55 Collins is dense with architectural history. Its pair of towers were designed by I.M. Pei’s practice in collaboration with Bates Smart and McCutcheon in the 1970s. Indeed, the building was Australia’s largest mixed-use project when completed in 1981, and the tallest in Melbourne until 1986.
“Great architecture is not just inherited – it must be reinterpreted,” says Andrew Perez, Partner, ANZ. “At 55 Collins, we have worked to honour the building’s history while drawing it forward into a new rhythm of city life. This is not a transformation for its own sake, but for the sake of what it now offers to the people who pass through, pause or belong to it.”
Rather than sitting in parallel, its two towers are placed in rotation such that two corners come closest to each other and create the varied civic space of Collins Place. Grimshaw’s recent intervention centres on this area, where street life transitions into the civic plaza and a general threshold between inside and outside is realised on a monumental scale.
The towers cater to commercial office space, but hospitality options bring life to the Collins Place level. Grimshaw’s work in this project – delivered in close partnership with Mirvac – includes a reimagined ground-floor lobby, a ground floor and Level 1 façade, revitalised podium levels, upgraded floorplates and new end-of-trip amenities.
“It’s about that balance of trying to make it feel hotel-like, and to still introduce lightness to it,” says Grimshaw Associate, Nicholas Lee, explaining some of the end-of-trip facilities. “Some of our transitions from wet area to dry area use a portal idea, for example.” Alongside well-equipped, peaceful changing and shower areas, building users will also be pleasantly surprised to find hidden squash courts and extensive bike parking.
The façade interventions are an especially notable and subtly impactful aspect of this project. Grimshaw has installed new glazing in an attempt to dissolve the threshold between public and private realms, while also bringing daylight deep into the interior spaces around street.
In the western tower, Grimshaw’s lobby fit-out brings a cohesive and refreshed feel to the space. Thoughtful materiality joins with a consistent use of formal motifs and datum lines to bring a sense of continuity and quiet order to the building, at once meeting needs for corporate sobriety and a hospitality-friendly welcome. It’s little wonder that you’ll find The Commons just a level up, given this contemporary merging of and workplace design excellence.
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In the in-between spaces of Collins Place itself – covered, yet still ‘outdoors’ in a sense – Grimshaw has enriched the area by introducing small niches in the streel level walls. Where, previously, these abrupt, flat walls discouraged any lingering or public activity, there are now nooks for seating amidst the food and drink venues at this level.
The precinct as a whole has that distinctive feel of modernist, even monumental, civic architecture such as you might see in central Tokyo or Singapore, only with a renewed human-scale warmth at street level. On a winter weekday afternoon, when Nicholas Lee took me around the site, a large number office workers and the wider public seemed to be happily making use of the plaza and its range of amenities.
“For 55 Collins, we [looked at] a lot of options – essentially, we put as much as we could on the table and brought it to feasibility and costing stage,” explains Lee. “We could then have an open conversation with Mirvac about the pros and cons. It was not like a traditional project – like – where it’s a new empty site and you try to justify design. With repositioning asset projects, what I found interesting was that, to get the best outcome for everyone, you have to bring everyone on the journey. You had to draw in front of the client and take them on the journey – having the client contribute as much as everyone else. Rather than sit back and just look at the numbers, we worked with them.”
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