Lab experiments: a remarkable new civic heart for Melbourne combines traditional urban qualities with wilfully anti-human geometry.

Architecturally, Melbourne is wacky. For a long time, the capital of Victoria seemed to be the seat of provincial respectability. But in the mid 1970s, tectonic culture was transformed, largely by Peter Corrigan of Edmund and Corrigan, who brought a sense of Irish larrikinism, disrespect for the po-faced and a continual questioning of what architecture is about and what it can do. The arrival of Leon van Scheik as professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) reinforced the tendency, which is not confined to the profession, but infects the whole of society and its attitude to architecture. Ashton Raggatt McDougall began to muck about with fractal geometries in architecture a decade ago.

So Melbourne was perhaps the only place in the world that would think of choosing the design by Donald Bates and Peter Davidson of the then London-based LAB Architecture Studio (1) for Federation Square. The project (2) was intended to give the city a heart, a gathering place for citizens, freed from the relentless nineteenth-century colonial grid -- a pattern that has been very sensibly adapted to cope with contemporary needs. Office towers are generally put in the middle of the blocks so the streets retain their human, Victorian scale. But one of the great disasters of nineteenth century planning was the way in which civil engineers seized so many riversides on which to insert their railways -- one that continues to be perpetrated with motorways in our own era. The railways cut central Melbourne off from the Yarra River. Federation Square bridges over the tracks, making (at least partly) a balcony looking over the vista towards the park. The site was previously occupied by dim commercial buildings for gas and fuel enterprises. Now these have gone and a great parvis (with Flinders Street roaring through it) is opened in front of William Butterfield's St Paul's Cathedral. The 7500 square metre piazza, to which the parvis is linked, is calculated to cater for a crowd of 15 000 people. Round it is the Ian Potter Centre (the National Gallery of Victoria), the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (which perhaps ought to be compared to the similar outfit soon to be built in Sydney, p50), and the headquarters of SBS, a television and radio broadcaster. At ground level, there are cafes, restaurants and shops, bringing the large institutional buildings down to earth in a genial and civilized manner. Across the approaches to Princes Bridge is the Edwardian Baroque Flinders Street Station, which in a sense forms the west wall of the piazza.

So the brief was excellent and the architects have responded with gentleness, bravery and wit. In plan, the new piazza is really excellent. It might almost be an example from Camillo Sitte's late nineteenth-century recipe for picturesque city-making complete with square, alleys and streets, foci and irregularity, but all a bit bent and wobbly. And there are some excellent moves in section. A huge glazed and luminous atrium welcomes visitors to the Ian Potter Centre. The back-to-back cinemas of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) have generated fine spaces. The Potter Centre itself is largely organized orthogonally, but is full of ingenious moments both in light and space -- some of the volumes have a resemblance to the concrete-walled voids of Libeskind's Jewish museum in Berlin (AR April 1999), but they are more powerful. In Berlin, you have to be told what the voids in the middle of the plan are supposed to represent. In Melbourne, the spaces are more generous, less neck-breaking to appreciat e (Libeskind, though into his 50s, was an unpractised architect who had many ideas, but little essential feeling about how the human body was to move in his spaces).

Good as its external and enclosed spaces may be, the great problem with Federation Square is what it looks like. Most of the outside is covered with triangular tiles of zinc, glass and warm local sandstone. Five of these make up a panel. And panels are joined into cladding units. Geometry is frantic yet fuzzy. Compared to the Neo-Renaissance, Moderne and Modern tissue of the CBD, everything at Federation Square seems blurred; there is no evidence of human scale, nor relationship to the rest of the city, nor indeed of the nature of what happens within the buildings surrounding the piazza. Maybe, in contemporary democratic societies, we do not need obvious hierarchies--after all we are all equal, so we should not try to invent pyramidal organizational structures. In fact, LAB has created a series of welcoming moments, as well as the excellent provision of cafes, bars and so on. Notably there is the entrance to the ACMI, and the great atrium, which was intended in the programme to be a conservatory, and might ye t become one. But the whole front to Flinders Street is anti-urban. It completely ignores the city that so generously has given it being.

The anti-human, anti-civic geometry of the facades is applauded by Charles Jencks and some similar critics. Jencks suggests that the 'enigmatic shards suggest a new contextualism...the building dissolves the city grid to the north into the parkland to the south using fractal geometries at several scales to do so'. (3) Er, well, it seems simply frightening, unwelcoming and off-putting to most of us. Jencks has argued that the square is an 'enigmatic signifier', a potent monument to human and civil life that does not have obvious or even latent meanings such as are conjured by the Pantheon, the Parthenon, Gothic Cathedrals and Victorian town halls. Jencks excuses the 'public iconography' because it is based on nature, on James Lovelocks's notion of Gaia. The geometry of the facades is supposed to be related to Benoit Mandelbrot's proposal of fractals: not Platonic or Euclidian, but related to nature 'irregular, fragmented and broken'.

Jencks and the acolytes of the new worship of nature are wrong. Darwin, the most profound and disturbing natural historian ever, said that its works are 'clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel'. (4) Thomas Henry Huxley, the Bulldog of diffident and kindly Darwin, put the issue of nature and of humanity extremely clearly. 'Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society, depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less from running away from it, but in combating it.' (5)

How can nature be a wise model for architectural activity? Gala is totally indifferent to species. We can no longer support the nineteenth-century notion that we, as humans, are at the top of some evolutionary tree. So we must make our own way, responding to nature, and working with it, but not copying. Where Federation Square echoes and builds on civilization--the culture of cities--it succeeds triumphantly, it can be jolly, convivial and welcoming. But where it tries to copy an abstracted notion of nature, it is as daunting and indifferent to gentler human feeling as Libeskind's building in Berlin.

1 Daniel Libeskind was the only practising architect on the jury (which in itself says quite a lot about Melbourne civilization). Bates worked for Libeskind in the early '90s.

2 Which has been realized with the established practice, Bates Smart.

3 Jencks, Charles. The New Paradigm In Architecture, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2002, p262.

4 Quoted in Dawkins, Richard, A Devil's Chaplain, Weidenfield & Nicholson, London 2003, p8.

5 Ibid, p10.

Architect

Lab + Bates Smart, Melbourne

Structural engineers

Ateller One, Bonacci Group, Hyder Consulting

Services engineer

AHW Consulting Engineers

Landscape architect

Karres en Brands

Photographs

Gollings Photography