Site Overview
site name:
South Lawn and Carpark
architects (landscape) :
Rayment and Stones, and Rayment & Associates
architects:
Ancher, Mortlock, Murray & Woolley
(Master planner: Bryce Mortlock)
Engineers and Planners: Loder and Bayly (significantly Richard [Dick] van der Molen).
Landscape Architects: Rayment and Stones
date of commission:
Carpark 1970 / Lawn 1972
date of completion:
Carpark 1972 / Lawn 1974
address:
South Lawn, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria
classification/typology:
Garden and Car Park (Landscape)
protection status:
Victorian Heritage Register (H1004) (the landscape of the South Lawn is not included in the VHR listing)
National Trust of Australia Heritage Register Victoria (B6479)
The Underground Car Park is part of a Heritage Overlay (HO342) that does not include the South Lawn but does include some of the surrounding buildings.
DOCOMOMO Australia
Fiche author:
Associate Professor Andrew Saniga, October 2023.
HISTORY
The Underground Car Park was an essential initiative within a radical masterplan developed for the University of Melbourne by Sydney-based architectural and planning firm Ancher Mortlock Murray and Woolley in 1970. Their masterplan advocated a set of urban design principles including consistency of paving and furnishings; the development of courtyard garden spaces; pedestrianisation and removal of roads; and crucially, the creation of a large underground car park on the site of the University’s historic South Lawn. The car park was an essential part of the plan to remove cars from the grounds. It was also to provide the structural support for a new South Lawn landscape above. This effectively created a modern roof-top garden in place of the nineteenth-century landscape (to a masterplan by landscape designer Edward La Trobe Bateman) that had prevailed, albeit significantly eroded in extent and quality by uncontrolled development of the early-to-mid twentieth century.
Description
The site of the South Lawn and Underground Car Park is around 1.2 hectares and is located adjacent to key buildings at the historic core of the Parkville Campus of the University of Melbourne. The Underground Car Park is characterized by a grid of innovatively designed structural supporting reinforced concrete shells and columns surrounded by car spaces that cater for approximately 370 cars. The car park space included some of the University’s essential services around its perimeter (such as gas lines etc) that linked the site with the greater campus. The South Lawn landscape mostly occupies the top of the car park but extends to an average of 30-40 metres beyond the structure, especially to the west adjacent the Baillieu Library. The landscape design is a unique synthesis of Rayment’s international modern landscape design aesthetic combined with Stones’ post-WWII ‘bush garden’ aesthetic, the latter of which is used to conceal the imposing concrete wall of the car park on its western side. The design’s main pedestrian axis is in the orientation of the original South Lawn axis, preserving the ceremonial entrance to the Parkville campus and its address to the original Quadrangle Building.
The Underground Car Park is constructed largely of hyperbolic paraboloid reinforced concrete structural shells and columns designed by engineer Richard (Dick) van der Molen of Loder and Bayly (formerly of Harris Lange and Partners). The tops of the columns are finished as rectangular shells approximately 8.5 x 10 metres that are filled with soil and capable of sustaining large (deciduous) trees. Water drainage through a specifically designed structured soil profile occurs via the core of the columns. Reinforced concrete panels form the walls and the car park surface is largely paved in asphalt. Two of the car park’s three pedestrian portals are created with recycled heritage fabric: the ‘Dublin’ door (from a 1745 house in St Stephen’s Green, Dublin); and, the ‘Colonial Bank’ door (two Atlas figures from a demolished bank in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne). The roof of the car park is the landscape of the South Lawn and is constructed in soft and hard landscape elements including: extensive brick paving, garden beds and lawn areas; avenue planting of large deciduous trees; a long rectangular shallow reflecting pool; a zig-zagging continuous timber bench seat and free-standing timber bench seats; a cenotaph relocated from the original South Lawn; a series of ‘bog gardens’ containing water-tolerant plant species; and, granite boulder terracing.
The Underground Car Park is of technical significance for its unusualness in terms of reinforced concrete ‘vaulted’ forms, its versatility and overall expression. Its technical significance extends to the symbiotic relationship developed between the engineering of the underground car park structure and the landscape enabled by that structure.
