Lovell Chen’s 2013 commission revisited the CMP we had completed for the whole of the Victorian Arts Centre in 1995 (as Allom Lovell & Associates) in conjunction with Professor Phillip Goad. The CMP review took account of the the physical changes to the Theatres Building that had taken place since then, and reviewed the original conservation policy and its guidelines for future management methods.

The Theatres Building was re-surveyed, interior and exterior descriptions revised and the original assessment of significance amended as appropriate.

Our client, Arts Centre Melbourne, requested the preparation of a practical day-to-day management tool for the implementation of policy directions arising from the management plan. We recast the expanded CMP into a heritage handbook, using an updatable data-sheet format detailing policy directions for individual spaces — creating a series of toolkits enabling heritage asset management.