playful ABANDON

The conditions that chiselled Victorian-era housing into an analogue of Greek antiquity differ wildly from the concerns that now shape contemporary residences into concrete boxes. Both architectural orders mirror the aspirations of an age and their attendant revolutions — one industrial, one digital — but in matters of style, they sit at rival poles.

For any designer charged with retrofitting 21st-century wants into 19th-century workings — a constant in the heritage-overlaid streets of Melbourne — these polarities present major challenges. How to create