Architecture in Counterpoint: ANAM and the Renewal of South Melbourne Town Hall

There is a particular intelligence required to work with an old building. The architect inherits somebody else’s decisions: proportions, materials, spatial hierarchies, ambitions, scars and peculiarities. Each becomes part of the material of the project. The architectural task is to understand what carries significance, what can change and how new architecture can enter into conversation with what is already there.

The renewal of South Melbourne Town Hall by Peter Elliott Architecture + Urban Design for the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) demonstrates the potential of this approach.

Designed by Charles Webb and opened in 1879, the Town Hall accommodated an extraordinary collection of functions behind its imposing civic exterior: council chambers, public hall, Mechanics Institute, library, courthouse, police facilities, post and telegraph offices, fire brigade and residences.

Webb was an important figure in nineteenth-century Melbourne architecture, responsible for buildings including the Grand Hotel, now The Hotel Windsor, and Tasma Terrace in East Melbourne, now the headquarters of the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). The connection is particularly fitting: two Webb buildings continuing their public and cultural lives through contemporary occupation.

Peter Elliott has described South Melbourne Town Hall as effectively “several buildings in one”, with more than fifty rooms, each with its own particular character.

This complexity is central to the project. The building has always been an assemblage of civic functions, spaces and patterns of occupation. Adaptation becomes part of its architectural history.

ANAM is already embedded within that history. It first occupied the Town Hall in 1997, following the amalgamation of the former municipalities and the relocation of civic functions to St Kilda. Serious structural problems culminated in the 2018 roof collapse, and the Academy eventually relocated to the historic Abbotsford Convent, another substantial institutional building given a new cultural life.

There is an appealing symmetry in an institution devoted to musical interpretation occupying architecture that itself requires interpretation.

The nineteenth-century civic building remains legible. Contemporary interventions establish a new layer of occupation with its own technical, spatial and cultural requirements. The renewed complex will contain the reimagined 350-seat Main Hall alongside a new 150-seat performance venue, rehearsal and recording facilities, teaching and practice spaces, a foyer, bar and lounge, catering facilities and public gathering spaces.

The architectural significance of the project lies partly in the difficulty of accommodating this program within a heritage building. Contemporary performance spaces carry exacting requirements. Acoustics, structure, servicing, circulation, accessibility, lighting, theatre infrastructure and back-of-house movement all require careful spatial resolution. Major structural and acoustic work is being integrated into the existing fabric, including seismic strengthening, an acoustically treated Main Hall roof, rigging, catwalks and acoustic reflectors.

Even the new lift reveals something about the relationship between program and architecture: it must accommodate a Steinway grand piano or a marimba.

These practical requirements are fundamental to the architecture. Successful adaptive reuse resolves them with precision and retains the spatial and material qualities that give the building its significance. Restoration becomes an active architectural process.

Good poetry is shaped through the careful placement of words, spaces, pauses and silences. A line acquires force through its relationship with everything around it. Adaptive reuse operates under a similar discipline.

Every intervention in a heritage building is an editorial decision. A worn surface may contain valuable evidence of occupation. A damaged element may require careful reconstruction. A later addition may have acquired significance of its own. A new intervention may require a clearly contemporary expression. Decisions about removal carry architectural weight alongside decisions about addition.

Restraint becomes an active design skill. The architect establishes a hierarchy of intervention: what is significant, what is useful, what can accommodate change and where contemporary architecture can make its contribution. The quality of the finished building depends upon the intelligence of those judgements.

Elliott’s long experience with civic, institutional, educational and cultural architecture is particularly relevant here. His practice has repeatedly worked with buildings where public identity, institutional function and architectural character overlap, including projects at Parliament House, RMIT and Monash University. South Melbourne Town Hall demands this degree of judgement because its value resides in its physical fabric and its accumulated occupation. Its architecture contains evidence of government, justice, education, domestic life, civic ceremony and community gathering. ANAM adds another layer to these histories. The strongest adaptive reuse projects allow buildings to accumulate time.

