Repost 2017: The Atrium, the best bit of #FedSquare by far. Such a mad #fractal spiderweb. But there’s rarely anything much in there (except the book fair) nor does it go through to anywhere in particular.
2021: just after I took this photo the Sunday second hand book fair was given one weeks notice to close; they only paid $30 each, so it was a sort of a public service thing, and fed sq said they wanted more flexibility, but at least it got people in there.
Something I wrote in 2018 ago during the successful @ourfedsquare campaign to get #fedsquare on the #heritageregister:
Did you know the very paving of Fed Sq was an artwork ?
The pink and beige sandstone from the Kimberley is a giant work called “Nearamnew” by Melbourne academic and author Paul Carter in collaboration with Lab architecture studio. The title, like the artwork, is an amalgam of meanings and layers, representing the many histories and peoples that go together to make the Federation of Australia. ‘Nearamnew’ was what some colonists thought the local Woiwurrung called this location, but can also be read as the english words near-am-new; the overall pattern is a huge whorl, that might be an eddy of the once swampy Yarra, or a giant fingerprint. There are 9 ‘ground figures/vision texts’, patches of carved letters, scattered across the plaza, each a literal and metaphorical layering of meaning, combining letters of the overall name, and fragments of historical and contemporary texts, not meant to be read, but as a ‘creative catalyst of movement’, ‘walking in the footsteps of the many who have gone before, retracing the many discourses that have tracked through, over and under this site.’
The proposed Apple store will involve new areas of paving, but we havnt heard any mention of how this might affect the artwork, nor has
Paul Carter been consulted. The large landscape/urban design firm Oculus has been named as the landscape design partner with Norman Foster.
Storey of Melbourne 