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Melbourne has been sorely damaged for many years through a rush to build.
And now there is a suggestion of a large, dead, ugly excrescence to be built over the railway yards next to Federation Square from Exhibition Street, past Spring Street and including the site opposite Treasury Gardens. It’s called Treasury Square, but in fact what is proposed is simply a dense set of three buildings – no open public square in sight.
The proposed Treasury Square development project at Jolimont Rail Yards.Credit: The Age
Early concepts show a trio of banal towers pretty well filling the available site, so they form a wall between the CBD grid and the river precinct. Of course, preliminary sketches are always fraught. They are simply the lowest level of representation of what might be.
If anything was built like these clumsy three box towers showing offices, apartments, and a hotel –each about 20 storeys high – we are simply allowing our city to slide into squalor once again instead of contributing to our heritage of architectural honour.
The problem is the process of procuring these developments. In this scenario, we select a preferred developer before we establish what is to be constructed, and their focus is on architecture as a commodity to make profits. We allow them to control creativity, while they seek to maximise their returns rather than contributing to the civic good.
That process is wrong. We should focus first on the best planning and architectural solution for Melbourne, consider issues of community benefit, sustainability, urban enhancement, circular economy, respect for Country and quality of the end product.
When the process is subjective, we are motivating development for the greater good. The current activity is quantitative, simply inserting a new object into the city without concern for the broader values of the community.
In particular this site is bordered by others ripe for a new future, the railways down to Barak Bridge and those between Batman Avenue and Russell Street. All will eventually leading down to the river, will also in time be developed. For this extension of the city, we need a vision for the whole precinct, a creative design which captures the imagination and texture of the place with all the aspirational energy and determination we can muster. We do not need yet not another drop-in solution to fill a gap.
We have precedence as a warning – think of the tall ugly glass “sisters” surrounding the RMIT precinct with their embarrassingly dull entry porches and minuscule apartment floor plans. These are more rat nests than homes for people.
And Docklands, with its (once upon a time) ridiculous spinning wheel offering views of a tacky set of formicaria where people live and work, most with their backs to the river. These are sad places; tough and brutal examples of uncaring planning and lack of design. But development in Melbourne wasn’t always done this way.
The development of Docklands has long been criticised for its lack of cohesive design. Credit: Craig Abraham
In the late 1800s, our citizens constructed fine and lasting public buildings for the “new Athens”, sponsored by people with a view to history, not simply financial returns. They were the same folk who established our tree-lined boulevards and great gardens – the Fitzroy, Exhibition and Botanic gardens among them.
Their worldview was not limited by a lack of civic imagination. They knew the returns on their investments would be evident long after they had moved on, and our generation is the beneficiary.
But the new Melbourne development is focused squarely on the bottom line where profit is measured in fast builds and balance-sheet returns, ramping up the numbers for higher and more quickly built structures is the developer’s tool of trade.
In the process, they are wrecking Melbourne. We are sliding into the netherworld of a universal city that could be anywhere. We’re being morphed into a nondescript international beehive. Civic dreams and hopes have evaporated into the investor’s pockets.
It seems our problem has been a lack of aspiration, or imagination, or hope. We accept what is served up to us for urban renewal as if it is a given, and then the city is condemned to live with unmanageable places and ugliness for the next half century or more.
The site of Treasury Square and its undeveloped neighbouring railway tracks would suggest a development that would respect the formal Hoddle grid ending on Flinders and Spring Streets. It offers so much by extending the city down to the riverbanks.
To enable an overall design to lead the future of the site, we must establish a vision that respects our heritage and one that also extends that proposition into the future. As a guide, it would be prudent to keep it simple, legible, and worthy of our other great public spaces.
We should expect large open areas on the site to be designed as “third places”, which sociologist Ray Oldenburg describes as places where we can relax, enjoy the weather, breathe fresh air and mix with the characters that make up a vibrant city.
Once we produce an imagined vision for the precinct, we can move on to laying out appropriate subdivisions for construction – including their functional purpose – and specify building materials, heights, details, and interactivity of their connection with the grand vision.
The process being adopted for the future site currently is blinkered by a lack of imagination and political timidity. Those in charge (who are our representatives, after all) have secured the site and jumped ahead to select a developer before we have a vision for the future. In that process, the people of Melbourne have no concrete design proposal to consider until it’s too late.
It will end in tears.
Norman Day is a practising architect, commentator and educator.
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