This was published 5 months ago
Opinion
Bloated, backward and banal, Vic Market rebuild is the opposite of good planning
Norman Day
ArchitectJohn Batman would shift in his grave if he was still buried under the Queen Victoria Market.
The changes proposed for the market are plainly unfit for purpose.
Batman, a murderous colonist, was laid to rest in 1839 on the site then known as Burial Hill, which became the Old Melbourne cemetery, and later the market in the 1860s, and was officially declared open in 1878. Now there are big plans to rebuild Queen Vic.
The new market, as imagined by the developers, maintains a focus on cars.
Like Batman himself, these new plans are notable for their lack of vision and an obsolete concept of what makes a civilised civic entity suitable for this and future generations.
Queen Victoria Market is a theatre. It is an enclosed community place where the celebration of food and goods being distributed meets the needs of the citizens. No-one is quite sure who is the actor, who is the audience and who’s preforming. Either way, it is a place of drama, sensual, lively, and bustling with energy.
Architectural demands are not complicated. We need roof cover from the sun and rain, daylight to show us around, fresh air to ventilate the sheds and good access for traders and their customers.
People shop for fruit and vegetables under the simple but effective historic sheds at the Queen Vic Market. Credit: Luis Ascui
Luckily, at Queen Vic, there is a historic set of buildings that reflect our heritage almost back to the time of Batman’s controversial 1835 deal with the Wurundjeri which claimed Melbourne for the colonialist.
Those legacies should not be compromised, but they could be damaged if bad decisions are made now for the future of the market.
The development strategy (approved by the state government last week) will build a mix of housing and offices on the southern boundary of the market and repurpose the existing ground level carpark as a plaza.
Known as Gurrowa Place, it will comprise an office and retail building, about 560 built-to-rent apartments (including 15 per cent affordable housing), and a student housing tower accommodating 1100 beds.
Like many cities these days, solutions for housing options are a priority, so these units will be welcome, especially because they will have a ready-made open space created by the new plaza.
But the proposed architecture of the towers is banal, International Style Modern. What the Dutch call krappe. For the inexpert among us, and non-Dutch, it has a facade overlooking the market, which is designed like an accountant’s spreadsheet, with cubic glass windows contained within a regulated Excel spreadsheet of vertical columns and lines of horizontal slabs. Maybe it was produced by an AI robot.
This project is ugly because it denies the human condition, but it also fails to meet fundamental criteria.
There should be a focus on sustainability, zero-carbon policies, the circular economy, accessibility and establishing a genuine dialogue between what is proposed and the human environment, but none is evident.
At least the buildings are located to the south of the market, so overshadowing will not be an issue, but overlooking and a lack of intimacy in the proposed open space will be.
The new buildings fit over their site like a glove and contain ubiquitous car parking levels, like any mid-century urban building from the 1900s.
In the process, the plan calls for substantial changes to existing roads and open spaces around the market. The existing Franklin Street Reserve will be deleted and built over with a tower that appears to be around 50 storeys high.
Franklin Street to the east will be redirected to pass directly in front of the existing 1930s South Sheds, dissecting them for the new “open space” plaza and disconnecting them from the market itself.
As part of the development, the existing ground level car park will be recycled as a public square and a new carpark for 220 cars constructed underground. The state government has insisted that the existing 720 car parking spots available are returned in the new development, so the balance of 500 are located in the adjacent Munro site in Therry Street.
A single level carpark under the new plaza would seem profligate and will increase the traffic congestion around the market. It would be best relocated off-market.
We are told that the scale of the new buildings is required to enable funding for the construction of the new car park and market improvements. The emphasis, once again, is on buildings that are big and profitable (for the developers), and cars appear to play a main role in the design.
Those two elements of an urban project are these days considered worldwide to be redundant strategies and obsolete ideas for a contemporary city. Mostly, good designers look for an expansive role for their buildings, where profits are shared with citizens and the blight of automobiles is relegated to the past.
Encouraging cars to the site will produce a daily clogging of the streets around the market – cars competing with people – which is the opposite of good planning.
There are plenty of alternatives for access to the market, such as a continuously moving people from around the city, linked to transport nodes, using safe and sustainable E-buses. Bicycle lanes operate already with free parking on site, trams and trains are nearby and service times can always be enhanced to match demand.
Perhaps overlooked in the publicity I have seen, there is no available view of the building group from the south – facing back to the city – but it would not be of much value anyway given the combined building silhouette will be over 200 metres long and around 100 to 200 metres high.
In effect, it’s a big wall. But the scale of it suggests something more sinister – along the lines of Australia’s obsession for big things like the Big Lobster, Sheep and Pineapple.
By regenerating the old burial ground as the market, the new south wall could be reimagined, metaphorically, as a huge headstone. RIP QVM.
Norman Day is a practising architect, commentator, and educator.
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