Art, Architecture, & Public Space
City Image Tour
Travel expert
What we do?
My walking conversation pivots on Melbourne's Federation Square. From here, we'll meander east and west along the north and south banks of the Yarra (Birrarung) River, through its unique urban and natural spaces, culture, and public art. These public spaces were created at the beginning of the 21st century as a second Melbourne next to the first and embraces the river's water from the banks. This unique form of waterfront development and journey is the route and experience of the City Image Tour.
Public Art
From the beginning of the 21st century, the City of Melbourne spearheaded an artist-lead urban renewal of the Central Business District. These temporary and permanent public artwork commissions established a global standard. Hosier Lane is the outdoor gallery Melbourne's acclaimed street. Two experimental permanent public artworks in City Image Tour are: the immersive soundscape of Federation Bells (2001), in Birrarung Mar, and the gigantic kinetic sculpture, The Travellers, on the Sandridge Bridge.
Architecture
Melbourne's colonial architecture mixes with revivalist architectural forms, modern buildings, and postmodern facades. Hamer Hall's renovation and Southgate's development laid the foundations for Melbourne's waterfront revival. The ambition of Federation Square was to create an architectural icon for Melbourne that would be as recognisable as the world-renowned Sydney Opera House. The postmodern architecture of Federation Square fragments and frames Melbourne's newest public space.
Urban Space
Melbourne has never had a European square. The first "square" was retrofitted into the the CBD as a three-sided plaza in the 1980s. This open public space was cut in half in the 1990s, redesigned, and then displaced by Federation Square in 2002. In between, the Southgate promenade, on the Yarra (Birrurung) river in 1992 turned Melbourne's face to the river. These public spaces and their heritage and postmodern bridgs stitch together the old Melbourne with the Southbank along the revitalised Yarra River.
Travel expert
Resident-artist guide
Your Host and Guide is an academic specializing in art in public space, a visual artist who has been commissioned for temporary public artworks in Melbourne, and a Cultural Producer of Interventions in Public Space.
Travel expert
Testimonials
Beatriz Maturana
As an academic colleague of Anthony, I highly recommend City Image Tour as a dynamic, down to earth, honest, and provocative walking conversation about Melbourne's redevelopment, its old and new public spaces, the arts and the culture of cities.
Murray Turner
On the City Image Tour you experience Melbourne's 21C renaissance as a waterfornt city. Anthony's tour of the new Melbourne, through its public spaces, art, and architecture, is a insider's story of a living place of urban culture, built on the unceded lands of first Nation People.
Teresa Lane
Anthony was my lecturer in RMIT Master of Art, Art in Public Space in Melbourne. He has a fascinating perspective on public space based on daily life, and the tour captures contemporary thinking about Melbourne works as the Cultural Capital of Australia.
Sean Rigney
“I have known Anthony since he lived in the city centre in the 1980s, well before Melbourne was a mote in the property developers’ eye - before Southbank had even been invented. He loves the culture of cities and has worked for more than 20 years in teaching, making and talking about better public spaces”.
