In a land boasting more skyscrapers per capita than any other country, Australians today would be pardoned for missing their first, a quarter the height of what’s now the tallest. Yet no building has exerted such influence on Australian cityscapes as Orica House on Melbourne’s Eastern Hill – its everyday inconspicuousness attests to the ubiquity of the form it pioneered.

Stand closer to what was originally ICI House and the view changes. “I tell people I’m showing round that this was the iPhone of Australian architecture,” says Tim Leslie, a studio director at Bates Smart McCutcheon (BSM), which not only designed the building but, in a form of architectural ancestor worship, have since made it their headquarters. “It was so different to everything that had gone before.”

As Graeme Davison, author of City Dreamers, a new history of the Australian urban imagination, puts it: “In one bold leap, Melbourne threw off its Victorian dowdiness and became the most self-consciously modern Australian city.” In the spirit of the 1956 Olympic Games and the advent of television, the International Style of ICI House married the cosmopolitan and the technological in exciting and optimistic proportions. In its wake, buildings soared.



I tell people this was the iPhone of Australian architecture Tim Leslie

Yet death and disaster also intruded. And not all the changes the building presaged were welcome. Aesthetic returns were to diminish swiftly: within a decade of ICI House’s slim, glassy elegance, the Gas & Fuel Corporation had inflicted on Melbourne not one but two hunched brown brick towers with tiny aluminium windows, proverbial in their monotony – the so-called ‘ugly sisters’.

And by his death in 1983, ICI House’s architect, Sir Osborn McCutcheon, had lost a good deal of his faith in industrial civilisation, and architecture’s place in it. “What would Os think of us today?” asks his son Andrew. “He would be aghast that property development has become such a major force in individual wealth creation. He saw planning land use as a stewardship of the land in the community interest … We seem to have to reinvent the wheel in every generation. History is not all a story of progress.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Orica House on Melbourne’s Eastern Hill as it looks today. Photograph: David Collopy/Photofit

A slow start

At Andrew McCutcheon’s breakfast table in St Kilda poring over his father’s early sketches, recently discovered in BSM’s archives, we’re a world away from the turbocapitalism of modern development. There was no degree course when Osborn McCutcheon felt drawn to architecture – one designed one’s own. His family was not rich but comfortable, part of the tight circle of respectable Methodist Melbourne – he would later marry his first cousin. He worked in practices in San Francisco and London, and the immaculate line drawings of cathedrals and cottages, wells and windows, were the fruits of a year’s wandering in Europe in 1925. For his first few years at the firm Bates & Peebles, where he had earlier been articled, McCutcheon had a negative income, subsisting on borrowings.

That may partly explain the eventual panache of ICI House, its pent-up fullness with ideas. What with Depression and War, there were more bad years than good in McCutcheon’s first two decades’ practice. He designed a number of celebrated Melbourne buildings, including the striped classical AMP Society headquarters (1932), the vivacious Jazz-Moderne Buckley & Nunn men’s store (1933), and the Moderne–classical Second Church of Christ, Scientist, in Camberwell (1937). But much of his work was domestic – commissions for houses from Melbourne’s well-to-do. More formative were probably two and a half hectic years spent with the American military.

The building swayed slightly. In the fish tank on the executive floor … the water lapped gently from side to side

When the US Army Corps of Engineers (Southwest Pacific Area) was established in February 1942, McCutcheon was recruited to head an architectural section which churned out hundreds of designs for military buildings – huts and warehouses, hangars and hospitals. Major McCutcheon, as he was, nearly came unstuck in New Guinea, bringing home malaria that turned him a vivid yellow, but also a strong faith in dry construction and prefabrication, which he would loudly defend to a sceptical profession (“I have no time for the view that such an approach to architecture inevitably lowers our standards.”). ICI House – hugely simplified, for example, by its identical and infinitely interchangeable 3ft by 5ft enamelled glass panes – is in a way its monument.

