The power plant, and waste facility is a typology pushed to the edge of a city. Grey precast concrete structures, value managed by their owning conglomerates, leaving behind the utmost in banal and bland architecture. Our contemporary city, and by extension Melbourne, therefore has been removed, to a certain extent from the machines that power it, because it perceives them as: dirty, unappealing, monstrous, noisy, polluting, and uninviting structures. But this was not always the case, and this leaves the power plant and recycling facility hankering for their Victorian past.
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The Victorians thought of their mechanical city services very differently to us in the twenty-first century. They were not pushed to the fringes and ignored; but shoved into the heart, exalted and celebrated for the technological progress. The Victorian man, was
an engineer, a man of science; all could be conquered, nature was to be taxonamised within a glass box, no project was too bold, and their structures commemorated their new mechanical age. The era turned into an almost sexual fetishisation of engineering, engineers, and the powerful masculinity espoused by Victorian ideals. Sewage processing plants, power stations, and waste facilities, took on the livery of palaces, castles, and mansions.
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This new power plant on the corner of punt road and Wellington Parade seeks a return of the triumphant mechanical city. Celebrating the recycling services it provides; it relentlessly melts down aluminium, and glass in order to provide a slightly better world for those around it. The mechanics of a city should not be hidden, they are vital services that deserve to not be neglected. And this building should show why engineers should bring sexy back.
