—I remember the brutalist concrete building that was built in Swanston Street in brave 1972. Its stark grey edge cut the sky like a battleship from Franklin Street to Storey Hall and teams ran through its knife-shadow from April to September. Years later, some craven architects adjudged that clean lines were no longer au courant, and the silent structure underwent plastic surgery. It was given prosthetic coloured blobs, and cute holes were punched into its scarp so that occupants could look out, like children in a playground castle.
—Decades later. William and I are sitting at an open-air café table in Swanston Street, opposite the great grey building. Its censored fascia is further obscured by the now-ubiquitous urban street trees. We are early for a screening of short films made by graduate film students. William is a film student; my film studies days ended before Woody Allen made Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanours or Husbands and Wives: or to make it perfectly clear, before Spielberg made E.T.
—If you enter Building 80 (opposite the brutalist one) on a spring afternoon, and turn back to the dazzling street, everything in your line of vision is silhouetted sharply, like scissor cut-outs, in the blinding white. We moved down shallow steps to the cool dim carpeted hush of a lower corridor, and passed a glass door looking on a kind of atrium cut by a secret slant of sun. Then the theatre, like an underground cave. Within its sibilant doors, seats with round backs of tangerine ran up the raked auditorium like an orange grove in a Mildura summer.
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