It must have been a mistake. It could have been a premonition. “Aspire Melbourne is an elegant addition to the Melbourne skyline,” the realestate.com.au description reads, “one of the last luxury towers in Melbourne’s CBD and Australia’s fastest selling projects (emphasis added).” I’m sitting in the air-conditioned, Muzak-infused library of Aspire, a new tower on King Street in Naarm (Melbourne), completed in 2024, and pause briefly to consider the implications of this claim. I assume the copywriter meant to write “latest” rather than “last” as it seems unlikely that no further towers will be built, but Aspire is one of the last landmark luxury towers to be realised as the result of the skyscraper bonanza presided over by former Victorian planning minister Matthew Guy (2010–14). It is also seemingly the last tower designed by influential architectural practice Elenberg Fraser to be built, due to the firm’s recent liquidation. It is a “last” of sorts, then: it’s the end, or at least one of the ends, of an era.

A 210.6-metre, sixty-five storey high-rise, Aspire is a little too voluptuous to be considered a pencil scraper, though it is one of the slimmer Elenberg Fraser towers and by far the most contemporary, mainly by virtue of its curved and arched concrete podium and ground floor lobby. Unlike the backside of the earlier Liberty Tower, there isn’t a smelly extractor fan or unsightly grille in sight. While the façade “cinches” visually and contains subtle vertical inflections, none of the corporeal hijinks that the architects are rumoured to have played with in earlier buildings are present here. Marketing material highlights Aspire’s amenities: a whiskey parlour, champagne conservatory, library, co-working lounge, gym, spa, sauna, hydro pool, PT area, grand ballroom, and dining rooms. This program that is threaded through the lobby and used to “clad” the street interface suggests a more program-driven architectural approach than Elenberg Fraser’s previous form-heavy parametric experiments. It also makes me think immediately of the opening scene from J. G. Ballard’s novel High Rise (1975), and I wonder which of these facilities is reserved for residents of the top-floor and, in an apocalyptic scenario whether the whiskey parlour or the ballroom would be the first scene of mob violence and pet barbeques. Right now, the muted tones and generic atmosphere feel sleepy. Revolution is not on the cards.

Aspire is my last stop on a three-day romp through the gridded streets of the CBD, chasing high-rises in Melbourne’s blazing summer sun. A fool’s errand from the get-go, I’d decided to visit all fourteen of Elenberg Fraser’s CBD tower projects in chronological order with my ten-month-old baby in tow because, to understand Aspire, it is important to understand the architect’s entire back catalogue, and the tower typology itself. From that, you’ll understand the sheer volume. I walked from Liberty Tower (2002) to A’Beckett Tower (2010) to Abode318 (2015) to Light House (2017) to EQ Tower (2017) to Swanston Central (2019—that one was out of order) to Avant (2018) to Victoria One (2018) to Aurora Melbourne Central (2019) to 380 Lonsdale (2021) to Premier Tower (a.k.a. Beyoncé, 2021) to UNO (2023) and then finally to Aspire (2024).; I have to admit that I missed 560 Flinders (2016), so that visit came later—no one’s perfect. The baby slept, and I crisscrossed the grid, taking ugly photo after ugly photo of the towers on my mobile, each more skewed than the last, all the while thinking about the words that might be required to write, or even think, critically about Elenberg Fraser’s oeuvre.
High-rise towers—and especially the kind designed by Elenberg Fraser—find themselves at the centre of a diverse set of critiques. For the left-leaning critic or theorist, towers actively materialise capital, symbolising neoliberal urban governance, free market excesses, the commodification of housing, and unsustainable energy consumption. Urbanists tend to decry high-rises for a liberal mix of social and technical reasons: not only do towers create wind tunnels, urban heat island effects, and overshadowing of the public realm, but they also break Danish urban design guru Jan Gehl’s (arbitrary) building height of “around six stories,” thereby eschewing a connection to the street, apparently a vital ingredient in creating “community,” which he set out in his treatise Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space (1971). Conservative urban renaissance types and NIMBY groups, meanwhile, typically disdain high-rises for their “monolithic” appearance and occasionally call them “Soviet” if placed in the service of public housing, while xenophobes weaponise terms like “foreign investors” and “international students” to demonise high-rise inhabitants. Meanwhile, feminist critics have exposed the male power fantasies behind “phallic” high-rise architecture (see Dolores Hayden’s 1977 Skyscraper Seduction / Skyscraper Rape). These critiques—some theoretically rigorous, others clearly spurious—can each be explored in relation to Elenberg Fraser’s towers, but this would be to treat the buildings as mere expressions of a type: as pure, generic form. Things, I would suggest, get a little messier and a whole lot deeper if we instead interrogate this specific project, that is, Aspire, as part of a multiple of Elenberg Fraser towers.

