The Nicholas Building: A User’s Manual
Ben Eltham
November 08
It’s no secret that affordable, inner-city studio space is becoming something of a rarity. The variety of artists that have traditionally brought colour and character to our streets are being scattered ever-further afield – all the more reason then to treasure the informal cultural hub that is Melbourne’s Nicholas Building. In Meanjin’s September issue, Ben Eltham treads the generous corridors – ‘a vertical city’ of creativity – and meets some of the inspired tenants that animate its space. An extract is below and you can read the full essay on our editions page.
It’s not difficult to guess the sort of creative types who exist on the better side of precarity in 2010: as well as the artists and haberdashers, the Nicholas Building is home to designers, animators, film- and television-makers, even anthropologists. Recent ABS figures show there were more than 17,000 designers working in Victoria in 2006, a number that has surely grown since. It’s not surprising therefore that the Nicholas Building has its fair share. Graphic design is the rag trade of the early twenty-first century.
Aaron Moodie is one of them. He’s perhaps typical of the designers who inhabit the Nicholas Building and other buildings like it in inner Melbourne. His firm, People Collective, is small (a partnership between Moodie and his colleague Colin Trechter), highly networked in Melbourne’s artistic community (People Collective designed the program for the Next Wave festival) and, while scarcely wealthy, brings in enough work to pay the bills and allow Moodie and Trechter a modest living.
‘I’ve been in the building since 2006, when I initially moved in with [designers] tin&ed on level eight, and I was there for three years before moving down here to level three,’ he tells me. ‘When did we move in, Natalya?’ he asks Natalya Hughes, the visual artist he shares the room with. ‘We moved into this studio June last year.’
Moodie’s studio, on level three, sports the words PRIVATE DETECTIVE on the door. ‘We often see flashes go off of people taking photos of it. We have no idea if there was a private detective, it’s just letraset, it’s not etched on the window, so it’s not period, it’s not like the podiatrist on level eight.’
Why maintain a studio, I ask. Moodie laughs. ‘I probably spend a good 60 to 70 per cent of my time in here. The idea of having somewhere to go every day is fundamental to running a business, because otherwise I’d be rolling out of bed at eleven every day. It’s just a good separation of working life and home life, though then I end up spending more time at here then I do at home.’
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