Coop's Shot Tower

Look up. You are standing inside a shopping centre that was literally built around a fifty-metre-tall industrial chimney from eighteen eighty-eight. Coop's Shot Tower is one of the most unlikely survivors in Melbourne, a Victorian-era factory encased in a massive glass cone designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa. It is architecture as time travel: eighteen eighties brick wrapped in nineteen nineties glass.

The tower was built for making lead shot. The process was brilliantly simple: you melted lead at the top of the tower, poured it through a copper sieve, and let the droplets fall fifty metres into a pool of water at the bottom. As the lead fell, surface tension pulled it into perfect spheres. The longer the fall, the rounder the shot. That is why shot towers had to be tall. This one produced ammunition for everything from hunting to warfare for nearly a century.

When Melbourne Central was being developed in the late nineteen eighties, the plan was to demolish the tower. The community was outraged. Coop's Shot Tower was heritage-listed, and the developers were forced to find a creative solution. So Kurokawa designed the enormous glass cone that envelopes it, eighty-four metres at its highest point, one of the largest glass structures in the world at the time of its construction. The tower stands inside the cone like a relic in a museum case, surrounded by escalators and food courts. There is a working clock at the base that plays Waltzing Matilda on the hour. It is gloriously weird. A shot tower inside a cone inside a shopping centre, playing Australia's unofficial anthem to shoppers eating sushi.