255
Market Square

255 Market Square

This is a place that honours the living and the dead. Market Square occupies the zone between Queen Street, Peel Street, Queen Victoria Market (QVM) and the Franklin Street Stores. The brief is to transform the current QVM carpark into a two-hectare open space that embodies the City of Melbourne’s QVM Design Charter. The site is characterised by being a visible and active part of the Market Precinct, and by being an invisible remnant of the former Old Melbourne Cemetery, with interred remains still present under the surface of the asphalt car park. Market Square will be a new type of open space in Melbourne. By combining the spatial complexity of Melbourne’s 19th Century gardens along with the flexibility of its 20th Century ones, Market Square will enable gathering and opportunities for informal recreation, rest and quiet reflection. It will work carefully to ensure that the existing sub-grade is undisturbed, creating a space of exchange between old and new, between landscape and architecture and between Country and sky. The ambition of the landscape design is to host nature, time, memory and people in a way that allows co-presence, richness and diversity, seeking to amplify the fundamental connection between space and the civic. The design for Market Square is currently the subject of consultation with the community, the City of Melbourne and other Government agencies.

Year 2022–
Location Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country / Melbourne VIC
Client The City of Melbourne, Lend Lease
Collaborators NH Architecture, Sarah Lynn Rees, Lovell Chen (Market Square) NH Architecture, Kerstin Thompson Architects, 3XN, McGregor Coxall, Suzannah Waldron, Lovell Chen (Gurrowa Place)
Project Team Benjamin Kronenberg, Blake Farmar-Bowers, Candice Teok, Dylan Gilmore, Liz Herbert, Marijke Davey, Mark Jacques, Nick Ng
Renders Scharp
Year 2022–
Location Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country / Melbourne VIC
Client The City of Melbourne, Lend Lease
Collaborators NH Architecture, Sarah Lynn Rees, Lovell Chen (Market Square) NH Architecture, Kerstin Thompson Architects, 3XN, McGregor Coxall, Suzannah Waldron, Lovell Chen (Gurrowa Place)
Project Team Benjamin Kronenberg, Blake Farmar-Bowers, Candice Teok, Dylan Gilmore, Liz Herbert, Marijke Davey, Mark Jacques, Nick Ng
Renders Scharp