Proposed wrought-iron gate panel for Melbourne Town Hall 1943

Summary

The predecessor of City of Melbourne's City Design Studio was the City Architect's Office, an administrative model adopted from Britain. The Art and Heritage Collection holds a suite of technical drawings created in that office between the 1940s and 1970s, drawings that propose various designs to support public use of the city streets. They include plans for park and street seating, vendor kiosks, hand railing, gates, bus shelters, planter boxes and street lights. While the philosophy currently framing the city's approach to industrial design is orientated towards an aesthetic that draws our public spaces into a single design vocabulary, consistency appears less of a concern in the period that these drawings pertain to. While there is some consistency within an area, the drawings suggest the municipality tolerated a level of variation. Since the early 1990s, fabrication of city designs has been outsourced to independent local companies. But during this period, street furniture was manufactured in the city's North Melbourne workshop. Here the staff were highly skilled workers in carpentry and steel fabrication. The wrought-iron gates documented in this drawing remain in place in the driveway leading into the site of Melbourne Town Hall from Swanston Street. Designed in 1945, the gate's decorative panels and framing features, which are shown at various stages of completion in the drawing, combine a simple geometry with restrained ornamentation. Drawn at a scale of one inch to one foot, the gates would have been crafted at the city's workshop, in North Melbourne, which employed specialists in metal fabrication.