Arts Centre Melbourne

This guide to Arts Centre Melbourne follows the spire crowning its theatres from 1961, when schoolchildren tipped coins into tins to help fund it, through architect Roy Grounds repeatedly redrawing his design after solid copper proved too heavy. You'll hear how construction dragged through the 1970s, why Grounds never saw his tower finished before his death in 1981, and what engineers later discovered creeping through its metal joints. It follows the spire from that first design through to the replacement raised above it.