Another tactic in an architecture review can be to conflate a critique of the work of Elenberg Fraser with a critical history of the firm itself. Although the two are intertwined, they are not the same thing. For the uninitiated, it is important to know about some of the controversies that have marked the office. Founded in 1998 by architects Callum Fraser and Zahava Elenberg (daughter of gallerist Anna Schwartz and artist Joel Elenberg, and stepdaughter of property developer and publisher Morry Schwartz), Elenberg Fraser’s “first and very major, large project,” Liberty Tower, was initiated directly after Elenberg’s graduation from RMIT. Developed by Morry Schwartz, which is bound to induce a wave of nepo baby jealousy in anyone running a small architecture firm, myself included, it’s a fact that is obviously not fertile ground for architectural critique. You may recall the firm was placed into liquidation in 2023, years after Zahava Elenberg left the company (and the relationship—she was also married to Callum Fraser for a time). This came after the firm was ordered to pay twenty-five percent of damages owed to apartment owners in relation to a non-fatal fire in 2014 on the facade of one of its projects, the Lacrosse Tower, in a judgement extensively covered by mainstream media in 2019.

But, back to the buildings. In the world of high rises, there are many ambiguities and grey zones—between inside and outside, city and building, public and private, façade and structure, etc. One of the many things that high rises blur is the definition of “a dwelling”, not only in spatial terms—How big is it?—but also in terms of how it is counted—How many are there? At a moment when apartments can instantly be “hotellerised” through a couple of clicks on a website—a possibility investigated by philosopher and architect Hélène Frichot and myself in relation to the Avant tower (again, by Elenberg Fraser)—it becomes had to draw hard lines between hotel rooms, serviced apartments, and residential dwellings, let alone count them. I quickly realised that a spreadsheet would be necessary to keep track of things, and that for the purposes of that spreadsheet I would need to keep the category of dwelling open, including hotel suites and apartments, under the same rubric.

Here, Zahava Elenberg was way ahead of me. In 2002—relatively soon after founding Elenberg Fraser—she started a second firm, called Move-In, which furnishes apartments in the “community living” sectors (i.e., build-to-rent, student accommodation, and senior living). In a recent interview she said, “It’s a big job when you might have 20,000 items you have to procure, quality control, pick and pack, and then install onsite under tight time constraints. I dream in spreadsheets now.”While the Liberty Tower (completed in 2002, so presumably the impetus for Move-In) “only” contained 233 apartments, the architect was clearly aware of the potential economy of scale at stake in the high-rise typology; by the late 2010s and early 2020s, Elenberg Fraser towers were comprising well over a thousand units (Swanston Central contains 1,045 dwellings and Aurora Melbourne Central 1,211 dwellings, including the hotel suites).

The fourteen towers I visited together accommodate around 8,594 dwellings. (This number should be taken roughly.) To put things in perspective, the total housing stock of the CBD’s west, east, and north census districts in 2021 comprised 28,308 dwellings. In 2023 the entire social housing stock of the State of Victoria sat at around 88,189 homes. While the aforementioned ambiguity around hotel rooms means that these statistics are not directly comparable, they still speak ballpark volumes. On this count, what Elenberg Fraser’s CBD oeuvre shows is that it is quite possible to build mass housing in a neoliberal present where such terms are routinely dismissed as despotic utopianism. To push my readers’ tolerance for such a spirit, as well for statistics, a little further, I note that 30,660 people were homeless in Victoria in 2023 and in 2024 there were 53,554 households on Victoria’s waitlist for public and community housing. If the average Melbourne CBD household size of 1.81 people per household were to be applied to the fourteen towers, they would accommodate 15,555 people. This means that if Elenberg Fraser were given the task of designing thirteen more towers at the scale of Aurora Melbourne Central, which were then built, the resulting buildings would eradicate homelessness in the entire state. Add a couple more and you would clear the public and community housing waitlist. These are incredible numbers! I am not trying to load these objects with an absent social potential—there is nothing about the towers that points to the eradication of homelessness or the structural causes behind it—but just to point to the achievement that is their “massiness”: their architectural capacity to get built, to take form, and to do so against a backdrop of the usual critiques against skyscrapers.

What are the architectural characteristics of massiness? Is massiness a problem to be handled or a quality to be sought after? Liberty; A’Beckett; Abode318; 560 Flinders; Light House; Eq. Tower; Swanston Central; Avant; Victoria One; Aurora; 380 Lonsdale; Premier; UNO; Aspire. The seemingly vacuous, the names start to feel familiar after a couple of days, as do the diverse façade geometries, glazing colours, volumes, and entrances marking each figure out as distinct. Old friends would present themselves in gaps between other buildings. I started to mentally greet them; my fool’s errand had got personal. Once you get to know the towers, there are clear “eras” at work. Common interests. Obsessions that die off and return. Two main volumetric types can be discerned: if you are a Swedish speaker like Rutger Sjögrim, architect and my partner at Secretary, who joined me in visiting the towers, they might be described as “graters” (Liberty, A’Beckett Tower, Abode, 560 Flinders, Avant, and Victoria One) and “vases”. The latter category in turn might be called “piles” (Light House), “champagne flutes” (EQ Tower, Premier, Aspire), “butterflies” (Aurora, UNO), and “chunkies” (Swanston Central, 380 Lonsdale). The types maintain various relations to orthogonal (the graters are more conventional in this regard) and curved geometries and the relation between the two, with Aspire sporting the most “cinched” curves, and Premier tower the most wedding-caked. Onto these initial types, pink, brown, and blue phases can be mapped, as do a series of articulation strategies, which track a progression from folding (Liberty) to pleating (A’Beckett) to plaiting (560 Flinders) to scoring (Victoria One) to netting (Avant) to rippling (380 Lonsdale) to dripping (Swanston Central).

