has been une activité faite de décisions en général rapides. From a retailers perspective, heritage protections serve only to dislocate the asset out of a necessarily rapid state of flux, to precipitate it away from future works and future speculative value. From the investor’s perspective, in the case of the Centreway Arcade, it appears an asset has been acquired and subsequently protected from the crystalline spectre of heritage itself. 

Clearly, however, not all within a commercial setting view heritage in this way. Beyond a superficial heritage aesthetic that has now become de rigueur in outer suburban cafes and gentrified hotel lobbies alike (think edison bulbs, exposed brickwork, huge mugs), many building owners are expressing interest in the elusive placemaking power of their heritage assets.18 The conflict described above is certainly not one of ignorance, nor failing taste. Since the early 1980s, researchers into holistic theories in the retail industries have been aware of the commercial benefits of the broader retail experience, through an ‘atmospherics’ of light, sound, music and importantly place.19 As an avenue for commercial success, then, the conversion of retail spaces into places of intrigue and historical connection should be both unsurprising and expected.20

Postmodernism Revived 

What makes the placelessness of the Centreway Arcade so intriguing, however, is the broader timing of its erasure. While so much of the heritage conversation centres around relatively stable public attitudes towards our 19th century building stock, the 1987 interior appeared poised to gain from a renaissance in public ‘pomo’ affection. 

Flattened through the image power of social media and rebranded as maximalist, postmodern aesthetics have seen a return in bright colours, textures and forms.21 Walking into any upmarket design store (or indeed the Melbourne Design Fair in the last few years) one finds a scene reminiscent of any number of 1980s Memphis Group exhibitions, covertly repositioned as a reaction against 2010s minimalism and the austerity of the Covid years.

Postmodern revival. Sculpture in the lobby of the newly renovated Palace Theatre, Bourke Street (now Le Méridien, Melbourne). Artwork: The Cossack, the Queen and Candy, no. 2, Marta Figueiredo, 2019. Author's own, 2024.

Given the propensity too for design aesthetics to spread upwards through all scales - from digital design to furniture and then at some stage to architecture - we should therefore expect to see a revived public interest in the readymade and as yet undervalued aesthetic of our ageing 1980s and 1990s building stock. With a few more years, perhaps, a culturally savvy international property investor (if there is such a thing) might have seen the Centreway Arcade as an appreciating asset, might have retained its features and its tenants and even perhaps have celebrated the stopping power of its quirky and self-referential commercial setting. An optimistic believer in the cyclical nature of public taste might even have seen the Centreway Arcade as analogous to the nearby Mid-Century Campbell Arcade, which was similarly unloved fourty years after its construction.22    

Instead, we lament a missed opportunity. We have learnt again that developers are not a group to be counted on for the cultural foresight required to sustain our built heritage. We are forced to accept a system which is necessarily hamstrung by the shifting requirements of commercial buildings - one which focuses on precints rather than internal places23 - and we can only wait to see what fate will befall similarly unprotected Post-Modern interiors - notably the 1996 Paramount Centre, Bourke Street, which is as intact as it is brilliantly undervalued. Madeline Lo-Booth, in a recent review of the centre for Memo, presents a building born of the same capitalist, commercial self-interests which now threaten its survival.24 Regarding what can be done to withstand these forces, I can only suggest voting with one’s feet. Reframe the consumer’s role in these commercial settings as an active heritage engagement. Eat dinner at the Paramount Food Court on a Tuesday night and call it conservation: 

Preservation itself is a forward-thinking celebration of life, that it is a way of looking at something that seems to be fading or gone and incubating new life within it.25  

Internal food court at the Paramount Centre, Bourke Street (1996). Author’s own, 2024.

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Notes:

1. The phrase, in this context, is borrowed from a user in the Melbourne subreddit. The same thread shows a good comparison of the arcade before and after the recent works, including a photograph of the now demolished fourth-dimension clock: Zealousideal_Ad642 comment on “Centreway Arcade: before and after renovations,” reddit, 2024, https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/yp3fps/centreway_arcade_before_and_after_renovations/

2. Speaking to one of the store managers who had seen several longstanding co-tenants move away or online, the experience was now that shoppers would hurry through, heads down, rarely stopping.