Architecture in Australia was muted in the first postwar decade by a shortage of materials and of capital, but not by a dearth of ideas. Practitioners looked on enviously but excitedly at developments overseas – signature projects in New York like Wallace Harrison’s United Nations Secretariat in New York (1948-1952) and Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House (1950-52).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An office inside ICI House in 1958. Photograph: Wolfgang Sievers

McCutcheon himself toured Scandinavia in 1948, borrowing ideas from its state-of-the-art hospital designs for his Footscray & District Hospital (1953). But he signified his embrace of modernism mainly by living in it, completing an ingenious “passive solar house” for his family in Mt Eliza, a rural enclave 30 miles from the city, at Christmas 1950.

‘Kackeraboite’, named after the local creek, was a long slim rectangle the width of a single room, north wall sheathed in glass, with huge sliding doors and banks of operable glass louvres split by a breezeway, sitting on an asphalted concrete slab that acted as a heat bank. Sun that penetrated to the back wall in winter did not hit the slab in summer, regulating internal temperatures. When McCutcheon’s contemporaries Robin Boyd, Frederick Romberg and Roy Grounds hosted Walter Gropius in May 1954, Kackeraboite was the venue of the reception – the Bauhaus sage wandered fascinated in the surrounding bushland, looking for koalas.

By that stage, McCutcheon had been drawn into one of Australia’s most rancorous aesthetic controversies, architecture’s counterpart of William Dobell’s Mr Joshua Smith winning the Archibald Prize. In January 1952, fire had gutted the great Gothic Revival pile of Wilson Hall at Melbourne University. Opinion was starkly divided about how to replace it.

The university council initially agreed to an exact rebuilding. But when it baulked at the expense, McCutcheon proposed a far cheaper modern alternative: a concrete-encased, steel-framed rectangular box with glass curtain walls and brick in-fill, and an interior of Swedish birch incorporating an intricate stained-glass screen designed by Douglas Annand and a chancellor’s throne fashioned by Grant Featherston.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An architect’s drawing for ICI House. Illustration: Bates Smart McCutcheon

The professoriat rebelled. But for a young colleague, Robert Dunster, it evinced McCutcheon’s leadership and urbanity. “Wilson Hall was the first building in Melbourne for decades that wasn’t simple or mundane, a house or a factory. And McCutcheon wanted perfection. He wanted a building to stand for a couple of hundred years. And he was able to inspire colleagues, the university and building workers with that idea.”



McCutcheon scorned flamboyance, but there was a flair to his purpose. The hour’s morning commute from Kackeraboite to BSM’s St Kilda Road studio was spent planning: by the time he arrived, trailing butter paper and cigarette smoke, he had laid out his daily objectives. Dunster recalls an afternoon standing at his boss’s desk awaiting attention. At length, McCutcheon looked up and said: “Three and a half minutes.” Then he resumed his activities for exactly that time before engaging again.

When not filling notebook after notebook with emphatic scrawlings, he would be rotating his pencil in his mouth. The tell-tale mark of pencil lead between his two front teeth was a firm in-joke. He abstained from alcohol – the sherry decanter on the sideboard at Kackeraboite was for the pleasure of visitors. But he was a peerless networker, especially over luncheon tables at Melbourne’s elite Savage Club, connected among politicians and planners, councillors and builders alike. In the 1930s, for example, he had designed the Ivanhoe mansions of the brothers Ernie and Frank Watts, who ran the city’s biggest construction company. In some respects, their partnership in ICI House was foreordained.

Sweet and lowdown

That, but maybe not much else. A walk round Melbourne’s central business district 60 years ago would have revealed a riot of bluestone, sandstone, brick and stucco, with the occasional flash of marble and granite – and, compared with today, very much more light. That was because Melbourne, like every Australian city bar Perth, and the vast majority of the world’s bigger metropolises, observed a height limit.

Melbourne’s, set in 1916, was 132 feet; Sydney allowed 150 feet. These horizontal slashes across Australian skies irked local architects, who argued that their various rationales, about fire safety and urban congestion, were outdated. But by some standards, the allowances were quite generous: London had only just begun tinkering with its 100-foot limit, while Paris (despite the Eiffel Tower) had ruled itself off at 65 feet. Nor did ICI Australia and New Zealand (ICIANZ), the antipodean arm of Britain’s sprawling Imperial Chemical Industries, seem a prime candidate to scour the sky.

