‘The best cinema that was ever built’: the Capitol, Melbourne’s hidden architectural treasure, turns 100 | Architecture

It sits in the centre of Melbourne, arguably on its most prominent street, and yet the Capitol theatre feels like the most overlooked building in the state. The beloved but strangely occluded Chicago-Gothic cinema, designed by married American architects Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin, turns 100 years old this week. It seems the perfect time for a reappraisal of this 20th century architectural wonder – its truly spectacular interior remaining stubbornly tucked behind a utilitarian facade.

The Capitol was commissioned by a conglomerate of businessmen who had already developed Luna Park and had worked with the Griffins (famous for designing Canberra) on the neighbouring Palais de Danse in St Kilda. The first of the large “picture palaces” – single-screen cinemas designed to take advantage of the booming interest in movies – the Capitol was notable at the time for its multi-use configuration of cinema and office space, as well as its idiosyncratic ceiling in the auditorium consisting of geometric panels augmented by thousands of coloured lights.

“A 2,500-seat theatre, this was one of the big three that included the Regent and the Forum,” explains Marc Morrell as we walk around, his softly spoken manner belying a fierce enthusiasm for the building; he is the venues manager for RMIT university, current owner of the Capitol. The Capitol’s opening screening was Cecil B DeMille’s original version of The Ten Commandments – “the bad version”, Morrell adds.

Paramount Studios owned and ran the Capitol for 40-odd years, but “the advent of television killed off the single-screen auditoria”, Morrell explains. The Capitol was scheduled for demolition in the 1960s, when a self-conscious shift to contemporary architecture saw many old buildings around Melbourne torn down. Leading heritage proponents rallied, including famed Australian architect Robin Boyd, who called it “the best cinema that was ever built or ever likely to be built”. So the Capitol was saved – albeit with some fatally compromising alterations, including a new mall under the cinema, major changes to the entrance and a reduced seating capacity, going from 2,100 seats to about 600.

For decades after that, the Capitol had a hodgepodge approach to programming. It screened blockbuster films for months on end – notably Superman and The Towering Inferno, which ingeniously employed those ceiling lights to simulate fire. It became an intermittent host of Melbourne international film festival and even the Comedy festival. It screened Chinese and Indian films for a while. It began to feel like a white elephant; audiences, perhaps confused by its counterintuitive entrance and the lack of street signage, dwindled.

RMIT bought the building in 1999 largely for pedagogical reasons, as a teaching space for its film and media students. But not everyone thought this was a great idea: the Capitol was mothballed for two years from 2014 because the organisational head simply couldn’t understand the point of the acquisition, says RMIT professor Martyn Hook. “They walked into the Capitol and asked, why the hell does RMIT own this? When the new vice-chancellor Martin Bean took over, his response was the total reverse. ‘My God, we own this?!’”

Bean’s enthusiasm may have been the building’s turning point, because it led to the five-year refurbishment by Six Degrees Architects, which attempted to return the cinema, if not to its original splendour, then at least to some semblance of it. The biggest effort went into the restoration of the foyers, gorgeous, tiered art deco spaces designed as lounges and milling areas.

“Prior to renovation, this foyer had bare concrete flooring and fluoro work lights,” Morrell says. “It looked like a share house that’d just been abandoned.” It cost $24.5m to restore, with donations from private citizens and a $2.5m contribution from the state government.

After the restoration, which was finished in 2019, it became possible to luxuriate in the quirky design choices and conceptual flourishes of the Griffins, a genius couple whose work around Australia is often overshadowed by their achievements in Canberra. The vast floorspace and geometric carpets bring Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to mind, but then a Roman frieze seems plonked in from an altogether different building. Those famed incandescent globes in red, blue, green and yellow – replaced now by a digital matrix of hundreds of LED bulbs – brings to mind crystalline caves, perhaps in keeping with the deco obsession with Egyptology and the treasure troves of Tutankhamun.

Despite the fact Walter received the bulk of the credit, “the Griffins were actually very evenly matched in terms of ability”, Hook says. Marion had worked under Frank Lloyd Wright and was considered one of the finest delineators in the field. Walter may have been the public face, able to front a crowd, but Marion was at least as talented. All of the extant designs of the Capitol are signed by her.

Such obscurity has curiously become a central feature of the Capitol itself. At street level, it is hard to notice, positioned awkwardly above a Subway. The apartments above have a gleaming, streamlined beauty that blends into the surrounding architecture of Swanson Street. It’s only when you venture inside, to those stunning interiors and vaulting ceilings, that you get a true sense of the building’s grandeur and spirit. It may have taken 100 years, but the Capitol is finally ready for its close up, Mr DeMille.