3. “Re-presenting the City: Cocks, Carmichael, Whitford’s Centreway Arcade,” Transitions (Summer 1987), 81

4. Steve Whitford, Centreway Arcade press copy, 1987, Robin Cocks Peter Carmichael Collection, accession number 0018.2015.0050, RMIT Design Archives

5. Whitford notes the intention for the ceiling here to be read as an abstraction of the sky, designed from different points to appear reminiscent of blue and bright clouds, of storms, sunshine, and of changes over a day. In re-encountering the architects’ written intent almost 40 years later, it is remarkable how much abstract reference and thinking is bound up in each formal and material decision. Layers of symbolism almost as thick as the dust. 

6. Tim tells me he distinctly remembers walking around the space with Steve Whitford, hearing about all the little cultural references contained within the design and materials. Particularly the subversive, anti-materialism text spelled out by the lettering on the south end wall.

7. For an overview of the relationship between liminality and architecture, see Cathy Smith, “Looking for Liminality in Architectural Space,” Limen Journal (January 2001), https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cathy-Smith-11/publication/326675016_Looking_for_Liminality_in_Architectural_Space/links/5b5d563e458515c4b2502207/Looking-for-Liminality-in-Architectural-Space.pdf; For an introduction to the aesthetic appeal of liminal spaces, see Karl Emil Koch, “Architecture: the Cult Following of Liminal Space,” Musée Magazine (November 2, 2020), https://museemagazine.com/features/2020/11/1/the-cult-following-of-liminal-space?rq=liminal

8. See Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 1995), 61-94.

9. I am told by a tenant that one of the only remaining pleasures in the new arcade is in hearing the same leaking roof drip down on the new plasterboard ceiling above.

10. See for example Melbourne Heritage Action, “Melbourne’s Best Unprotected Interiors,” accessed 25 August 2024, https://melbourneheritageaction.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/mha_top_unprotected_interiors.pdf

11. National Trust, Centreway Arcade, classified 14 Oct 1992, http://vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au/search/nattrust_result_detail/64715. Note that the National Trust is a community led Non-Government Organisation, and as such has no statutory power - that is, the state level listing of the Centreway Arcade provides no formal protection at all; Victorian Government Department of Transport and Planning, Schedule to Clause 43.01 Heritage Overlay, Yarra Planning Scheme, last updated 25 July 2024, https://planning-schemes.app.planning.vic.gov.au/MELBOURNE/ordinance/43.01-s. HO594 (pertaining to 259-263 Collins Street, Melbourne) lists external paint controls, along with solar energy system controls, but no internal alteration controls.

12. See Aisha Dow, “Outrage as workers begin ripping out Palace Theatre interior before council heritage decision,” The Age, November 20, 2014, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/outrage-as-workers-begin-ripping-out-palace-theatre-interior-before-council-heritage-decision-20141120-11qk7b.html

13. Jinshan Investment Group Pty Ltd v Melbourne CC [2016] VCAT 626, http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VCAT/2016/626.html

14. The obligatory ‘refresh’ is so fundamental to the turnover of new retail spaces that it seems more important that the space appears new, rather than ascribing to any particular taste. Note that tobacco and vape stores have emerged as an interesting exception to this.

15. OMA has been at the forefront of this enterprise since at least 2001 - see the much publicised Prada Epicentre in New York, 2001, and The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, published almost simultaneously in January 2002.

16. Victoria Camblin, “Retail Has Become a Game of Seduction: OMA's Ellen van Loon on the new KaDeWe Experience,” 032c (March 16, 2022), https://032c.com/magazine/retail-has-become-a-game-of-seduction-ellen-van-loon-on-the-new-Kadewe-experience-retail-redesign-berlin

17. Etienne Moulin, letter to the Paris Prefecture, 1979 (Courtesy Galeries Lafayette Heritage and Archives department collection)

18. Some examples locally: works to the Bendigo Mining Exchange (Williams Boag Architects, 2020), Collingwood Yards (Fieldwork, 2022); Overseas, Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice (OMA, 2009-2016), Shipyard 1862 (Kengo Kuma,2011-2017)

19. See Turley, Lou W., and Ronald E. Milliman. "Atmospheric effects on shopping behaviour: a review of the experimental evidence." Journal of business research 49, no. 2 (2000): 193-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0148-2963(99)00010-7; See Bie Plevoets, “Retail-Reuse: an interior view on adaptive reuse of buildings,” PhD diss., (Universiteit Hasselt), 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1942/17167. Plevoets notes however that “a study on the tension between retail and heritage preservation from the smaller scale - the interior - does not exist so far”

20. Spaces, like outer space, are non-specific, intangible, hostile. To quote the late David Yenken, “We move through space; we stop in with places.” see David Yenken, “Perspectives on Placemaking,” in Places, not Spaces: Placemaking in Australia, eds. Leanne Barnes (Sydney: Envirobook, 1995), 11-19.