ICIANZ straggled over eight sites in Melbourne, including a termite-ridden archive in an old chemical plant in Yarraville presided over by an aged ex-serviceman with a wooden leg; it had only just retired a logo featuring Britannia staring wistfully out to sea. Its parent, meanwhile, was a waddling, paternalistic bureaucracy, whose own London headquarters was a neoclassical low-rise faced in Portland stone and festooned with sculptures: Millbank was known among chafing middle managers as ‘Millstone’. ICI’s chairman, Sir Alexander Fleck, was a childless widower whose passions were hill climbing, tree felling and the Venerable Bede.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ICI House pictured in 1958. Photograph: Wolfgang Sievers

Something at ICIANZ, however, had recently shifted. A generational change in management had placed two younger men at the top: 50-year-old Ken Begg as chairman and 40-year-old Archibald Glenn as managing director, who wished to signify their ambitions with a new headquarters. In March 1952, the company had acquired a 2,340-square metre site at one of Melbourne’s highest points, Eastern Hill, where Lonsdale Street protrudes beyond the Hoddle Grid. Aligned with Parliament House and the Treasury Building, it seemed to cry out for a bold, proud building. And McCutcheon was eager to provide it.

McCutcheon’s first innovation was a cunning way to meet the spirit of the height limit while defying its letter, proposing a rectangular ‘tower-type building’ of 203 feet that would occupy only 41% of the block at ground level; the rest of the block would be allotted to a courtyard garden featuring public artwork of the kind with which he had enriched Wilson Hall. McCutcheon soothed the anxieties of the State Building Regulations Committee by persuading them that approval for ICI House need not prelude rampant development: section 214 of the Uniform Planning Regulations entitled the committee to modify rules without amending them. But nobody missed the implications when The Herald foreshadowed the plans in May 1955: ‘New Skyline for City?’ read the headline.

The Metropolitan Fire Brigade was anxious. Not only was the height limit calibrated by the reach of their ladders and water jets, but the 360-degree view of Melbourne they enjoyed from their watchtower, only 200 yards from the site of ICI House, would be disrupted. To placate them, McCutcheon incorporated into his building elaborate fire protection measures, including a pioneering sprinkler system above the fifth floor. Others were also discomfited. The Eastern Hill block was not only home to the Salvation Army, but also several brothels. Not so much could be done in design terms here.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Office cafe, 1958. Photograph: Wolfgang Sievers

Fortunately, the atmosphere was one of excitement. Melbourne was about to sample something hitherto confined to the get-ahead United States. Robin Boyd, not only an adventurous architect but a popular arbiter of architectural taste, used his bully pulpit in The Herald to welcome the slashing of “the red tape which restricted Melbourne”. In the lineage from the Tower of Babel to the Eiffel Tower, here was a skyscraper worth the name: “This is a clean, precipitous tower in the best tradition. Elbow room is the first essential for effective skyscraping, and the ICI has that.” ICI had actually obtained even more elbow room than bargained for: having applied for permission to erect to 203 feet, it was approved to build to 230 feet thanks to the transposition of the ‘3’ and the ‘0’ by a Melbourne City Council typist.

Yet height was only the most obvious feature of McCutcheon’s design. Externally and internally, it was absolutely au courant. Without, McCutcheon clad ICI House in gleaming glass curtain walls to north and south that would flood the interior with natural light – a homage to New York’s UN Building and Lever House. Within, he offered vistas of uninterrupted space, a pioneering open plan, by quarantining the building’s services, such as lifts, plumbing and air conditioning, in a discrete 275-foot service tower, initially behind the core tower, then at right angles – a solution adopted in Chicago’s Inland Steel headquarters (1957) and San Francisco’s Crown Zellerbach Building (1959), classic glass curtain wall skyscrapers whose construction was concurrent with ICI House.

