The architectural law of diminishing returns
states that the larger the budget, the lesser the innovation, thanks to the
developers’ credo to maximise floor space, minimise construction time and,
generally, forget the user. With Federation Square, Donald Bates and Peter
Davidson of Lab architecture studio have rewritten that law. A complex
ensemble of galleries, cinemas, bars, restaurants, offices and public spaces
due to open mid 2002, it is a remarkable piece of urban regeneration for
three reasons. Firstly, costing over A$400 million, it is the first built
project by this relatively young practice whose approach openly privileges
imagination, experimentation and collaboration over tried-and-tested
standards. Secondly, built on a massive structural deck that bridges train
lines running into nearby Flinders Street Station, it is a spectacular piece
of engineering. Thirdly, it represents an unprecedented commitment to civic
space in a country whose public squares have hitherto been nominal affairs.
It is a development that could easily have unravelled amid major shifts in
the political landscape, and a technical brief of breathtaking complexity.
Born of the boundless ambition of Melbourne’s own Mitterand, the brash,
populist Liberal Premier, Jeff Kennett, Federation Square is tied into a
larger project: the transformation of the blighted area south of the Yarra
River from factory ghost town into blossoming ‘Arts Precinct’. Indeed, the
last decade has seen each major Australian city invent its own version of
Beaubourg, Hoxton, or Greenwich; gallery smorgasbords to lure the gold card
culture vultures. Adelaide’s West End Co-Location initiative, built around
the creative critical mass of its colleges of architecture, performing and
visual arts, is organised and active but perhaps a little too reliant on the
imprimatur of the academy. Brisbane’s Expo 88 success, powering an ever
growing South Bank complex of theatres, galleries and music venues, is
expansive and vigorous, though still a little unsure of its creative
programme. While Sydney, still reeling from its MCA redevelopment fiasco (a
failed quayside culture hub initiative), remains the dynamic,
internationally focused and slightly arrogant diaspora of galleries and
studios it has always been.
Unfortunately, though now an urban success story, Melbourne’s arts precinct,
and its pull on the tax dollar, raised the ire of the rural vote who,
surveying their rutted roads, decided enough was enough and kicked out
Kennett and his ‘let them eat cake’ policies. Conceived, then, at the tail
end of this cultural programme at a time of political upheavals, the Fed
Square brief was always going to have shifting goalposts. Major elements
absent from the original competition brief were hastily added at the last
minute. Controversy raged over modest outlying structures which (it was
claimed) interrupted sight lines to the nearby cathedral. Unrealistic
budgets were set, giving critics ammunition when they were predictably
blown. A couple of resignations in management were followed by the
appointment of a new can-do CEO, brought in to steady the boat.
Of course, Machiavellian power-broking is the stock-in-trade of any urban
development this size, the inevitable imposition of a city politics that
could crucify a more rigid design or dogmatic approach. There are, after
all, good reasons why the urban proposals of so many Modernist heroes, from
Le Corbusier to Frank Lloyd Wright to the Smithsons, did not get built,
belonging as they did to an era of architectural masterplanning predicated
on state-driven megalomania. Federation Square, on the other hand,
exemplifies a change in approach which, though increasingly global, is
overwhelmingly led by Dutch practices such as OMA, MVRDV, UNstudio and West
8. Altogether less tyrannical and more adaptive, it is an approach described
by Lab as ‘not about imposing a single vision upon the project brief, but
rather of engaging in the emergence of an appropriate proposal through a
collaborative design and consultative process’.
The most visually bold expression of this flexible and dynamic approach is
found in Federation Square’s unique feature: its sculpted façade. Employing
an innovative triangular grid formation, the façade eschews the endless
repetition of identical surfaces in favour of a constantly changing,
deforming and modulating curtain of sandstone, zinc and glass. It is through
this unique surface geometry that the architects have been able to absorb
any necessary changes to the brief within ‘a mechanised, systems-based
production process’. Although this kind of wire-frame adaptive surface
modelling has been kicking around grad school end-of-year shows since the
mid-nineties, Federation Square is truly a pioneer in graduating off the
screen and onto the streets. Folding unpredictably around each building,
it’s like a continuous fractal combat fatigue over each of the distinct
buildings throughout the site.
As to the specific buildings within the whole, there are a number of key
elements. Starting with the smaller, both the glamorous Neo Pub and the
commercial offices of the Yarra building are minor players but do perform
important functions. Not only bringing in the dollar, they also create a
more enclosed, protected environment at the sloping southern part of the
plaza, which might have otherwise quietly, aimlessly slipped down into the
Yarra River. Other bit parts are played by a number of free-standing zinc
structures, or ‘shards’ as they have been named, which serve various
information, ticketing and service functions. Venturi’s famous celebration
of Vegas aside, architecture’s relationship to signage and illuminated
information has been at best ambivalent. With these shards Lab have made ‘a
serious attempt to combine new technology with information and cultural
content as an integrated architectural treatment’. In addressing this aspect
of the project Lab collaborated with the heterogeneous Soho studio of Tomato
in producing a range of Holzer-like colour coded LED screens, interactive
maps, and various funky orientation features.
Without doubt, however, the most significant aspects of Federation Square
are the National Gallery of Victoria’s Australian collection and the
Australian Centre for the Moving Image: the former holding an impressive
contemporary collection of Australian artists, as well as the world’s
largest collection of Aboriginal art, the latter representing an almost
visionary commitment to the dynamic and expanding world of screen media; a
formidable duo of ancient and contemporary.
