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November 18, 2003
Federation Square folks.
It was not built when I was last in Melbourne. I have not experienced it as a public space. So I am opening up a discussion about it with those who have experienced it, formed some judgements about it, or know of published evaluations and concerns. This series, In the Mind of the Architect, may help to start the discussion.
My own interest here is in public spaces. There are not many in our cities, due to the space being commodified by the freewheeling market. Consequently, most of our architecture is for private clients who think in terms of economics. This corporate architecture is foisted on the public whether we like it or not. We have to live with them, good or bad. Even though they shape our cities and our movements we do not have a say.
I remembered Melbourne's failed squares of the past. They were dead bleak spaces. And Adelaide's public space around the Festival Centre was just a deck of concrete with a few sculptures and pot plants on it. A disaster.
This was another go at creating a genuine public space:
I'm aware that the Square is marketed as the centre of the metropolis of Melbourne and is seen as the heart of the nation.
I realize that Melbourne is at the cutting edge of architecture in Australia and that RMIT university is the incubator for the new architecture in Melbourne. through trying to get one major building from every top architect in the city.
And that the background to the construction was that the Kennett Liberal Government had a vision to create one of the great civic spaces of the 21st century right on top of the railway yards which had divided the city from the river.
Now it does have a monumental quality that is mean to impress and awe:
On the other hand, these forms break with the modernist big black boxes of steel and glass, with their sleek elegance. They became the businessmans vernacular. They are not boring. We do have pluralism, variety and complexity here. they are like public sculptures which we have to live with for a long time.
So I look at the Square as a public space that is one of our sacred sites that transgress the rights of the property owner, which are the heart of our political system. I look and this image Julian Hill immediately comes to mind:
 It's called Remember Me?
Where are the local architectural codes of the local tradition? It seems to refer back to the pre-modern city square ringed by great civic buildings.
Does it give us a sense of gravitas, the sense of solid civic public space that you get from cities that we all like to think of as being good public cities.
Yeah I know, it's fractal architecture; and that what we have here are the primitives of a new sensibility.
The beginning of something thats going to grow and grow and grow.
Something that will be nurtured in our computers by young architects pushing the boundaries.
Did the designers listen to the wind? Did they feel the sun? We sould ask these questions because it is not just about innovative design:
 Public buildings and squares are important becuase they help us to define ourselves as a nation.
They facilitate our understanding of who we are as public beings and who we might be.
Is the Square postmodernism?
It appears that postmodernism in architecture has been and gone----didn't it have something to with Learning From Las Vegas?---- The judgement is that some of the buildings are bad, horrible kitsch. We should pause a moment as there is still alive in philosophy. There it stands for movements influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger's attack on the presuppositions of western metaphysics of instrumental reason.
That attack can be linked to modernist architecture. That movement had a number of presuppositions: its rational forms and technological purism, search for unity and harmony, prohibition on historical references, the universal language of pure form, and the ethos of progress.
Where to now? Changing the modern' no against tradition and history' to the postmodern letting it all in and then being ironic? Or stepping along the pathway toward an Australian architecture?
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Interesting topic Gary. It is monumental and spectacular - when I visited it was still being completed and I was at the opening of the Centre for the Moving Image - which is mysterious, beautiful, sexy, and hip.I think that rather than thinking in binary terms (modern:postmodern) we might need to think about the avant-garde in postmodernity - it shares some of modernism's desire for change and also the postmodern's celebration of difference, while on the other hand rejecting the brutal disengagement of modernism and embracing play instead. And all these logics of value come together in exactly this kind of architecture (and in a different way, the Brisbane Powerhouse). I posted some thoughts on this last week at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~burgess/archives/000291.html. I lie, I have been thinking throughout the entire progress of my masters about this.