The MacRobertson Girls’ High School buildings are a series of

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

buildings constructed on the site of the

Mac.Robertson Girls' High School The Mac.Robertson Girls' High School (also known simply as Mac.Rob or MGHS) is a government-funded single-sex academically selective secondary day school, located in Albert Park, Victoria, Australia. Entry for Mac.Rob, which is operated by th ...

, 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 high ...

, in ,

South Melbourne South Melbourne is an inner suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 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 the 2021 ...

, 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, commonly abbreviated as Vic, is a state in southeastern Australia. It is the second-smallest state (after Tasmania), with a land area of ; the second-most-populated state (after New South Wales), with a population of over 7 million; ...

, $40,000 of which was spent to construct the school. Norman Seabrook of Seabrook and Fildes 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, also called modernist architecture, or the modern movement, is an architectural architectural movement, movement and architectural style, style that was prominent in the 20th century, between the earlier Art Deco Architectu ...

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. ...

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 that 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 building ...

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 (, ; 'The Style') was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 by a group of artists and architects based in Leiden (Theo van Doesburg, Jacobus Oud, J.J.P. Oud), Voorburg (Vilmos Huszár, Jan Wils) and Laren, North Holland, Laren (Piet Mo ...

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 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 commonly on a Hessian fabric, hes ...

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 Willem Marinus Dudok (6 July 1884 – 6 April 1974) was a famous Dutch modernist architect. He was born in Amsterdam. He became City Architect for the town of Hilversum in 1928 where he was best known for the brick Hilversum Town Hall, compl ...

Hilversum Hilversum () is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of North Holland, Netherlands. Located in the heart of the Gooi, it is ...

’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 Flemish bond is a pattern of brickwork that is a common feature in Georgian architecture. The pattern features bricks laid lengthwise (''stretchers'') alternating with bricks laid with their shorter ends exposed (''headers'') within the same cou ...

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

Gothic collegiate Collegiate Gothic is an architectural style subgenre of Gothic Revival architecture, popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries for college and high school buildings in the United States and Canada, and to a certain extent Europ ...

to Georgian revival style 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 o ...

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