Lonsdale Street Dandenong

Every once in a while you get a project that you just love, and its not always the ones you’d expect.

It has been a couple of years at least since we were invited to put in a proposal for the refurbishment of Lonsdale Street, the main street in Dandenong.

Dandenong is best part of an hour from central Melbourne and has a rich social and cultural history; it was once a major centre for heavy industry in Australia and attracted migrants from all around the world to make Dandenong home.  But like many such places that type of work has vanished, leaving in its place some social problems.  Things are changing now; the heavy industry is being replaced by more technological work and the place is very much on the up again. And you can say what you like about Dandenong; there is no denying its character and soul.

Anyway, we were fortunate enough to get the gig and to work alongside some of our favourite collaborators in the industry.  The client is VicUrban who are pumping an astonishing $200m ++ into the project, making this the most significant urban renewal project in Victoria outside of Docklands.  The lead designer is a partnership between TCL and BKK; practices who both truly believe in collaboration and are genuinely interested in contributions to the design process from outside .  Then we had our artist introduced to the project, the wonderful David Sequeira who seemed to understand in an instant what this project was about and was driven not to create a monument to himself but to have his creativity feed into the design of the less glamourous things such as tree selections, paver types and, thankfully, the lighting scheme.

One afternoon at TCL’s offices there was a workshop between TCL, BKK, David Sequiera, Rachel Burke and me.  Over the course of that session we collectively dreamt up the feature lighting scheme which consist of over 100 LED light sticks which will be installed at 6m intervals along the central median of the road.  Each of the sticks will be programmed to be set at a unique colour – representing the cultural diversity of Dandenong itself.

And the really exciting this is that when Rachel went to site last week the first dozen or so were installed – see below.