The MacRobertson Girls’ High School buildings are a series of

heritage-listed This list is of heritage registers, inventories of cultural properties, natural and man-made, tangible and intangible, movable and immovable, that are deemed to be of sufficient heritage value to be separately identified and recorded. In many ...

buildings constructed on the site of the

Mac.Robertson Girls' High School , motto_translation = Mastery of self , established = , type = Government-funded single-sex selective secondary day school , principal = Sue Harrap , location = South Melbourne, Victoria , country = Australia , coordi ...

, located on the

Kings Way Princes Highway is a major road in Australia, extending from Sydney via Melbourne to Adelaide through the states of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. It has a length of (along Highway 1) or via the former alignments of the hi ...

, in ,

South Melbourne South Melbourne is an inner suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3 km south of Melbourne's Central Business District, located within the City of Port Phillip local government area. South Melbourne recorded a population of 11,548 at t ...

, Victoria, Australia. The girls' school and the campus is named in honour of Sir Michael Macpherson Robertson after MacRobertson donated £100,000 to the

State of Victoria Victoria is a state in southeastern Australia. It is the second-smallest state with a land area of , the second most populated state (after New South Wales) with a population of over 6.5 million, and the most densely populated state in Au ...

, £40,000 of which was spent to construct the school. Norman Seabrook of

Seabrook and Fildes Seabrook and Fildes was an Australian architecture practice in Melbourne, Victoria that played a significant role in the introduction of modernist architecture that first occurred in the 1930s. They are most well known for the Dutch modernist ...

architecture practice, designed the building after winning the state-wide design competition with his functional and modern design entry in the Inter-war Functionalist & Moderne style. Constructed in 1934 during centenary celebrations of Victoria, MacRobertson was vital to the progress of

modernist architecture Modern architecture, or modernist architecture, was an architectural movement or architectural style based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete; the idea that form ...

in Australia and essential in the strong re-emergence of the state after the economic downturn of the depression. The building was listed on the

Victorian Heritage Register The Victorian Heritage Register (VHR) lists places deemed to be of cultural heritage significance to the State of Victoria, Australia. It has statutory weight under the Heritage Act 2017. The Minister for Planning is the responsible Minister. H ...

on 23 May 1998 due to the buildings' architectural, historic and social significance to the State of Victoria.

Description

The school was zoned in a functional manner with four wings for different disciplines including classrooms, science rooms, art rooms, and cookery rooms. This allowed for smooth movement between disciplines and also created distinct external courtyard areas around the building. The facade of the building comprises "interlocking cubic forms of differing heights" which is offset by the vertical

clock tower Clock towers are a specific type of structure which house a turret clock and have one or more clock faces on the upper exterior walls. Many clock towers are freestanding structures but they can also adjoin or be located on top of another buildi ...

with white rendered vertical strips. The material Seabrook used were functional while at the same time embracing the typical palette of

De Stijl ''De Stijl'' (; ), Dutch for "The Style", also known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of artists and architects. In a more narrow sense, the term ''De Stijl'' is used to refer to a body o ...

movement by using striking colours of cream brick, red steel framed hopper windows and dark blue glazed brick piers between windows. Internally softer shades of red, blue, yellow, green and black were used. With the use of practical floor finish material such as

linoleum Linoleum, sometimes shortened to lino, is a floor covering made from materials such as solidified linseed oil (linoxyn), Pine Resin, pine resin, ground Cork (material), cork dust, sawdust, and mineral fillers such as calcium carbonate, most com ...

for classrooms, terracotta tiles for corridors and granolithic materials for the stairs and services rooms.

Key influences

It is believed that the main influence of Seabrook's design for MacRobertson Girls’ High School was William Dudok

Hilversum Hilversum () is a city and municipality in the province of North Holland, Netherlands. Located in the heart of the Gooi, it is the largest urban centre in that area. It is surrounded by heathland, woods, meadows, lakes, and smaller towns. Hilvers ...

’s town hall (1923–31).< Both these buildings have similar brickwork, rectilinear interlocking facades, functional planning, open air classrooms, flat roof, industrial aesthetic and a modern interior fitout. The brickwork used in both consists of two stretchers followed by a header in a

Flemish bond Brickwork is masonry produced by a bricklayer, using bricks and Mortar (masonry), mortar. Typically, rows of bricks called ''Course (architecture), courses'' are laid on top of one another to build up a structure such as a brick wall. Bricks ...

with an extra wide and deeply raked horizontal joint which emphasises horizontality, while the cream brickwork emphasised shadows. Seabrook selected local Glen Iris Cream bricks at a time when they were only being used sparingly in buildings such as in polychromatic brickwork. Using the cream brick for the entirety of the building was seen as a modernist approach and set a trend for many future buildings in Victoria.

Design approach

Seabrook had a strong functional design approach to the design of MacRobertson Girls’ High School. He believed that a '' "building must look like what it is, be it a town hall or a destructor plan…" ''. This frame of mind helped in creating the unique and functional design of the building which has had a great impact on

Australian architecture Architecture of Australia has generally been consistent with architectural trends in the wider Western world, with some special adaptations to compensate for distinctive Australian Climate of Australia, climatic and Culture of Australia, cultural ...

. It was the first modernist school constructed in Victoria, at a time when other contemporary schools tended to adopt a variety of Gothic collegiate to

Georgian revival style Georgian architecture is the name given in most English-speaking countries to the set of architectural styles current between 1714 and 1830. It is named after the first four British monarchs of the House of Hanover—George I, George II, Georg ...

in the design. Robin Boyd described the building as an "evolution of modern architecture" in Australia. The differing masses of MacRobertson impart proportion and scale to the building, while the

colour of the articulated red steel hopper windows contrast to the blue glazed brick piers and cream brickwork, helping to break up the facade. Steel windows were not common in schools at this time and are seen as a modernist and functional approach. Seabrook also considered the site in his design, using

native plants In biogeography, a native species is indigenous to a given region or ecosystem if its presence in that region is the result of only local natural evolution (though often popularised as "with no human intervention") during history. The term is equi ...

to embrace the dry, flat

scrubland Shrubland, scrubland, scrub, brush, or bush is a plant community characterized by vegetation dominance (ecology), dominated by shrubs, often also including grasses, Herbaceous plant, herbs, and geophytes. Shrubland may either occur naturally or ...

of South Melbourne. The

flagpole A flagpole, flagmast, flagstaff, or staff is a pole designed to support a flag. If it is taller than can be easily reached to raise the flag, a cord is used, looping around a pulley at the top of the pole with the ends tied at the bottom. The fla ...

and

are also significant in his design and can be seen in many of Seabrook's later work.

Gallery

MacRobertson Girls' High School's courtyard.JPG, MacRobertson Girls' High School's courtyard The School's characteristic clock tower with two white rendered vertical strips.JPG, The School's characteristic clock tower with two white rendered vertical strips Red hopper windows with blue tiled piers in between.JPG, Red hopper windows with blue tiled piers in between

References

External links