140 William Street

140 William Street, Melbourne
Building façade from William Street
Record height
Tallest in Melbourne from 1972 to 1975
Preceded by	Marland House
Surpassed by	Optus Centre
General information
Location	Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 140 William Street in the CBD
Coordinates	37°48′57″S 144°57′31″E / 37.8158°S 144.9586°E / -37.8158; 144.9586Coordinates: 37°48′57″S 144°57′31″E / 37.8158°S 144.9586°E / -37.8158; 144.9586
Completed	1972
Height
Roof	152 metres (499 ft)
Technical details
Floor count	41
Design and construction
Architect	Yuncken Freeman
Engineer	Irwin Johnson & Partners

140 William Street (formerly BHP House) is a 41-storey steel, concrete and glass building located in the eastern side of the central business district of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Constructed between 1969 and 1972, BHP House was designed by the architectural practice Yuncken Freeman alongside engineers Irwin Johnson and Partners, with heavy influence of contemporary skyscrapers in Chicago, Illinois. The local architects sought technical advice from Fazlur Khan of renowned American architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), spending 10 weeks at their Chicago office in 1968. At the time, BHP House was known to be the tallest steel framed building and the first office building in Australia to use a “total energy concept” – the generation of its own electricity using BHP natural gas. The name BHP House came from the building being the national headquarters of the Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP) Company. Since being erected, BHP House has been included in the Victorian Heritage Register (Number H1699) for significance to the State of Victoria for following three reasons:

Containing 41 floors and standing at 152m tall, BHP House was designed in a ‘Modern Style’ during the 1960s. At the time, the design was intentionally promoting the use of steel in Australian construction and sought to establish new national height standards for a steel-framed structure. Consisting of three dominant materials - steel, concrete and glass - 'BHP House was in fact the tallest building in the city upon completion. The buildings ‘sheer glazed curtain wall’ was juxtaposed by banded curtain walls of the 1950s and 1960s and thus was often compared to the works of Mies van der Rohe, due to its detachment from surrounding cityscape, and its presence as a ‘three dimensional sculptural monument’. In the architectural field, BHP House is regarded as one of the more notable projects by Yuncken Freeman Architects due to cutting edge techniques for an office building such as flush glazing, minimalist interiors and expressed structural bracing.