History remains a verb.

There are distinguished international precedents for this approach. At Snape Maltings in Suffolk, nineteenth-century industrial buildings associated with the malt trade acquired an extraordinary second life through music. Their robust brick architecture became integral to their cultural occupation. Material character, industrial scale and existing spatial qualities contribute directly to the experience of performance.

At the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Herzog & de Meuron retained the massive brick Kaispeicher warehouse as the physical and conceptual base for an entirely new concert hall above it. The immense solidity of the former warehouse supports the crystalline cultural building rising above. Two architectural periods form a single composition. Across the world, former power stations, railway buildings, factories, churches and civic structures have become compelling cultural spaces. Their architectural character comes from qualities developed through time: scale derived from former uses, unusual structures, material patina, spatial irregularity and collective memory.

Adaptive reuse gives contemporary cultural architecture access to this accumulated richness. South Melbourne Town Hall belongs to this wider architectural tradition, with a distinctly local civic character. Its strength lies in continuity: a public building continuing to serve a public and cultural purpose through a new form of occupation. ANAM is returning to a building with which it already has a history. The project carries the qualities of renewal and homecoming.

A building for listening: Town halls were traditionally architecture for speaking. They embodied civic authority. Councils deliberated, courts pronounced judgement, politicians addressed citizens, ceremonies were conducted and public decisions announced. Their rooms, thresholds, stairs, chambers and halls gave architectural form to civic life. ANAM introduces a new pattern of occupation. A music academy requires rooms for intense individual concentration and collective performance; spaces for teaching, experimentation, rehearsal, conversation and silence. The architecture must negotiate different acoustic conditions within the same building. A practice room, recording space, foyer and concert hall each demand a particular relationship between sound, enclosure, material and volume. Acoustics becomes an architectural matter. Sound influences spatial sequence, separation, material selection, thresholds and the relationship between intimate and collective spaces.

The consultation with Aunty Gail and Aunty Julieanne of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation adds another dimension to the conception of gathering. Peter Elliott has spoken of cultural knowledge informing ways audiences might gather in intimate configurations for music, dance and culture alongside conventional performance arrangements. This expands the architectural understanding of the site and its heritage. The Town Hall forms one part of a much longer cultural history of place.

The project brings together several traditions of gathering: First Nations understandings of place and culture, nineteenth-century European models of civic assembly, twentieth-century community occupation and twenty-first-century musical education and performance. These layers give the project cultural and architectural depth.

Continuity through use; Heritage buildings are living cultural assets. Their significance develops through architecture, memory, occupation and use. Adaptive reuse allows these qualities to accumulate and gives buildings the capacity to remain culturally relevant across generations.

South Melbourne Town Hall has already demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for reinvention. It has accommodated municipal government, law, postal services, education, emergency services, domestic occupation and music. Each use has contributed to the identity of the building. The current project becomes the latest chapter in that history. When ANAM returns, the building will carry its nineteenth-century civic origins together with the accumulated history of the intervening century and a half. Contemporary musical life becomes another layer within that architectural memory. Old masonry and new acoustics. Civic ceremony and experimental performance. Restoration and invention. Memory and anticipation. The formal scale of the Main Hall and the intimacy of smaller rooms. Architecture conceived for one society and carefully adapted for another.

The success of Peter Elliott Architecture’s work will ultimately be judged through the relationship between these layers: the clarity of the existing building, the precision of the new interventions, the quality of the performance spaces and the ease with which a complex contemporary institution occupies a nineteenth-century civic structure.

Adaptive reuse sustains heritage value through intelligent architectural decisions and continued occupation. South Melbourne Town Hall has the potential to become an important Australian example of cultural adaptive reuse. Its significance will come from the care with which architecture, heritage, acoustics, cultural knowledge and contemporary public life are brought together.

The building has already lived many lives. ANAM becomes part of its continuing history.