Melbourne's strange and splendid skyline that never was

In 1979, Melbourne set out to build a landmark to rival Australia’s famous Sydney Opera House. But it was also attempting to solve one of the city's oldest planning problems.

Opposite Flinders Street Station sat the Jolimont rail yards: a sprawling tangle of tracks, sheds, soot-blackened roofs and overhead wires occupying some of the most prominent real estate in the city.

For decades, politicians, planners and developers had dreamed of covering the site.

In 1922, engineer James Alexander Smith proposed a giant concrete deck carrying streets and public buildings above the tracks. Influential American architect, Walter Burley Griffin, later developed his own monumental scheme for the area.

Again and again, governments returned to the same fantasy – burying the rail yards and creating a grand southern entrance to the city of Melbourne.

But nothing seemed quite right. And, ultimately, nothing was built.

Then the Great Depression intervened. Then World War II. Then came political caution, financial anxiety and endless disagreements about what should replace the rail yards once they disappeared.

Arts & Culture

Zanuckville: Australia’s strangest suburb?

Over time, the site acquired an almost mythical status in Melbourne’s imagination. It was a permanent problem forever awaiting a grand solution.

By the 1960s, the Victorian Government attempted to solve the issue through the Princes Gate Towers, two modernist office blocks built over part of the rail yards beside Princes Bridge.

Intended as symbols of progress, they quickly became among the most disliked buildings in Melbourne.

Critics attacked their bulk, ugliness, and insensitivity to the surrounding cityscape. What had been promoted as a solution to Melbourne’s dilemma only added to the problem.

The 1979 Melbourne Landmark Ideas Competition emerged directly from that failure.

After deciding to demolish the Princes Gate Towers when they were barely a dozen years old, Victoria’s Hamer Government launched an international competition asking the world to imagine what should replace them.

The brief was extraordinarily open. Architects competed alongside artists, engineers, students, inventors and enthusiastic amateurs.

More than 2300 entries arrived from around the world.

One entrant envisioned a giant Peach Melba towering above Melbourne. Another proposed a gigantic crocodile sprawled across the rail yards, its tail twice the height of Melbourne's Rialto Tower.

Neofuturist architects Jan Kaplický and David Nixon with engineer, Frank Newby, designed a steel ‘V’ taller than the Eiffel Tower as a symbol for Victoria.

Arts & Culture

Reframing the ‘Australian Ugliness’

English architect Cedric Price imagined elevated market gardens suspended above the tracks.  Italian architect and designer, Aldo Rossi, designed a stepped tower looming over the city, while the creative firm, Coop Himmelb(l)au, buried a concert hall inside a giant stainless-steel rock.

There were pyramids, megastructures, giant bridges, floating structures, airborne walkways, laser beams projected into the night sky and futuristic towers extending across the Yarra River.

Some ideas treated the site as infrastructure. Others approached it as theatre, tourist attraction, sculpture, machine or joke.

The competition briefly turned Melbourne into a laboratory for the kinds of experimental architecture then circulating internationally through Expo '70 in Osaka, the work of groups like Archigram and Superstudio, and the growing culture of megastructures and spectacle.

The competition quickly became a spectacle in its own right.

The wildest entries attracted most of the media attention, turning the competition into a form of entertainment. For a brief period, Melbourne’s future became a matter of public fascination.

But, beneath the eccentricity was a serious question: what kind of city did Melbourne want to become?

The entries exposed a city uncertain about its identity and increasingly anxious about its place in the world.

Some proposals imagined Melbourne as a futuristic metropolis of lasers, glass pyramids, and airborne structures. Others imagined it as a garden city, cultural capital, entertainment hub or tourist destination.

The judges seemed almost as uncertain as the entrants. Faced with thousands of wildly different schemes, they could not agree on a single winner. Instead, they selected forty-eight prize winners.

Arts & Culture

Walt Disney’s ‘love affair’ with Australia

The result was widely mocked. Critics accused the judges of indecision and the competition itself of being little more than a publicity stunt.

One of the judges, the Australian art historian, Patrick McCaughey, complained publicly that the entries demonstrated “a megalomania that makes the pyramids look like pimples”.

Nothing was built, and the competition gradually acquired the reputation as a farce.

But that verdict misses something important.

The Melbourne Landmark Ideas Competition captured the city at a moment of transition between industrial Melbourne and the more image-conscious city that emerged during the following decades.

Beneath the bizarre proposals were serious arguments about tourism, public space, spectacle, architecture, and civic identity – issues that still dominate urban politics around the world.

Many ideas that were mocked as absurd in 1979 no longer seem especially strange. Cities now compete through iconic architecture, branding campaigns, cultural infrastructure and instantly recognisable imagery.

Melbourne’s Federation Square, built over a tiny part of the old rail yards, was initially ridiculed before becoming embedded in Melbourne’s identity.

The competition never produced the landmark its organisers had hoped for. What’s more, Melbourne continues to argue about many of the same questions raised in 1979: image, taste, spectacle, and its rivalry with Sydney.

But for a brief moment, the competition gave the city permission to imagine itself differently.

Derham Groves’s latest book, The 1979 Melbourne Landmark Ideas Competition: Lost Visions of a City’s Future, is due to be published in August by Palgrave Macmillan.