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June 3, 2008
I was in Melbourne on the weekend and I took the opportunity to spend some time on Saturday to wander around the CBD in an around the Southern Cross Railway station and the Lonsdale St Power Station.
I had a plan: after exploring the railway station I would take some photo of the "Save the Tarkine" slogan on the power station's imposing chimney stack, a quick wander around then Docklands, then suss out the Bolte Bridge, before I caught the train down the Mornington Peninsula.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Southern Cross Railway Station, 2008
The old power station on the corner of Lonsdale and Spencer streets was a hulking, asbestos-riddled concrete brute of a building, and it had lain eerie and abandoned for 26 years. It was a classic example of Brutalist industrial architecture that celebrated concrete. It stood for the provincial, grimy industrial Melbourne of the 20th century.
I was too late.Soldis Capital, a Russian consortium who paid $7.6 million for the site last year, has cleared the site of asbestos and are now clearing it of old buildings.The latter's chimney had been dismantled and the site was closed off for demolition to make way for commercial office redevelopment, that is styled as a lifestyle retail precinct.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, copper facade of hotel on Londsdale /Spencer St cnr, Melbourne, 2008
It is an example of how Melbourne has changed. Back in the 1980s and 1990s Melbourne had an empty, useless city centre, as the CBD was the dead heart of a dreary, unexciting provincial city. The changes started happening with the opening the first bars in the CBD's laneways that have since become Melbourne's international face. In the decade from the mid-1990s, Melbourne's CBD $1 billion resurrection has produced Federation Square, the Melbourne Museum and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and revitalised the State Library and NGV International.
The city was pulled out of its modernist provincialism by restoring public space and civic engagement, exciting, postmodern public architecture and the interesting corporate architecture. The latter is increasingly to be found in the market driven developments developments in, and around, the Docklands precinct.
I ended up in Digital Harbour--- a specialist IT precinct ---- poked around 1010 LaTrobe Street, before exploring the Victoria Harbor, that is deemed to be the heart of the Melbourne Docklands. I never made it to the Bolte Bridge.
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