Collingwood Football Club Grandstand
Victoria Park, Collingwood, VIC
Commenced: March 1909
Completed: June 1909

The first non-residential project that Lauritz Hansen built was a grandstand for the Collingwood Football Club at Victoria Park. It cost 2687 pounds and was completed in just four months, opening in June 1909. (It was demolished in the 1970s).

The project was an important milestone because it demonstrated Lauritz's organisational, business and building skills, and led to further large scale projects including two grandstands at the Flemington Showgrounds, and industrial and office projects in Melbourne's CBD and suburbs.

Bill Shields (Foreman, right) with C Mailer (Manager, Cox Bros), E Richardson (Manager HY Tasmania) and Sir Frank Richardson (Managing Director of Cox Bros) overseeing the building of Cox Bros Department Store (now Myer), Launceston, Tasmania, 1961.

We love the hard hats!

Otto Yuncken devised an innovative suspended scaffold to replaster the domed ceiling at the State Library of Victoria, 1929.

Bank of New South Wales, Melbourne

Tom Duckworth was the General Foreman on the Bank of New South Wales building at 360 Collins Street, Melbourne, which commenced in May 1933. The 11-storey steel-framed building boasted an impressive entrance with two bronze doors that were 8.3 metres high and weighed nearly seven tons, framed by highly polished granite. Inside, it featured a 12-metre square column-free banking chamber which was unprecedented in Melbourne at the time.

The chamber was supported by four steel-plate girders that were over 19 metres long and weighed up to 60 tons each. Manufactured by Johns and Waygood in South Melbourne, they were the longest girders constructed in Victoria at the time and required a specially designed 14-wheeled, 28 horsepower truck for transport to the site.

In those days, steam boilers were used to power the derrick cranes that lifted the girders into place, which occurred in a smooth operation early one morning. A crowd of onlookers gathered to observe the marvellous feat, despite the 2am start.

Myponga Dam, built by the Hansen Williams Hornibrook joint venture, Myponga, SA, 1959.

Commonwealth Trading Bank, Corner Liverpool and Elizabeth Streets, Hobart, 1949-1954

Alf Ludlow, (right) shaking hands with Max Hansen, former Managing Director, (left). Peter Hansen, current Chairman (on far right).

Alf Ludlow was Hansen Yuncken's first apprentice when he joined the company in 1921. His first job as foreman was the Ruskin Motor Body Works in West Melbourne in 1927. During the Depression, in 1930, he was laid off and resumed employment with the firm in July 1931 on the Myer Emporium project. In 1934 he was the foreman on the Epworth Hospital East and West Wings project, before becoming a general foreman in 1937. He supervised the construction of the AMP Building in Lonsdale Street, which was completed after Alf retired, at the age of 50, in July 1957. Alf was so highly regarded by the Hansen Yuncken management team that he was fiven the company's first ever retirement dinner, as well as the more commonly awarded company pension.

In 1966 Hansen Yuncken won the contract to build AMP's headquarters in Adelaide's King William Street, designed by architects Woods Bagot ($6.693m).

Technological Innovation
Hansen Yuncken continued to pioneer new construction methods in the 1960s, particularly on the Communications House in Mebourne and AMP Adelaide projects, where it deployed two newly purchased Favco tower cranes. With the ability to extend themselves upwards as required, the cranes were particularly useful on tight city sites with limited ground space, where they offered many advantages over the older stiff-legged type. These two projects also boasted the company's first passenger hoists on multi-storey construction sites, and new concrete pumps, all of which demonstrated Hansen Yuncken's willingness to embrace new technologies.

Royal Hobart Hospital, 1966

Looking back, it is apparent that construction of the Stock Exchange Building in Melbourne, which commenced in 1965, and the Royal Hobart Hospital, which began the following year, occurred on the cusp of a building technology revolution. Both projects combined the use of traditional equipment such as stiff-legged cranes for materials handling and new technologies such as precast panels, Favco cranes, electric passenger and materials hoists and concrete trucks, which were only just making their way on to building sites.

Port Authority Building, Melbourne, VIC, 1931

The company's founders, Lauritz Hansen and Otto Yuncken, considered the Port Authority Building in Melbourne, completed in December 1931, to be the company's finest achievement. Alf Ludlow, who joined as Hansen Yuncken's first apprentice in 1921, recalled its construction: "The first time I saw piles put down was at the Harbour Trust (Port Authority) Building in 1929. They were timber piles, not concrete, and were driven by a weight carried up an erected gantry with guides on it. The pile was strapped with a ring around the top to stop it from splitting. They drove it until it didn't move after so many drives. If it refused to move, they considered that it had reached the bottom.

"The gantry for hoisting materials had two wheels right at the top, which had to be greased every day. That was a job for the rigger, to climb up and grease the wheels over which a rope ran down through a snatch block and back to an electric winch. The bell, which was a triangle rung by a piece of cord, would be heard by the winch driver and he would lower the skip. There used to be a man travelling on the skip, but that was later stopped.

"After 1925, Hansen Yuncken would have been the leading builder in Melbourne and we kept pace in all our multi-storey jobs with new machinery. From that point, we increased our capacity with a bigger mixer. We got what they call a bag mixer and there were usually two bag mixers on the city jobs. We were able to put that in the basement in the early stages and we built hoppers for the trucks to bring in the sand, the screening and the cement. They would be shot down a chute to the lower floor and Darkie Austin, who was our main concrete man, and Bill Alley, would be in these pits, and they'd lift the lid of the bin and shoot the sand and the screenings into the hoppers that had levels marked on them. If it was a two-bag batch, you'd put your two bags in and pull the level and it would shoot into the mixed, be mixed and then it would tip into another hopper that had a trap door on it.

"That was opened to fill a rickshaw, which had two wheels and a steel structure that held approximately three barrows. You could wheel the rickshaw along runs to tip it where you were concreting. In the rickshaw, the batch stayed more constant whereas with chutes the concrete tended to separate, as they made the concrete a bit too wet in those days. The standard way of mixing concrete now, using pumps and vibration, that didn't exist in my day".

Port Authority Building, Melbourne, VIC, 1931

Sun Theatre, 1938
8 Ballarat Street,
Yarraville, Victoria