Melbourne’s State Theatre Reopens After a Makeover You Cannot See

“What did you change?” For the architects behind Melbourne’s Ian Potter State Theatre, that is the question that best captures the success of a $256-million refurbishment to modernise the 2000-seat venue while preserving its defining interiors. The 2000-seat theatre reopened on October 3, six months ahead of schedule, after its first major refurbishment since opening in 1984. It is the first completed milestone in the Victorian government’s $1.7-billion Melbourne Arts Precinct Transformation. The works drew on $241 million in state funding for Arts Centre Melbourne upgrades and a $15-million gift from the Ian Potter Foundation. NH Architecture led the design, with Snøhetta’s Melbourne studio as design partner. Lendlease was the builder and Development Victoria delivered the project for the Melbourne Arts Precinct Corporation. Inside the Roy Grounds-designed Theatres Building, the auditorium is the work of Academy Award-winning Australian designer John Truscott. His raspberry red chairs, brass balustrades and cascading brass and gold-leaf ceiling have defined a night at the State Theatre for four decades. ▲ The 2000-seat theatre reopened six months ahead of schedule after its first major refurbishment since opening in 1984. The interiors are heritage-listed. Keeping all that intact, while replacing almost everything behind it, was the starting point for the design team. “The simple brief was, don’t stuff it up,” NH Architecture co-founder and director Hamish Lyon [ pictured at top with Snohetta Australasia project director Matthew Irvine ] tells The Urban Developer . Quite often over the past couple of years, people who knew what he was working on asked the same thing: was he getting rid of the red and the gold? “It is a much-loved cultural venue. People really care about it,” he says. “And for architecture and design, that’s a really wonderful place to start.” The harder brief was technical. Heritage Victoria determined how much of Truscott’s interior had to stay. Building codes determined what had to change. “Much of the interiors is no longer compliant for accessibility, for fire,” Lyon says. “So those overlaps between the artistic, cultural good and the need to make the building perform and survive for the next 40 years, that was really where the brief was.” Delete Every element of the existing fabric was documented to decide what could be preserved, restored, adapted or reproduced. Truscott’s cascading ceiling came down panel by panel, was cleaned and then reinstated. Reaching it meant filling the auditorium with a multi-level scaffold that Lyon likened to a birdcage. “It was like an art installation in its own right,” he says. Thousands of detailed decisions on materials and finishes were made along the way, according to Lendlease executive general manager for construction in Victoria Bill Alexandrakis. “This was a technically complex refurbishment, with our team and specialist trade partners carefully preserving the theatre’s heritage character while delivering upgrades that will support world-class performances,” Alexandrakis said. Alongside the original ceiling are more than 20 new custom-moulded acoustic panels carrying 27,000 concave and convex baubles that diffuse sound across the room. Master gilder Marcus Walkley, who gilded the theatre in 1984, returned to finish them by hand. “They feel like they’ve always been part of the theatre, but they’re very new,” Snøhetta Australasia project director Matthew Irvine tells The Urban Developer . Elsewhere, carpet has given way to timber flooring, stained to recall the tone of the original. Timber battens line the rear wall to absorb and diffuse sound. New seats, developed with theatre planner Schuler Shook and Italian manufacturer Poltrona Frau, keep the crease and back height of the originals, while their timber backs and pans improve the acoustics. “It was a fine balance of making them modern, but also keeping that red velvet feeling,” Irvine says. Most of the remaining work is hidden. Air is now supplied beneath the seats at low velocity, which reduces background noise and improves efficiency. A sound system of 200 speakers, 60 amplifiers and more than 12km of cabling is built into the wall and ceiling linings. Accessibility drove the most visible changes. New aisles cut through the stalls and circle, and two lifts serve 10 wheelchair positions with companion seating. Two extra rows in the uppermost balcony offset the seats lost, keeping capacity above 2000. Both practices have spent about a decade on the job, starting with the Arts Centre masterplan from which the theatre became the first project. “[Now it is] open it to the public and they say, ‘Well, what have you done?’” Lyon says. “But we do take it as a compliment.” ▲ Graham Bennett’s hand-painted red velvet house curtain stayed in the building throughout, suspended above the stage for more than two years before it was cleaned and lowered again. Construction is not finished. Behind the Theatres Building, a 14m-deep excavation has removed more than 15,000 cubic metres of earth to make room for an expanded loading dock, an accessible stage door, a rehearsal studio and a function room. Those works would increase the building’s footprint by about 16 per cent. Beyond the Arts Centre, The Fox: NGV Contemporary and the 18,000sq m Laak Boorndap urban garden are still to come. Melbourne Arts Precinct Corporation figures put the precinct’s contribution to the Victorian economy at $591 million in 2025, from 19.3 million visitors. For Irvine, whose practice worked alongside Blight Rayner Architecture on the $150-million Glasshouse Theatre that opened in Brisbane in March, and the Shanghai Grand Opera House that also opens this month, the biggest challenge was making the theatre feel the same. “That’s a strange compliment to get, but I think it’s the right compliment for this project.”

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Melbourne’s State Theatre Reopens After a Makeover You Cannot See

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