Perhaps the cleverest feature, meanwhile, was something the public never saw. Drawing on his experiences with the US Army, McCutcheon made extensive use of prefabrication and dry construction: floor units, beam encasements, concrete spandrels, panels of the west and east walls and the synthetic granite panels enclosing the service tower were all fabricated off site.

This, then, was a bold experiment. To be on the safe side, McCutcheon trialled several features, including the curtain wall detailing, service tower and reliance on prefabrication, in another smaller building in William Street, a headquarters for brickmaker Humes, whose construction was proceeding just in advance of ICI House. But it would be an underestimate to see Australia’s first skyscraper as a triumph of technology. It was a testament to McCutcheon’s personality, his calm authority, that Begg and Glenn bought into his vision so comprehensively. “It wasn’t ICI telling McCutcheon it wanted a glass box for its headquarters,” observes heritage architect Peter Lovell. “It was the other way around.”

The activity, moreover, formed part of a general building boom, unmatched in Australia since the 1880s. “It wasn’t simply about modernism,” says Philip Goad, deputy dean of architecture at Melbourne University and author of the history Bates Smart (2004). “It was about modernisation, a sense that the country now had to get its act together.” After two fallow decades, more than a score of tall office buildings would be completed in Melbourne between 1955 and 1960. It excited rivalry too. The final unveiling of plans in April 1956 was front page news in the Sydney Morning Herald, beneath the shocked headline: “Melbourne to have tallest building.” In due course height limits would stand no chance against the urges of oneupmanship.

BSM benefited: the firm was commissioned to design a second ICI House (1957), at 10 storeys, on Circular Quay, and handsome headquarters for Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance (1957-1960) in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Hobart. But Melbourne was the place to be. As EA Watts Pty Ltd began to manoeuvre the steel skeleton into place in May 1957, ICI had to erect a viewing platform for the benefit of “pavement superintendents” – the crowds, sometimes running into hundreds, who gathered round the site each day, including one man who would come every single morning, without exception, for nearly two years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It wasn’t simply about modernism’: an ICI House interior. Photograph: Bates Smart McCutcheon

Watts’ workforce was itself a cross-section of the new postwar Australia: Australians and Englishmen alongside Italians, Greeks, Dutchmen, Americans, Yugoslavs, Poles and Egyptians, building their futures by making up to £50 a week. They worked speedily and harmoniously, completing the framing by Christmas, and the flooring systems within six further months. They paid a price too: three workers died, two in falls from height. Struan Gilfillan, then the most junior architect on the BSM team assisting McCutcheon, and today the last survivor, recalls the headlong rush: “Towards the end I was doing much of my work on the site. You’d design something one day, it would be built the next day, and you’d be inspecting it the day after.”

Though ICIANZ’s Begg and Glenn were interested clients, BSM exerted a control over the project that by modern lights seems quite extraordinary, even designing the custom-made furniture, manufactured by Collingwood’s Hunt Son & Oliver, with contributions from Grant Featherston. For browsing architectural eyes, there was much to see. The pilotis harked back to the Villa Savoye (1928) in Pouissy – the prototype modernist dwelling, designed by Le Corbusier. The landscaped courtyard garden, with its fountain sculpture by Gerald Lewers, was patterned by John Stevens on a similar feature of the Ministry of Education and Health (1936) in Rio – the original International Style office building, designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer under Le Corbusier’s sway.

The entranceway steps, which subtly slow the visitor’s transition from outside to inside, are a Japanese motif. The interior reliance on wood – warm and easy on the eye – shows Scandinavian influences. All of it encased in a characteristically American building typology for a British multinational client … and in an Australian city.

An Australian landmark

Height’s allure could be dark also. Fifty-eight-year-old PMG technician Ben Edwards had not been himself for some days. Since starting a course of blood pressure tablets, he had been forgetting things, feeling panicked. Could he be going out of his mind, he asked his GP. And though assured otherwise, he hesitated to go to work in Flinders Lane on 6 November 1958, before deciding he must.

