Proposed garden seat 1966

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 no-nonsense garden seat documented in this drawing will be familiar to Melburnians, many of whom would have lowered their derrières onto the gentle curve of its wooden battens. But look again, as this is the predecessor of today's more refined version of the time-honoured design. The version you see in parks and gardens around the city today exhibits gracefully curved steel armrests that turn into elegant little feet, referencing not only art nouveau but also the curvature and weightlessness of the Citroën DS.