From the moment Jeff Copolov was born, his life and Orica House have been intertwined.
His grandfather, modernist architect Richard Tandler, watched in awe in the 1950s as it rose from a “motley collection of hoardings and old buildings” like a glass giant, becoming Australia’s tallest spectacle at 18 storeys and 81 metres high.
A storied place: Bates Smart interior design director Jeff Copolov and Open House Melbourne executive director Tania Davidge, outside Orica House.Credit: Joe Armao
When the building in East Melbourne – now dwarfed by the city’s skyline – opened in 1958, 20,000 people came to see it, and none was more enthusiastic to gaze out from its expansive top-floor cafeteria windows than Tandler.
Almost 70 years later, Copolov has worked inside the building – formerly known as ICI House – for more than two decades. He’s had a hand in upgrading it since 1989.
“My mother, who’s still alive at 96, frequently used to say that … weekend outings [with my grandfather] would be to go and watch this extraordinary skyscraper emerging from the ground,” said Copolov, 66.
“I’ve been, in a way, tied to this building, somehow inevitably. I was born the very year it was finished.”
Copolov began working at architecture firm Bates Smart in 1983, some 30 years after its principal designer Osborn McCutcheon fought hard to get ICI House, Australia’s first modern skyscraper, off the ground.
A fatal eight-storey fire in 1901 at a department store in Sydney’s CBD meant building heights could not exceed 40 metres, which was the height of firefighting ladders at the time.
ICI House – more than 40 metres above that limit – was only approved because it offered public spaces: a garden on the ground floor, public car parks, and the cafeteria on the top floor, where most other buildings reserved space for executives.
Modernist buildings combining towers and publicly accessible plazas – like Collins Place, AMP Square and the state offices at Treasury Place – followed its lead. So, too, did offices with open-plan spaces where workers could socialise.
ICI House’s design was “incredibly foresightful”, offsetting the office floor part of the building entirely from its amenity block of stairs and toilets, said Copolov, who was appointed Bates Smart’s interior design director in 1995.
“It really changed the whole notion of plot ratios and heights,” Copolov said.
“You kind of have to look at [through the eyes of my grandfather]. This thing was twice as high as anything else around. It stood out like some beacon cathedral on a hill.”
ICI House was Australia’s tallest building until 1961.
Orica House today.Credit: Joe Armao
As of 2001, explosives company Orica was the building’s only major tenant.
Bates Smart’s tenancy elsewhere was ending at the time, and Copolov was tasked with finding the firm a new office. He chose Orica House as its “natural home”, and has lovingly refurbished much of the space.
As he walks the storied building’s halls, he points out some of its heritage features: pre-cast concrete coffers from when there was no technology to pour floors above the sixth level, and window-accessible gantries to wheel along and clean the outside of the building.
Orica House’s old bank – now the Bates Smart gallery – is an apt venue for this year’s Open House Melbourne Weekend “stories of the city” exhibition, where Melburnians’ own stories will line its walls, Open House Melbourne executive director Tania Davidge said.
Melburnians will be able to submit their stories from April 29.
The Open House Melbourne Weekend, which opens private buildings and spaces to the public for tours, runs July 26 to 27.
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