Summary
Most of us likely spend little time considering the outdoor furniture and fixtures that ease our encounters with public space and enrich our experience of the city streets and parks. But industrial design at the City of Melbourne has long been recognised as a discipline essential to maintaining the quality of our urban space and to shaping the identity of the city. It is a discipline that travels in tandem with social, urban and public policy, with design outputs both responding to and reflecting changing priorities.
The Art and Heritage Collection holds a selection of the many technical drawings made by City of Melbourne industrial designers, documenting examples that can be observed throughout the central city. Unlike their peers in the private sector, the city’s designers are fortunate in that around 90 per cent of their designs make it off the page and into three dimensions to exist in real time and space.
This drawing documents the 1987 design of the bench seating that exists throughout the city’s parks and gardens. While the curved, fine steel armrests appear to reference the graceful aesthetics of art nouveau, the curvature, weightlessness and suggestion of levitation also find their inspiration in nothing short of the Citroën DS. These classic two-metre-long park benches are made locally and use sustainably grown plantation blackwood for the seating.
