The Lost City of Melbourne

During Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns, filmmaker Gus Berger was forced to close the Thornbury Picture House, his beloved independent cinema. Turning adversity into creative purpose, he began investigating the disappearance of Melbourne's picture theatres, a city that had once led the world in cinema culture. That investigation opened into a broader and more devastating story: the systematic demolition of Melbourne’s architectural heritage in the 1950s, driven by a collective embarrassment about anything deemed too Victorian ahead of the 1956 Olympic Games. The demolition company Whelan the Wrecker became the defining symbol of that destruction, its signs appearing on grand hotel after theatre after civic building until an entire chapter of the city had been erased.

The resulting documentary premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2022, becoming the highest grossing Australian documentary of that year. The companion book, featuring essays by leading historians including Robyn Annear and Graeme Davison alongside photography by Mark Strizic, Wolfgang Sievers and John Gollings, extended that act of recovery into print.

The graphic identity for both film and book took Hoddle’s Grid as its central design idea, distorting and eroding the rigid geometry of the original 1837 survey as a visual metaphor for what was lost. The precise orthogonal order that surveyor Robert Hoddle imposed on the landscape became unstable, its lines breaking down and fragmenting in the same way the city’s fabric was broken down by the wrecking ball. The grid is both the foundation of Melbourne’s identity and the measure of what was taken from it, and its erosion in the graphic language of the project makes that loss visible and felt.