Wreck, ruin and glory

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Ms Annear says Whelan, a four-generation family business that folded in 1992 after 100 years, "enabled people's imaginings" of their city, be they good or bad.

When it was erected in 1896, the Equitable Life Assurance Society building, on the corner of Collins and Elizabeth streets, reflected the Victorian yen for prosperity and permanence. It had seven storeys and marble walls and floors. Its roof blocks weighed up to 15 tonnes.

The building's four-metre-tall sculpture Charity Being Kind to the Poor towered four storeys above Collins Street. It shows a giant woman sheltering a bedraggled mother and her two children.

But by 1959, grand gestures were out. Post-Olympics, big companies preferred the maximum floor space design of box skyscrapers, and the Equitable, now the Colonial Mutual Life building, had to come down.
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[ Wreck, ruin and glory ]