Simon Maidment

When the Journey becomes the Destination

Fea­ture arti­cle for Pub­lic Art Review, Spring/Summer 2010 issue, Ed. Anne Lox­ley. Excerpt only.

Mel­bourne is widely known as Australia’s ‘Cul­tural Cap­i­tal’, or so we tell our­selves here. What’s indis­putable is that four aspects of mod­ern life under­pin the iden­tity and expe­ri­ence of this, the most south­ern major city on Australia’s main­land. These are sport, cars, food, and the arts, arguably in that order.

Mel­bourne is a rapidly grow­ing city, both in pop­u­la­tion – cur­rently four mil­lion with a pro­jec­tion of five mil­lion by 2020 – and in geo­graphic size. Like Syd­ney, the nation’s largest city at 4.4 mil­lion, Mel­bourne is one of the most sub­ur­banised cities in the world, with a pop­u­la­tion den­sity of 4,056 peo­ple per square mile. To put this into a global per­spec­tive Los Ange­les, the world’s most famous bloated sub­ur­bia, has 7,068. Tak­ing into account some cities with sig­nif­i­cant art indus­tries we have den­si­ties of New York City 26,403, Tokyo 15,148, Lon­don 10,596, and Paris 9,648[i].

The ‘Great Aus­tralian Dream’, the desire to own a quar­ter acre slice of sub­ur­bia, con­tin­ues to pro­pel the urban sprawl fur­ther and faster. More­over, Aus­tralians are obsessed with cars – our vast land seems to demand it from our peo­ple, much like the United States – but Mel­bur­ni­ans seem espe­cially so. Graeme Davi­son, author of Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Con­quered our Cities, has noted that in Mel­bourne in 1951 only one in ten drove to work, but by 1974 two-thirds com­muted by car[ii]. These con­di­tions have, in turn, made roads some­thing of an obses­sion in Melbourne.

The year is 1999, and amid a seis­mic shift of pri­vati­sa­tion by the Gov­ern­ment, Melbourne’s road sys­tem entered new, unchar­tered ter­ri­tory. Sec­tions of Citylink, Melbourne’s first toll­way, opened to the pub­lic. This con­tro­ver­sial road project was eight times larger than any attempted before in Mel­bourne, and was the result of a Pub­lic Pri­vate Part­ner­ship (PPP) between the Vic­to­rian State Gov­ern­ment and Transur­ban. The road linked Melbourne’s inter­na­tional air­port to the cen­tral city, and was made up of a com­bi­na­tion of newly built and exist­ing sec­tions of freeway.

Citylink is impor­tant to the emerg­ing story of Melbourne’s free­way art for two rea­sons: it was the first time large scale ‘sculp­tural’ struc­tures had been con­structed to enhance the aes­thet­ics of a free­way, and it has become the model du jour for devel­op­ing new major road infra­struc­ture projects to address the dis­per­sal of the city’s population.

For the first time, the Gov­ern­ment needed a road to be more than just a method of mov­ing auto­mo­biles from one point to another; it needed to make this sec­tion of free­way wor­thy of charg­ing the dri­ver for a road pre­vi­ously trav­elled gratis. This road needed to stand for some­thing, and that some­thing was progress, mod­erni­sa­tion, and the idea of Mel­bourne as a major inter­na­tional city.

The result was three key mon­u­ments to this agenda, all still stand­ing proud today: a series of large red and yel­low mono­liths, fol­lowed by a short bridge enclosed by a steel ‘tube’, lead­ing to the Bolte Bridge, or more impor­tantly in our nar­ra­tive, two slen­der grey columns flank­ing this bridge at its apex, and dwarf­ing it as they rise a full 90m from the water below.

