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Palais de Danse, St Kilda
Comments Palais de Danse, St Kilda (talk) 13:43, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

The Palais de Danse originally located in St Kilda’s Lower Esplanade, inner southern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The Palais de Danse once stood as a striking piece of interwar architecture. Constructed in 1925, the Palais de Danse was designed by renowned American architect at the time, Walter Burley Griffin, 1876 –1937 and his wife Marion Griffin, 1871 – 1961.

History
After war was declared, in 1915 the Palais de Danse site became Palais Pictures. This was the third Palais cinema in St Kilda. After the war, in 1919, a steel-framed, arched truss structure was built over the old dance hall. The hall was then dismantled and re-erected next door, to the north. This ran for a couple of years, and then its interior was entirely redesigned by Architect, Walter Burley Griffin.

After winning an international competition for the design of the proposed new national capital city, Canberra, the Griffins came to Australia in 1913, and established an office in Melbourne and it was 7 years after their move to Melbourne in 1920, that the Palais de Danse was first designed.

The Phillip brothers, as a team, were to be instrumental in the shaping of St.Kilda's entertainment industry. In 1920, Walter Burley Griffin crossed paths with the Phillips brothers and Griffin’s design on the Palais de Danse began. Being entertainment entrepreneurs, the Phillips Brothers soon became interested in the moving picture business and commissioned Griffin to design the Palais Theatre, 1922.

Features / Architectural Style
The Palais de Danse embraces the Interwar period in architecture, which saw the emergence of the newer modern styles, in response to the Great Depression. Architectural Styles of this period portrayed in the Palais de Danse included Modern and classical.

The Griffin’s short-lived 2-storey interior for the relocated old timber Palais de Danse has been illustrated as an interesting Modernist design of purely geometrical elements, in a sequence of ascending vertical chevron panels, like vertebrae. The gently arched ceiling was supported on organic trunks, with umbrella branches in folded, prismatic forms. It seated as many as 2,870 patrons. Its triangular entrance awning was supported on staggered columns.

The Palais de Danse was commonly used as a hall and is remembered for its magical atmosphere. Although supported by abstracted Doric columns, the frieze above was entirely Modernist, with complex, prismatic panels up lit. On hot nights, the louvered wall panels hinged up, to capture sea breezes wafting off the bay.

The Outcome
In just over 2 decades there have been four different Palais cinemas in St Kilda, most confusingly, three of them on the esplanade. In 1913 they built the Palais de Danse next to Luna Park, which was converted to Palais Pictures in 1915. A new cinema was built on the site in 1920, and the Palais de Danse was recreated on an adjoining site.

Reprehensibly a spectacular fire engulfed the stage in February 1926, just before completion, bringing a halt to work. When the Griffins moved on to Sydney the fire convinced the Phillips brothers to erect the forth Palais Pictures, a much grander and splendid theatre on the site. For this ambitious enterprise they commissioned the extremely experienced theatre architect Henry E. White 1888-1952 of Sydney.