The Underground Car Park is of Social Significance in that it is a core public open space within the university community, playing host to vital pedestrian access routes, passive use, informal and informal gatherings, major events and cultural activities in the cycle of the University’s academic calendar, including the annual ANZAC Day war memorial services. The moving of the cenotaph from its subordinate position at the north-east corner of the site at the time of the South Lawn’s construction in the 1970s when ANZAC Day was less popular to its current site that affords larger gatherings inadvertently registers changing social values across four decades.
The Underground Car Park is of Aesthetic Significance because of the innovative, elegant and dramatic reinforced concrete hyperbolic paraboloid structural shells and columns in the context of the utilitarian purpose it fulfils.
The landscape of the South Lawn is aesthetically significant as a roof-top garden that integrates an array of disparate building forms that had encroached upon the historic nineteenth-century South Lawn. The South Lawn is aesthetically distinctive as a modern landscape that has mostly erased its nineteenth-century form but has simultaneously preserved a large green open space in the heart of the Parkville Campus. The landscape elements of the South Lawn, in particular the paving (‘University Grey’ bricks specifically produced for the University) and furniture (timber bench seating, rubbish bins and lighting) formed the progenitor for a suite of landscape elements across campus that have created a harmonious urban design for the campus.
The Underground Car Park is of Historic Significance as being an extraordinary car park for its time and in the Australian context, being concealed beneath a landscape and almost fully enclosed. The car park’s designers were of a high calibre who worked on influential projects and include: award-winning Sydney architect Bryce Mortlock and AMMW; John Loder and John Bayly of Loder and Bayly; and, Richard (Dick) van der Molen who is associated with significant mid-twentieth century projects in Victoria such as the Westgate Bridge. The car park’s two entrances demonstrate the creation of decorative elements formed with recycled heritage fabric. The car park is also significant in terms of public consciousness for its appearance on ABC Television and within the internationally successful Australian film Mad Max (1979).
The South Lawn landscape has played a key role in the modernisation of the Parkville campus’s nineteenth-century landscape character. It is historically significant in that few other of Australia’s ‘Sandstone Universities’ have been redeveloped to such a considerable extent to practically erase their original character. It includes a landscape by two of the founders of the profession of landscape architecture in Australia of the mid-1960s, Ellis Stones and Ronald Rayment, both of whom played highly distinctive roles in the push to institutionalise the profession in Australia (the AILA formed in 1966).
References
Mortlock, B., [Ancher Mortlock Murray & Woolley Pty Ltd Architects and Planners] 1970, University of Melbourne Master Plan Report 1970, Ancher Mortlock Murray & Woolley Pty Ltd Architects and Planners.
Saniga, Andrew, 2012, Making Landscape Architecture in Australia, UNSW Press, Chapter 7.
Lovell Chen, 2011, Underground Car Park and South Lawn The University of Melbourne Conservation Management Plan, Lovell Chen Architects & Heritage Consultants and John Patrick Landscape Architects Pty Ltd.
Other Texts
In December 1968 Sydney-based architecture and planning firm Anchor Mortlock Murray and Woolley Pty Ltd were appointed campus master planners for the University of Melbourne. A key component of their plan was a major new underground car park, and atop, the creation of a reconfigured South Lawn as the campus’s major open space whilst also unifying disparate architectural styles at the University’s core. The car park structure is a unique gridded configuration of innovatively designed concrete shells that formed both the structural support for the roof garden as well as the soil repositories crucial for sustaining vegetation.
The character of most of the site’s landscape came from Ronald Rayment who was inspired by Californian and Scandinavian modernism. His design ethos emphasised human comfort and the relationship between building, site and setting. He used mass planting and strong geometric lines. The path alignment, in part influenced by Mortlock, avoided axiality and the creation of a ceremonial space: a pre-existing war memorial was dispatched to the corner of the site and monumentality eschewed. Circulation was defined by a long rectilinear pool and a continuous zigzagging cedar timber slatted seat. A scheme for a bush garden (1972-3) by Ellis Stones (with Nell Rickard) was an attempt to conceal and soften the impact of the west wall of the car park where its height was at its most prominent, and coincidentally, where it abutted the Vice Chancellor’s residence. A series of terraces were formed from massive boulders the levelled spaces in-between stocked with Australian native plants.
Text adapted from an entry by Andrew Saniga in Australia Modern: Architecture, Landscape and Design 1925-1975, Hannah Lewi and Philip Goad (2019, Thames and Hudson).
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