The 1979 Melbourne Landmark Ideas Competition: Lost Visions of a City’s Future - Derham Groves

In 1979, the Victorian Government asked a deceptively simple question: What should Melbourne’s landmark be? The Melbourne Landmark Ideas Competition invited anyone—architects, artists, engineers, dreamers, and amateurs—to imagine a new symbol for the city on the neglected Jolimont rail yards opposite Flinders Street Station. The response was overwhelming: 2,300 proposals from around the world. They ranged from a giant Peach Melba and a building-sized chair to floating structures and megastructures, theme parks, monumental bridges, crystal pyramids, aquariums, laser beacons, and towers designed to rival the world’s great icons. One scheme proposed a gigantic clock spanning the Jolimont rail yards. Another imagined a crocodile large enough to swallow the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Overwhelmed by the abundance, the judges famously failed to choose a single winner. Instead, they named forty-eight. Nothing was built.

Nearly half a century later, architectural historian Derham Groves revisits this extraordinary episode in Melbourne’s history. Drawing on the original competition entries preserved in the Public Record Office Victoria, he reconstructs a moment when the city briefly opened its imagination to the world. Part detective story, part cultural history, and part cabinet of architectural curiosities, The 1979 Melbourne Landmark Ideas Competition: Lost Visions of a City’s Future uncovers the forgotten schemes, the personalities behind them, and the debates they provoked. The result is a vivid portrait of Melbourne at a turning point—when modernist certainty was fading, postmodern playfulness was emerging, and the future of the city seemed up for grabs. The competition never produced a landmark, but it left behind something more revealing: a dazzling record of how people once imagined Melbourne’s future—and how different that future might have been.