The sin­gle yel­low and 39 red mono­liths are offi­cially titled Mel­bourne Gate­way, as this is the point where a vis­i­tor catch­ing a cab from the air­port finally reaches the north of the cen­tral city. The struc­ture, like the oth­ers pre­vi­ously men­tioned, was designed by Den­ton Corker Mar­shall Archi­tects (DCM), and is meant to sym­bol­ise the city-defining nine­teenth cen­tury Gold Rush. The mas­sive 70m yel­low form – quickly dubbed the ‘Cheese Stick’ by Mel­bur­ni­ans – can­tilevers over the road at an alarm­ing angle and recalls in hue the water­shed con­tro­ver­sial pub­lic art­work Vault by Ron Robertson-Swann (more on this later). It is by far the most suc­cess­ful of the pha­lanx, despite the dis­parag­ing name and gen­eral agree­ment by much of the intel­li­gentsia that it resem­bles a fas­cist salute, a con­clu­sion quickly deter­mined as a reac­tion and ref­er­ence to the reign­ing Vic­to­rian State Pre­mier (and Arts Min­is­ter) of the day Jeff Ken­nett and his poli­cies. While this sen­ti­ment lingers as a kind of nos­tal­gia, what remains is a dynamic and dra­matic form that cer­tainly embod­ies the ambi­tion to arrest a vis­i­tor to Melbourne.

If trav­el­ling to the south end of town, or the east­ern, south­ern and west­ern sub­urbs of Mel­bourne, we con­tinue on Citylink to Bolte Bridge. Now if any­one doubted the polit­i­cal detrac­tors, surely the thin sliver tow­ers that serve no func­tion but to extrav­a­gantly flank the 490m long bridge were proof of the total­i­tar­ian impulse of archi­tects and their masters.

Through its sheer audac­ity, sim­plic­ity and ambi­tion the fact remains the Bolte Bridge is an astound­ing piece of urban design, one that through its sheer audac­ity, sim­plic­ity and ambi­tion ele­vates itself far closer to sta­tus as a work of art. It doesn’t just ref­er­ence or bor­row from the lan­guage the archi­tects of Fas­cist Italy and Stal­in­ist Rus­sia employed to denote the power and ‘inex­orable’ progress in their state build­ings, it seems to embody it – here clearly is a city’s del­i­cate fin­gers reach­ing for, and maybe con­nected to, the stars. When viewed from the city cen­tre, the twin forms have a void as a back­drop, day or night, serv­ing to cre­ate the illu­sion they are in fact far higher (their 90m is in real­ity dwarfed by the nearby build­ings of the city, the largest of which, Eureka Tower, being over three times their height). And yet for all this mon­u­men­tal­ity, pass­ing in a car on the bridge you feel you can reach out and touch these sentinels.

While the Gate­way is a series of bright pri­mary colours – a sin to most Mel­bur­ni­ans and one best con­signed to Syd­ney or, bet­ter still, Bris­bane – the Bolte is reas­sur­ingly mono­chrome, like the medium-grey suits of Mad Men. Now that’s Mel­bourne we say to ourselves.

Another tonal­ity quickly becom­ing insep­a­ra­ble from Melbourne’s visual iden­tity is that of Corten steel, a self-weathering metal that has a deep brown rust fin­ish, echo­ing the notion of Aus­tralia that poet Dorothea MacKel­lar artic­u­lated as the ‘wide brown land’. The iconic build­ing ‘Ngargee’ that houses Melbourne’s Aus­tralian Cen­tre for Con­tem­po­rary Art (ACCA) and state con­tem­po­rary dance com­pany Chunky Move is per­haps the most cel­e­brated of these build­ings, designed by Wood Marsh Archi­tects. They have since designed the Aus­tralian National Pavil­ion in the same mate­r­ial for the 2010 Shang­hai Expo, fur­ther­ing this visual con­nec­tion. Another Corten struc­ture worth cel­e­brat­ing is the won­der­ful Craigieburn Bypass by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Archi­tects, a stretch of free­way that links the Hume High­way with the Mel­bourne Ring Road.

Arti­cle continues.

[i] Fig­ures cour­tesy of Wikipedia.

[ii] Davi­son, Graeme, Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Con­quered our Cities, Allen & Unwin, 2004.