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Inside the square box: skyscrapers and techno-economic developments in Melbourne Central Business District (1955-1995)

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  • Title:
    Inside the square box: skyscrapers and techno-economic developments in Melbourne Central Business District (1955-1995)
  • Author: MARFELLA, GIORGIO
  • Subjects: architectural theory and history ; Australia, Melbourne ; business cycles ; construction history ; creative destruction ; economic history and geography ; history of technology ; tall office buildings ; United States of America
  • Description: Focusing on the Central Business District of Melbourne between 1955 and 1995, this thesis investigates the evolutionary dynamics of tall office buildings. The investigation is undertaken from a techno-economic perspective that is informed by the testing of four factors of influence in relation to 1) function, 2) public and private stakeholders, 3) architectural form, and 4) building materials and systems. Following an evolutionary path similar to the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction, a building type, consisting of an office tower with square footprints, dominated the production of skyscrapers in Melbourne. After an embryonic stage of genesis, the type evolved in response to public and private needs of prestige and, during times of technological and economic uncertainty, as the materialisation of a quest for integrated efficiency in design. The type then entered a stage of crisis in concomitance with cultural changes in urban planning, a moment of cumulative synthesis in technological innovation, and oversupply of floor space due to increasing speculative activity. This dynamic process of typological evolution was matched by the long wave of a business cycle that began after World War II and terminated with a major economic downturn in the early 1990s. The formal evolution of the dominant building type is discussed with a focus on spatial qualities that are critical for the techno-economic feasibility of office planning. A dataset of buildings in Melbourne CBD provides the empirical evidence that explains the dynamics of transformation of the dominant type and of other, less dominant but not less relevant, tall office building types that were used in the city in the second half of the twentieth century. Technological events of international relevance that developed between Australia and the United States of America in the same period are discussed, and American inputs are identified as a primary influence on the development of skyscrapers in Melbourne. Inferring from the empirical evidence of this retrospective, this study suggests that with a techno-economic investigation centred on four concomitant and interrelated factors of influence, the architectural form of tall buildings can be understood as a critical nexus of large urban transformations and strategic innovations in construction technology. Source: TROVE
  • Creation Date: 2017
  • Language: English
  • Source: Trove Australian Thesis (Full Text Open Access)
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