Federation Square

When Federation Square opened in two thousand and two, Melburnians absolutely hated it. The angular, fractured geometry designed by Lab Architecture Studio and Bates Smart was called everything from a bombed-out ruin to a pile of broken tiles. The Herald Sun ran letters comparing it to a war zone. But here is the twist: the building that everyone despised is now so beloved that when Apple tried to build a flagship store here in twenty seventeen, the public outcry killed the proposal. Melburnians had done a complete one-eighty. They went from hating the place to being willing to fight for it.

The design is genuinely unusual. Those jagged panels are not random. They are based on a mathematical system called a pinwheel tiling, where five triangles fit together into a larger triangle, repeated at different scales across the entire facade. There are exactly five hundred thousand individual panels making up the exterior. The whole thing sits on top of a concrete deck over the old rail yards, which means you are standing on a platform above active train tracks right now.

Before Fed Square existed, this was one of the ugliest corners in Melbourne: a brutalist car park called the Gas and Fuel Corporation buildings. Demolishing them was the one thing everyone agreed on. The square cost four hundred and sixty-seven million dollars, nearly double the original budget, and took eleven years from design to completion. But today, more than ten million people pass through it annually, making it one of the most visited public spaces in Australia. The National Gallery of Victoria's Ian Potter Centre sits underneath, housing the world's largest collection of Australian art. You are essentially standing on top of a world-class gallery.