Canberra's FWWs (First World Whingers) are world class and Canberrans are so easily disgruntled by the new. And so it comes as no surprise to learn that when first introduced even our iconic 'bunker' bus shelters upset some Canberrans.
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Today we love and admire them (and leap to buy the bus shelter merchandise dreamed up by clever artist Trevor Dickinson) but now ArchivesACT is reminding us that when (in 1975) the first of them were installed they knotted some knickers. FWWs wrote to the The Canberra Times to call them "concrete monstrosities" and "orange-spotted fungi". Early vandalism of them was excused by one writer as the remorseful installers' worthy attempts to improve the ugly shelters' looks.
Now ArchivesACT has dusted off some files about the shelters, pointing out that this month sees the 41st anniversary of the first plonkings-down of them. Go to ArchivesACT's website and to "Find Of The Month." http://www.archives.act.gov.au/find_of_the_month
In that inaugural year of 1975 the Department of the Capital Territory sprinkled 98 of these shelters across Canberra.
Today the aforementioned Trevor Dickinson (this column is always singing his praises) is the man we most closely associate with the shelters. But of course the shelter's designer, Clement George Cummings (1934-1997) deserves the major and the long-overdue limelight. Now ArchivesACT is shining that limelight on him thanks, it explains, to the discovery earlier this year of a complete set if Cummings' shelter-design plans. They were gathering dust and weevils were beginning to fancy them at the Tuggeranong ACTION Depot. Plan fans and geeky students of Canberra's history will love them and will find them online in "Find Of The Month".
The hitherto unsung Clem Cummings studied architecture at Sydney University (graduating with honours in 1962) and then commenced work in Canberra at the Department of Works. In 1971 he established his own practice of C.G. Cummings, Architect.
He received the Housing Industry Association Award for a private home he designed for somewhere in leafy, elite, dyllic Garran, this columnist's suburb. But it is his design for the concrete bus shelters, prepared in 1974 for the National Capital Development Commission, that is of course his most recognisable work. Since 2000 the ACT Chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects has awarded the Clem Cummings Medal "to recognise contributions by architects and non-architects to architecture and the public interest".
Today ArchivesACT fancies (and we agree) that the dear shelters are "Canberra's most endearing piece of urban architecture". As Trevor Dickinson notices and celebrates, the shelter (more accurately shelters, plural, because there have been at least five slightly modified versions of it) is a beautiful example of an object that, in striving to be functional, has somehow also managed to have something arty about its looks.
We will probably never know whether Cummings was conscious of trying to design a kind of artwork. His practical triumph was the design of a shelter that (properly aligned) really does shelter folk from the elements, even and especially the element of wind, important in a city in which in winter the winds are full of ice cubes. Alas, though, the shelters' windows (no vandal-proof form of window pane has ever been found for them and the bare apertures let winds in) are a design flaw.
Cummings was especially conscious of designing something burly and vandal proof. The first shelters cost an alarming $2300 each (soon rising to $2800). A committee of bean-counters suggested greatly reducing the cost of bus shelters to just $1000 each but Transport Branch secretary B.C. Darke successfully resisted this. He argued that while the $2300 shelters were wondrously "resistant to vandalism" for $1000 you would get only a spindly little structure that would be "fair game to the vandals of the city".
If bus shelters have feelings (and of course these Cummings' ones do) then the Canberra shelters must look back with nostalgia to the ACTION/Monotone mural competitions of the 1980s and 1990s. In orgies of authorised street art school children were encouraged to paint scenes on and in a shelter close to their school. This column has covered that happy era with critically-acclaimed essays about it all.
And now, today, always championing fine street art (both authorised and fly-by-night) we draw attention to the dazzling works of Okuda San Miguel. To visit his website http://okudart.es/showcase/ is to find 1000 things to make you go "Gosh!"
Recent works of his, just reported on by the ever-fabulous digital arts and design magazine Designboom http://www.designboom.com/art/okuda-san-miguel-arcugnano-italy-kindergarten-04-22-2016/ are murals of playful faces and figures painted across the walls of the kindergarten in a small Italian town. Some of the works cleverly integrate existing features and so for example windows are artfully incorporated as eyes in faces, or perhaps as sunglasses covering those eyes.
Canberra school principals! Do you have plain walls like these, crying out for embellishments? Canberra street artists (authorised or feral) do the works of Okuda San Miguel make you think of what wonders might be imparted to inviting walls that you know? Chief Minister Barr why not take the electorally popular initiative of paying Okuda San Miguel to come here and work some of his unique magic?
