History
Known originally as the Olympic Pool, it was built as an indoor sporting arena for diving, swimming, water polo, and the swimming part of the modern pentathlon events for the 1956 Summer Olympics. It was the first fully indoor Olympic swimming venue in an Olympic Games and is the only major stadium structure from the 1956 Olympic Games with the facade intact. It is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register. The design of this building was the winner of one of three international competitions held in 1952 to provide stadia for the 1956 Olympic Games. Architects Kevin Borland, Peter McIntyre, John and Phyllis Murphy and their engineer Bill Irwin won the only one of these competitions to be consummated. Construction by McDougall & Ireland, one of Melbourne's then largest construction companies, began in October 1954 and was completed in 1956, just prior to the commencement of the Melbourne Olympic Games.
After redevelopment in the 1980s, the venue became the Melbourne Sports and Entertainment Centre and later The Glass House. It hosted home games for the National Basketball League's North Melbourne Giants, as well as the Melbourne Tigers, Eastside Spectres and Westside Saints. The arena, which had a capacity of 7,200 people, was also used as a concert venue.
Read more about this topic: Melbourne Sports And Entertainment Centre
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)