Dovers Building
Encyclopedia
Dovers Building is a unique reinforced concrete building in Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. Built in 1936 by architect and engineer, Hugh Ralston Crawford
Hugh Ralston Crawford
Hugh Ralston Crawford , practiced both as an engineer and architect in Australia and the United States in the 1st half of the 20th Century.Crawford was born in the United States in 1876, and moved to Queensland, Australia as a child...

, Dovers Building is located at 7 Drewery Lane, Melbourne.

Crawford held the Australian patent rights for the Turner Mushroom flat slab system which was patented by C.A.P. Turner
C.A.P. Turner
Claude Allen Porter Turner was an American structural engineer who designed a number of buildings and bridges, particularly in the midwestern U.S. states of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin....

 in the U.S.A. in 1905. This system was so called due to the peculiar formation of rods around the column head and the rapidity with which they could be erected. Between 1906 and 1909, at least eighteen other buildings of this type were built in the U.S.A.

Dovers Building was erected as a warehouse and factory for the firm Sniders and Abrahams, Manufacturing Tobacconists in 1908 and was the second example of Turner's flat plate system of reinforced concrete construction to be built and was begun in the same year as Turners Lindeke Warner Building in Minnesota. It was originally a five storey structure, with an extra two storeys were added in 1938 also designed by Crawford.

Built in the Edwardian period in the Chicagoesque style, the facades are decorated with foliated capitals and arches at the top floor level of the original building, but otherwise the walls are not decorated.

This was the 1st flat slab building in Australia using the system and Crawford subsequently designed a large number of other buildings using the Turner system. Dovers Building is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register
Victorian Heritage Register
The Victorian Heritage Register lists places of cultural heritage significance to the State of Victoria, Australia. It has statutory weight under the Heritage Act 1995 which establishes Heritage Victoria as the permit authority...

.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK