The campus and
the country
it served.

By the mid-1960s the Australian Road Research Board needed a purpose-built headquarters, and acquired a 6.5-hectare former apple orchard on Burwood Highway, Vermont South. Melbourne was chosen partly to avoid any perception of competing with the road research institute at the University of New South Wales. The complex, later named the Australian Road Research Centre, was designed by Mockridge, Stahle & Mitchell in a quiet, restrained modernism: low, block-like forms scaled to the routines of a working research campus, set into open, sloping grounds.

The idea of a national road research body circulated for decades before it took form. As early as 1924, William Calder of Victoria’s Country Roads Board urged a coordinated, scientific approach to road building. In 1948 the Board’s chief engineer, Caleb Grafton Roberts, returned from an overseas study tour convinced Australia was falling behind countries with central testing laboratories, and recommended a permanent national body. ARRB was established in 1960 and became the country’s first national road research system, testing materials and guiding technical standards for uniquely Australian conditions.

Sir Brian Murray is shown through ARRB’s computer centre at its opening. The Board was set up to replace the fragmented research efforts of individual states, and its mandate was broad: coordinate research, share knowledge widely, and tackle problems unique to Australia, from durable pavements for a hot, dry continent to the safety of suburban streets. Its early leadership in traffic management and road safety challenged accepted wisdom and introduced evidence-based approaches that saved lives.

Sharing knowledge was as central to ARRB’s work as producing it. Through its library, training, conferences and national research networks, the Board built Australia’s long-term transport expertise. Its reconceptualisation of residential streets as places rather than traffic corridors helped reshape suburban planning, influencing everyday life in ways most residents never saw. Across the decades it earned a reputation for independence, technical rigour and public purpose.

Bound volumes of Road Abstracts record decades of accumulated research. That legacy of purposeful progress, practical, collaborative and attuned to Australian conditions, became the first of the interpretive themes developed for VerSo Place: a reminder that innovation is most meaningful when it enhances community wellbeing and people’s experience of place. The themes were mapped to specific uses, from campaign messaging and brand storytelling to resident communications.

A research campus was also a workplace with its own daily rhythms and its own community, from the laboratories to the canteen, pictured here around 1980. Mockridge, Stahle & Mitchell designed the centre for that working life: modest in form, careful in its modulation of light, and scaled to the people inside it. The partners believed that even utilitarian buildings should embody calm, order and dignity, a sensibility that carries directly into a community designed around comfort and familiarity.

Landscape architect Beryl Mann, an associate of Mockridge, Stahle & Mitchell and a founding member of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, kept the large remnant eucalypts, planted dense lines of native trees along the boundaries, and personally supervised the regrading of the slope. ARRB left Vermont South in 2017, and today operates as the National Transport Research Organisation. The landmark administration building and its landscape remain, carrying the site’s long public character into its next chapter as VerSo Place.