Proposed arrangement of seats and plant containers Town Hall, Swanston St 1964

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. Proposing seating and planters along the Swanston Street facade of Melbourne Town Hall, the drawing shows pine or fir trees in the concrete planters, suggesting the design may have been in readiness for Christmas; it is dated October 1964. The section illustrates a crafted approach to the timber seating, which would have been made in the city's North Melbourne workshop. Interestingly, the drawing shows the curve of a driveway to the building's main entrance, routed for the convenience of dignitaries and important guests. This is a vehicular feature long absent from the Town Hall frontage.