Federation Square - The next steps, Kate Brennan
The Monthly Wine Showcase, an example of the events at Federation Square
Tai Chi classes
Federation Square – the next steps
Kate Brennan describes a management-led approach to creative spaces in Melbourne
‘…in just a few years Federation Square has assumed an important place in the physical and mental topography of the city and its people. It is a space filled with possibilities.’ The Age, July 2006
Well before building started in 1998, Federation Square was alive in the minds of Melbournians. Public debate about the site on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets had raged for more than eighty years. The final brief, developed by the State Government of Victoria and the City of Melbourne, conceived of Federation Square as a site for innovation, creative expression and community engagement: ‘a cultural focal point of the city,’ where none had existed previously.
When construction was completed in October 2002, the design by London’s Lab Architecture studio continued to polarise opinion. The management challenge at Federation Square in the early days was to pursue its broad aims of engagement, while individuals, the media, even the City of Melbourne, criticised the physical form. The management team’s success was unequivocal: Federation Square soon engaged hundreds of diverse communities, forged relationships with sporting and arts organisations, and set up sponsorships with major events including the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Four years later, Chris Johnston of The Age Melbourne’s daily broadsheet newspaper declared, ‘…it’s now clear that this grand, unusual plaza is the post-modern village green and amphitheatre it was always meant to be.’ (see UDQ 98 p23-25)
This gives rise to several questions: What was Federation Square meant to be? How can these aims be fostered in the future? Now that the design debate has receded, how will other measurements of success be applied? What are the creative possibilities?
These are key questions for the team leading the project beyond its establishment phase, guided by Federation Square’s Civic and Cultural Charter, built into the initial design brief. As the original design for Federation Square saw Melbourne as a city of culture, the ongoing management of Fed Square needs to support that. So, where the original team had little time to envisage future changes, the team is now focused on evolution. The Charter makes a clear distinction between design and ongoing management, implying that although Melbourne’s creative and cultural strengths are reflected there, the expression of these strengths do not necessarily flow from the design. So how do you manage a space to encourage creative activity? The answer lies in thinking about long-term sustainability, how to manage for inclusion, community ownership, creative engagement, and leading-edge development.
The team began by restating the vision in a new corporate plan addressing the strengths and weaknesses of Federation Square’s built form and its relationships – as a world site, not just a place in Victoria. It would be unfair to say that Federation Square was not designed with people in mind, or that it has not succeeded as a social space so far. Project for Public Places confirmed Federation Square’s status as one of the world’s great spaces, both in terms of composition and management. In terms of sustainability though, there is now interest in reviewing Federation Square with place-making principles in mind, and extending the capacity of the space and its management to promote creative engagement.
A major new focus has been the development of Federation Square’s multimedia platform. This links with the experiential needs of visitors in a public place, the most basic of which is visual complexity. The Big Screen – always a focus at Federation Square – was upgraded in 2007 and the team developed an interactive product called SMS Fed TV, allowing visitors to text the screen and determine the images to be shown. This builds on the basic SMS text interactivity offered by the scrolling LED screens on the East Shard. Federation Square is also assisting in the development of the international Urban Screens Network, which will enable future multimedia collaborations and content-sharing with Berlin, Hong Kong and London among other cities. Ongoing multimedia work includes the consolidation of the surround-sound system in The Atrium and efforts to optimise this for visitors through commissioned installations. The introduction of free wireless web access across the site underpins a broader resolve to lead developments in community interaction with the media.
Part of establishing a sustainable creative agenda at Federation Square is simply drawing the focus back to people as creative leaders in a space – rather than buildings or institutions. This involves encouraging people to think, plan and act imaginatively, whether they are visitors, staff or collaborators, and the management team approaches this challenge with three distinct tactics.
The first is re-conceiving of Federation Square itself as a stage – being flexible with the buildings and spaces physically and seasonally. The annual Advent Calendar project, initiated in 2006, involves draping the face of the East Shard in a giant canvas with windows opened each night over Christmas, accompanied by outdoor performances. Using the façade of the East Shard was a significant intervention into the way the site is used, with rigging points installed and altering the way the site is seen in order to facilitate creative use.
The second and third tactics are inextricable; encouraging people in – inviting them to be inspired by the space and to see it as flexible – and backing this up with a willingness to meet logistical challenges. In many cases, projects have ranged from the poetry commissioned from school groups for the scrolling LED displays to screen content developed by on-site cultural partners such as the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).
Another example is the All of Us exhibition and an ideal project for the Australia Day period in 2007. The team was approached by photographer Michel Lawrence, who had decided to photograph a person from each of the language groups being spoken in Australia. Initially he proposed an exhibition on River Terrace, but this was enlarged to install them on the Crossbar Building. This may sound simple but required a wide range of different skills and infrastructure to make it happen.
This expertise is being channelled back into Federation Square’s existing community events, currently more than 1,700 each year, to try to increase the breadth of their offer and engagement. A recent workshop with the multicultural commission for people from non-English speaking communities looked at ways to plan, manage risks and creatively develop their events better. With so many professional artists from communities around the world now living in Australia, the team is encouraging a stronger link between artists and their own communities and perhaps move away from the traditional ‘dancing and foodstalls’ concept of a multicultural event.
A draft place-making paper produced by the team for Federation Square suggests that ‘Creative places are not necessarily comfortable places. People get involved because you’re pushing at the boundaries, the new collides with the old, and that creative rub establishes a dynamic and tense equilibrium, a point at which things happen.’
The Light in Winter is a major new project that seeks to combine these principles – challenging seasonality, inviting external creative input as well as re-conceiving of the physical space – while reconciling the two major objectives of the corporate plan. In 2006, Federation Square invited Robyn Archer, former director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, to develop a new annual event. Archer proposed a festival of light, drawing in artists and community groups in to create an evolving installation each winter, as the size of Federation Square is ideal for large-scale illuminations and light commissions.
Federation Square’s creative aims remain grounded by the needs of stakeholders. One of the site’s key performance indicators is the number of people who visit, and pedestrian traffic is important for the businesses. But its management has to be creative about how to work with tenants. The idea of negotiation is in parallel with the idea of federation itself. Peter Davison of Lab Architecture experienced this productive tension even in the design process; ‘For us, Federation Square was a continuous process of negotiation, and as such the idea of a federated system is, in some sense, at the heart of the entire project. It is about independent identities that come together to form a larger whole… Differences about individual entities, coherence about the whole they form.’
Kate Brennan is Chief Executive Officer for Fed Square Pty Ltd