At 1.45pm, having drawn his pay, he asked leave from his superior to sort out some money orders. Two hours later, he became the site’s fourth death, plummeting to the pavement of Albert Street from the roof of the nearly complete ICI House, passing by two window cleaners, who took him for a large bag. The next week his wife received two money orders, although no note, and the coroner returned an open verdict. (The 25-year-old investigating constable who deemed there “no suspicious circumstances” also played back pocket for St Kilda. Allan Jeans went on to be a sainted name in Australian rules – in Melbourne, you are never far from football).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sir Osborn McCutcheon’s speech notes, written on the back of an old memo. Photograph: Bates Smart McCutcheon

When ICI House was opened a fortnight from Christmas, the fascination it exerted was more obviously wholesome. In his speech to assembled dignatories, British chairman Fleck spoke of “an Australian landmark”, “a Commonwealth occasion”, and of the duty borne by companies “to see that the buildings they commission shall be not only appropriate to their needs and efficient, but also aesthetically satisfying”. McCutcheon’s speech notes, dashed off at typical speed on the back of a memo, capitalised the word DIGNITY next to a lower case efficiency. And it is fair to say that of the 20,000 citizens who took the opportunity to tour ICI House during the ensuing Open Week, very few were enticed by its efficiency. On the contrary, the building seemed the last word in worker comfort, from its 100-seat ground floor theatre and Wales banking chamber, to its top floor 400-seat cafeteria with uninterrupted views for 70 miles in each direction and gleaming Gaggia coffee machine.

By day the air conditioning system and sealed windows, maintaining a constant 20C and 50% humidity, were a revelatory relief from summer swelter – not to mention the pampering indulgences like the roof garden, sub-basement recreation rooms and 12th-floor staff lending library. By night, with 5,500 electric lights, ICI House blazed like a Chinese lantern. “Probably no other building project since … the Exhibition Buildings in 1879 has captured Melbourne’s imagination as much as this glass-house giant,” reported The Herald, whose cartoonist ‘Weg’ (William Ellis Green) depicted ICI House as a vitreous mountain while a suited businessman ran towards three mischievous cricket-playing boys. “Please! Kids!” he was exclaiming. “Don’t play here!”

Such critics as had existed were disarmed. The ageing artist Norman Lindsay had denounced the glass box as “a final triumph to modernistic art, with its cry of death to all beauty”. As if to head the charge off, ICIANZ began amassing what became Australia’s most extensive corporate art collection, including works by Arthur Boyd, Arthur Streeton, John Brack, Sidney Nolan and … Norman Lindsay. The collection complemented a building that was itself a kind of art object.

A 20-minute ICI movie, Skyscraper Story, painted its headquarters in heroic hues. Soaring towards the clouds reflected in its glass, ICI House was the perfect subject for the cool, functionalist, objective photography of Wolfgang Sievers. Arising like a mirage beyond the foliage of Parliament Gardens or contrasted with the antique Lonsdale Street, ICI House appealed to the alert and discriminating urban eye of Mark Strizic.

Particularly reveling in the attention was the company’s public relations manager, Peter Ryan – later, at Melbourne University Press, one of Australia’s most distinguished publishers. For him, the building was an “unimaginable boon”, redefining what had been a rather dour and inscrutable enterprise: “For a time, editors and journalists from all over Australia would do almost anything to be invited on a personal tour of inspection, accompanied by lunch in the splendid private dining room.” Through Ryan, Geoffrey Blainey was employed to write a company history of ICIANZ, on which he worked in ICI House for a year. “It was very handsome from the outside,” he recalls. “In the low skyline of that era it stood out like a glass trophy.” Like many a worker since he was less enamoured of the open plan, which affirmed a personal preference: “I like rooms with walls.”

Breaking glass

Another significant and sincere admirer also withheld a little of his approbation. Robin Boyd was then embarked on his seminal modernist critique of The Great Australian Ugliness (1960), with its denunciation of the local taste for busy and obtrusive “featurism”. He welcomed ICI House, relieved that “even in a frantically featurist society a non-featurist building can be a success”. Here was “as good a representative of the crystallised mid-century style as can be found anywhere in the world”, particularly ingenious in its “clever separation of service and office areas”, which were “nicely complementary to each other in strength and proportion, like male and female.” At the same time, part of him shrank from its implications: in future corporate design suites, he speculated in The Puzzle of Architecture (1962), there might be “no seat … for the architect, let alone a throne.”