I’ve always been quite convinced of the thesis that the skyscraper is simply an index of capital, imagining a wellspring of speculative value bursting upwards like oil or gas, with the glass curtain wall of the tower acting as a prophylactic envelope that both contains and materialises these financial resources. But here there are clearly other operations at play: tests, explorations, failures, lessons. Having trawled reviews of these buildings, I find little in the way of a collegial conversation around their massiness. Again, I am struck by the way in which the high-rise makes demands on us with respect to words. Embedded in Elenberg Fraser’s CBD oeuvre is thus also the possibility of a new criticism, or at least one that is conducted on different terms (something that Australian architectural critic and historian Karen Burns called for already in 2003 in relation to Liberty, but which, as far as I can tell, was never followed up).

If a single building can provide a critic or passerby or an entire architectural community with a mirror onto at least some of the (usually invisible) norms and controls—not to mention the trends, tastes, and irrational desires—that structure a society, what can 8,594 apartments tell us, then, about Naarm (Melbourne) in the first three decades of the twenty-first century? In searching for the meaning behind the massiness, timing is everything.

Architecture is an atemporal discipline, always arriving in advance of the built fact. Buildings are designed years before they are built, making the question of dating architecture far from straightforward. The fourteen towers I mention here were built between 2002 and 2024, and it was roughly in the order of their completion that I visited them. But these are not the only important dates. At present, despite the firm’s reported liquidation, the Elenberg Fraser website is still online in its entirety. Partners leave traces in practices long after their departure, and I wonder whether I can sense Zahava’s spreadsheet dreams in an odd detail on the web presentation of the firm’s projects: each tower is listed by name but also by project number. At most architecture offices that I’ve worked at, the project number starts with a year—presumably the one in which the project was initiated—and these years are telling. With the exception of Liberty and A’Beckett, the first two towers, the other twelve project numbers fall between 2010 and 2014. This is not insignificant and leads me to the final lesson that I would like to extract from this particularly juicy mass.

In the decade spanning 1999–2010, the Victorian state planning portfolio had been passed from Labor MPs John Thwaites (1999–2002), Mary Delahunty (2002–05), and Rob Hulls (2005–06), until it finally landed in the hands of Justin Madden sprawl (2006–2010), a vocal critic of suburban, whose time in office coincided with a period of rapid change on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and the Yaluk-ut Weelam Boon Wurrung of the Kulin Nation. Towers had begun to rise, punctuating the flat industrial land south of the Yarra River, in the “new” area of Southbank. In 2010, when the Libs won office in Victoria, Matthew Guy was handed planning. Following his appointment as minister, Guy took no time in exploiting a regulatory quirk in the planning system: developments over 25,000 square metres could be excised from municipal planning and determined by the minister themselves. When news hit that Guy had a soft spot for the approval stamp, savvy developers seemingly “upsized” to make sure their applications landed on the desk of “Mr. Skyscraper,” and tower fever hit. Famously, in an incident called “Super Tuesday,” on February 25, 2014, 2,000 apartments were approved in a single day. Guy was minister between December 2, 2010, and December 4, 2014. This window coincides with the design (if it can be carbon-dated by project number) of twelve of Elenberg Fraser’s fourteen CBD towers. There are projects that were approved by the subsequent minister, Richard Wynne, but in the case of “the last tower”—Aspire—the groundwork was laid during the Guy era through the approval of the demolition of the building that formerly housed the Koorie Heritage Trust.

The timing suggests that a mass architecture is both possible and designable (the arguments that I unfold above), precisely because of, not in spite of, planning regulations. It seems overdramatic to say that there would be no Elenberg Fraser without Matthew Guy, but it is fair to say that the scale and character of the architects’ work would have been radically different. As such, it is not “capital” alone that these towers index, but also political will. At a moment when architecture is being warned to stay out of conflicts and out of politics—stay out of talking about Palestine, stay out of questions of gender, stay out of debates around whose walls we will not build—the Elenberg Fraser towers show us that architecture is not autonomous, but always made by means of (party) politics.

So what if Elenberg Fraser’s CBD towers were “the last landmark luxury towers”? Perhaps the emphasis should be placed on “landmark” and “luxury.” Air-conditioned envelopes that extrude hundreds of metres into the air stacked on structures of precious concrete and enclosed in resource-intensive glass, these towers clearly came at a cost, which, as I’ve discussed, may be calculated in a multitude of ways. They also represent an impressive oeuvre and, in their sheer massiness, a significant spatial resource: it is worth remembering, should you visit Aspire or its sister towers, that these buildings contain 8,594 dwellings. Those are homes that might, under different circumstances and alternate arrangements, be inhabited on vastly different terms.