Of the two, the NGV has perhaps the more inventive floor plan. Required to
accommodate the flat-footed curatorial tradition of chronological sequence,
its loose figure of eight plan nevertheless also promotes different readings
through a series of bridging ‘intra filament’ spaces. Voluminous wedge
spaces which cut through all three levels of the building allow visitors to
make their own connections between periods and regions, literally providing
new perspectives vis à vis both the building and the history of Australian
art. Rendered with unpainted concrete, gently lit overhead and sparsely
punctuated by irregular windows, these are meditative spaces of rest,
reference points for orientation. They are also great people-watching
platforms, voyeurism being one of the museum’s unsung pleasures. Thus the
NGV is designed as a highly porous collection of spaces whose multiple
routes of navigation and exploration ultimately provide the incentive for
repeat visits, the eternal holy grail of museum management. Whether the
curators can rise to the crowd-pulling challenge waits to be seen.
On the other hand, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, with its
messianic mission to ‘prepare the citizens of Victoria with screen and
visual literacy’ is thoroughly public focused. ACMI is a government funded
initiative to provide support and expand opportunities for every aspect of
the screen arts from film and TV to multimedia. A significant co-tenant is
the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS – an incomparable channel for
multicultural productions, hard-hitting documentaries and arthouse
projects), an association which promises pioneering collaboration between
new digital technologies and traditional broadcasting.
ACMI will also house the Screen Gallery. One of the largest exhibition
venues of its type anywhere in the world, this will be dedicated to the
promotion and development of screen media creativity in all its forms,
within a purpose-built 1700m2 space complete with fully equipped workshops,
highly versatile viewing facilities, interactive experimental spaces and a
programme of cutting-edge conferences, events and screenings. This part of
Federation Square, kicking off with a mixed Aussie-international show of
Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, Alexander Sokurov, Jem Cohen, Sue Ford
and Bill Viola, promises to be the premier engine for digital creativity in
Australia.
With rush hour trains rumbling below into their termini and disgorging
thousands of commuters, the ACMI in particular is a miracle of sound
proofing. Admitting to a certain nerdish fascination with this sort of
thing, I had to take a peep under the flooring of the Screen Gallery. The
secret turned out to be a massive concrete slab spiked with thousands of
steel rods with adjustable rubber footings on which are bolted thousands of
rigid plastic, acoustically designed square panels, and finally a tiled
floor suitable for removing in sections for maintenance. Amazingly, it
works. Even with the equivalent of Charing Cross below, you could just as
easily be on the moon.
Also quietly innovative is the passive, low energy cooling/heating system
called the Labyrinth. A long zigzag concrete tunnel under the plaza, pumped
with cool air at night and slowly released the following day, it reduces
ambient temperature by 12oC with a fraction of normal energy consumption. A
tad extravagant perhaps for a climate much like grey old London but you
can’t knock imaginative energy solutions wherever they emerge.
Another nerdish observation (my last, I promise) regards the ground-breaking
way in which the architects have translated the radical geometry of the
triangular façade into a complex self-supporting double glazing for the
central atrium, an enormous enclosed public space divided into north and
south. A staggeringly complex bit of engineering given its incalculable
non-orthogonal, almost chaotic structure. Yet the massive volume of the
north atrium cantilevers out over the public areas without a care in the
world. One of those gravity defying, look-no-hands moments of contemporary
architecture.
The plaza itself has an informal layout thankfully void of the mechanised
exuberance of water features, monumental lumps of rusting metal, or for that
matter any other bronze cast hybrid of Giacometti, Henry Moore and Anthony
Caro, so loved by municipal arts officers. Instead, the writer (The Lie of
the Land, amongst others) and artist Paul Carter, following a similar vein
to last year’s collaboration with artist Ruark Lewis at Sydney’s Olympic
Park, interrogates the genius loci of the site. Always an intensely
political act here in Australia, Carter reveals a place of shared histories
and stolen land. Using inscribed tablets set into the Kimberley sandstone
cobbles that cover the plaza, Carter inter-cuts between texts of differing
scales, creating a fabric of barely legible language. Those who have read
any of Carter’s critique on the politics of colonial cartography and the
erasure of the vanquished will know that his complex analysis can sometimes
verge on the opaque. Though evident here, too, the opacity and disjunction
of the text is itself a deliberate, rather poetic brooding on the work’s
theme; the imposition of language (often through the colonial bible-thumping
advance squad) as the necessary precursor to claiming land rights.
There is something in Carter’s play on language, coherence and the claiming
of land which echoes in Federation Square’s most visual coda, the complex
geometry of the façade, the atrium and, in a sense, the fractal dispersal of
the buildings throughout the site. I am reminded of the A&D issue After
Geometry, guest edited by Bates and Davidson, in which the story of geometry
begins (albeit with caveats) as ‘the story of measure and verification. As
the story of demarcation and the re-inscription of land ownership after the
floods in the Nile Delta, geometry emerges as the abstract practicality,
able to erase erasure. As certifiable repetition and not mere
approximation.’ With the story of Australia as the explicit backdrop to
Federation Square, from Terra Nullus to land of settling immigrants marking
out their territories, followed by aggregation into a national whole, it
seems fitting that geometry, the language of land acquisition, should here
be exploded into a most unmonumental, though thoroughly civic, urban
development.
Andrew Mackenzie is a curator, tv presenter and freelance writer based in Melbourne