“Boyd saw that office building could become a formularised system,” says Melbourne University’s Goad. “With the standardisation of work spaces, the exterior mattered little in the long run, and architectural aesthetics were unnecessary, which worried him greatly – because at the other end of the spectrum were the Eero Saarinens and Jørn Utzons, one-off gymnastic performers. In an architecture of extremes, how do you teach beauty? How do you judge whether the Opera House is spectacular, or just an ugly spiky thing? So although he admired ICI House, it also caused him grief.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Melbourne skyline including the old Gas & Fuel

buildings. Photograph: The Age/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

By then, too, grief had come McCutcheon’s way, and more directly. At first, the only problems with ICI House were minor, even amusing. It was found, for example, that the building swayed ever so slightly – at the top, about ¾ of an inch in a 80mph gale. The only place this was perceptible was in the fish tank on the executive floor, where the water lapped gently from side to side – BSM’s solution was a thick black line round the top of the tank.

Then, just before Christmas 1960, one of the glass panes shattered into tiny fragments. It was such a shock that, at first, a sniper was suspected. But then another shattered, and another. “Everyone hoped that it wasn’t anything major,” recalls Struan Gilfillan. “You always accept a few breakages. But pretty soon they seemed to start falling like confetti.” Altogether, 71 panes of the Pan-O-Glass from Belgium’s Société Belge d’Exploitations Verrières would shatter, and it would be more than a year before any explanation emerged. In the hiatus, timber canopies had to be erected over nearby footpaths.

BSM smarted. “Oh, we were shocked and horrified,” remembers Gilfillan. “The criticism from architects at other firms was endless. ‘Oh, you’re from Bates Smart? You did that building, did you? Well, fancy that.’ We were very relieved when the scientific analysis was done.” Research by ER Ballantyne of the CSIRO’s Building Research Division sheeted the blame to the manufacturer, explaining how the Pan-O-Glass was fatally weakened by nickel sulphide impurities, particles smaller than the head of the pin, as they expanded and contracted in Australian temperatures. That Ballantyne’s paper, Fracture of Toughened Glass Wall Cladding, ICI House, Melbourne (1961), was another world first was little consolation. ICIANZ’s announcement that it was replacing all the panes on the west wall at a cost in excess of £50,000 made for an unwelcome front-page headline in the Herald in March 1962.

Not only can you see out both sides of Orica House, but the views are … well, they’re to die for Philip Goad

Glass curtain walls would prove problematic in other ways too. ICI House was an expensive building to operate, air conditioning absorbing nearly 40% of the building’s running costs. Others experienced difficulties still more pronounced. In January 1962 the AMP Society clawed back for Sydney the mantle of the location of Australia’s tallest building, opening a 25-storey tower at Sydney Cove, but when the sun got the better of its unsheltered northern curtain wall it became virtually uninhabitable. When its architects, Peddle Thorp, were sought to design a headquarters for Custom Credit on St Kilda Road, the commission specifically referred to “a dignified building … not a flimsy glass box … something to reflect the stability of the credit system”. The glass curtain wall lost Australian favour, and was scorned for decades afterwards.

In the end, ICI House’s chief legacy became its size, on lists of which it steadily slipped down. Developers, whose ambitions increasingly defined city skylines, used their emancipation from height limits not for aesthetic enrichment but steeper rents; much as Boyd had prophesied, the architect’s role was diminished. Corporate image-making was likewise refined, visible in the contrast between ICI House and BHP House (1972), the definitive headquarters of the next generation. The former looked as stylish as James Bond’s cigarette lighter; the latter, designed by the mighty American corporate practice Skidmore Owings & Merrill, as darkly cool as a presidential limousine.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An office inside ICI House in 1958. Photograph: Wolfgang Sievers

And as it transformed city streets into dark and windy canyons, sucked energy, crammed people and flattened textures, the tall office building began courting a critical eye. “So here we are,” sighed the Sydney Morning Herald’s arch sceptic George Molnar. “Our boxes are not economical. They are functional in a restricted sense only. They fail in the aesthetics they profess. What made us build them? It is an old story. Unnecessary centralisation in the city through real-estate speculation. They are jungle creatures, rising to the sky for light … It is not just a question of style. We should aim for a saner conception of our cities.” And one who would have nodded approval was Osborn McCutcheon.