21. See Rebecca L. Gross, Ornament is not a Crime (Sydney: Thames & Hudson Australia, 2023). “After decades of minimalism, mid-century modern and Scandinavian design, the distinctive visual language, bright colours and unexpected materials of the 80s postmodernists are making a comeback”

22. See Megan Clune, “20 Years of Platform Gallery,” Broadsheet, December 8, 2010, https://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbourne/art-and-design/article/20-years-platform-gallery.  “In 1994 the Flinders Street underpass was so neglected that pedestrians preferred to huddle up the narrow stairs onto Flinders Street rather than brave whatever lurked beneath.”

23. Again, this is to be expected. Broadly, Australian attitudes towards heritage are most often engaged with from the street, and public sentiment towards Interior Heritage seems to reflect this. When asked what should be prioritised for inclusion in the VHR, respondents to a 2023 Heritage Council poll noted Interior Heritage as less important than maritime and even infrastructural heritage. Heritage Council Victoria, Future directions of the Victorian Heritage Register: 2023 Public Survey Summary Report (Heritage Council Victoria: Melbourne, 2023), https://heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/HCV-FutureDirectionsOfTheVHR-2023SurveySummaryReport.pdf

24. Madeline Lo-Booth, “The Paramount Centre,” Memo Review, October 2, 2024, https://www.memoreview.net/reviews/the-paramount-centre

25. Mark Wigley, “Introduction” in Preservation is Overtaking Us, eds. Jordan Carver (Columbia: GSSAP Transcripts, 2014). https://www.arch.columbia.edu/books/reader/6-preservation-is-overtaking-us

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References:

Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. New York: Verso, 1995.

Camblin, Victoria. “Retail Has Become a Game of Seduction: OMA's Ellen van Loon on the new KaDeWe Experience.” 032c (March 16, 2022). https://032c.com/magazine/retail-has-become-a-game-of-seduction-ellen-van-loon-on-the-new-Kadewe-experience-retail-redesign-berlin 

Clune, Megan. “20 Years of Platform Gallery.” Broadsheet. December 8, 2010. https://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbourne/art-and-design/article/20-years-platform-gallery 

Gross, Rebecca L. Ornament is not a Crime. Sydney: Thames & Hudson Australia, 2023. 

Heritage Council Victoria. Future directions of the Victorian Heritage Register: 2023 Public Survey Summary Report. Melbourne: Heritage Council Victoria, 2023.  https://heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/HCV-FutureDirectionsOfTheVHR-2023SurveySummaryReport.pdf

Koch, Karl Emil. “Architecture: the Cult Following of Liminal Space.” Musée Magazine (November 2, 2020). https://museemagazine.com/features/2020/11/1/the-cult-following-of-liminal-space?rq=liminal

Lo-Booth, Madeline. “The Paramount Centre.” Memo Review, October 2, 2024. https://www.memoreview.net/reviews/the-paramount-centre

Plevoets, Bie. “Retail-Reuse: an interior view on adaptive reuse of buildings.” PhD, Universiteit Hasselt, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1942/17167

Smith, Cathy. “Looking for Liminality in Architectural Space.” Limen Journal 1 (January 2001). https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cathy-Smith-11/publication/326675016_Looking_for_Liminality_in_Architectural_Space/links/5b5d563e458515c4b2502207/Looking-for-Liminality-in-Architectural-Space.pdf

Turley, Lou W., and Ronald E. Milliman. "Atmospheric effects on shopping behaviour: a review of the experimental evidence." Journal of business research 49, no. 2 (2000): 193-211. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0148-2963(99)00010-7

Yenken, David. “Perspectives on Placemaking.” In Places, not Spaces: Placemaking in Australia, edited by Leanne Barnes (Sydney: Envirobook, 1995), 11-19.

Wigley, Mark. “Introduction.” In Preservation is Overtaking Us, edited by Jordan Carver. Columbia: GSSAP Transcripts, 2014. https://www.arch.columbia.edu/books/reader/6-preservation-is-overtaking-us

“Re-presenting the City: Cocks, Carmichael, Whitford’s Centreway Arcade.” Transitions (Summer 1987): 80-84

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Image credit:

Angus Grant

Tim Griffith