Books devoted to a single building are rare things. If written with critical acumen and poise, if beautifully illustrated and handsomely designed, they become, for me at least, rather like a favourite biography, something that one returns to again and again. This is the case with Gideon Haigh and Peter Elliott’s (Parliament of Victoria, 2022), the intriguing account of the turbulent life and times (and complex design origins) of arguably Australia’s most important nineteenth-century work of classicism: Victoria’s Parliament House on Spring Street, Melbourne. As the book’s title describes it, this is a building whose life is ongoing and