A fall from fashion

If he never regretted ICI House, McCutcheon grew to share Boyd’s ambivalence about its unintended legacy. Knighted in 1966 and increasingly required to act as a grand old man of architecture, he enjoined audiences to design more humanely. “We act for communities; for private and public bodies; and not as creators of monuments to directors or to ourselves,” he warned. “The test of a building is the human responses it evokes, not its size or glamour.”

McCutcheon was strongly influenced by The Club of Rome’s sobering world prospectus The Predicament of Mankind (1968), Paul Ehrlich’s Malthusian prophecies in The Population Bomb (1968), and Ian McHarg’s hopes of ecological redemption in Design with Nature (1969). Some of his writings assumed almost a mystical air: “The simple man, the quiet man, is moved and has deep satisfaction from earthy smells, the sky, wind, tree; by the storm and night murmurings, by the friendship and companionship of birds and animal life, and the power to plant and tend growing things and to human relationships.”

Seventy-year-old McCutcheon then founded, as a joint venture between BSM and engineering firm Rankine & Hill, a unique multi-disciplinary planning consultancy to provide more holistic solutions to what were commonly typed building problems. Urban Design and Planning Associates was led by his son Andrew, who had qualified as an architect, sheered away to become a Methodist minister, then studied social planning in the UK on a Churchill Scholarship. UDPA rose and fell, at one with the planning propensities of Whitlamism, at odds with the intellectual apathy of the Fraser years – although by standing between rapacious developers and recalcitrant protesters in the 1970s, it did much to save what remains today of Sydney’s Rocks.

Story of cities #17: Canberra's vision of the ideal city gets mired in 'mediocrity' Read more

By the 1980s, ICI House itself looked in peril. Grandiose head offices fell from fashion – some argued that they were no longer necessary, tied up capital and induced bureaucratic torpor. Some of ICI House’s luxuries, like the lofty cafeteria and roof garden, were sacrificed to economy. When ICIANZ was granted independence by its restructuring parent company in July 1997, the great art collection was dispersed, and the building itself sold to Macquarie Bank. ICIANZ’s descendant, Orica, now occupies only five levels; the building’s top floor is rented by British engineering consultancy Arup.

Fifteen years ago, however, a new tenant looped Orica House back to its origins: BSM, architectural credits now including the likes of Melbourne’s Crown Casino and Federation Square and Sydney’s Mid City and Police Headquarters, moved into the sixth floor of its most significant building. Observing the new fashion for post-industrial bareness, but also as if to admire its original handiwork, it stripped the suspended ceiling system to reveal the prefabricated concrete flooring so revolutionary in its time. And while the face of the city has changed, the tall building of today being the soaring apartment tower, the thrill of gazing on it from elevation abides. “Many big buildings these days are very fat for economic reasons, which is why you end up with big windowless areas,” says Melbourne University’s Goad. “So while there are some inefficiencies in the slab plan, the amenity advantages are huge – potential for cross ventilation, visual connection etc. Not only can you see out both sides of Orica House, but the views are … well, they’re to die for.”

Multiple overlapping heritage protections, and nomination as one of eight buildings on the World Register of Significant Twentieth Century Australian Architecture, have further secured that outlook. Sensing that a touch of Mad Men chic might enhance its rental appeal, current owner Charter Hall has recently begun refurbishing its eight lifts, inspired by the original BSM design fished from a microfiche in the firm’s archives, with Aalto-esque curved timber ceilings that roll gently into the rear wall.

What once seemed to dwarf human scale today seems tactfully restrained – refraining from gobbling its whole block, making good on the ground its imposition on the sky. And what once was a vision of Melbourne’s future now offers a powerful sense of communion with the architectural and social past.

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion