Works

Mitchell Streetscape

Street Furniture · Public Art · Mitchell, Queensland

The complete streetscape for the main street of Mitchell, designed and built as one family of pieces.

Seating, street lights, bollards, decking and planter beds in local ironbark, CNC-cut steel and mosaic, with LEDs that carry the street into the evening.

The chunky seat. The principal seat, built from 300 × 300 mm slabs of locally grown and milled ironbark. The ends are CNC-cut steel, deliberately aged in acid and salt baths before sealing, with hand-cut mosaic tiles set into the rebates.

The pentagonal seat. It wraps around a relocated, mature bottle tree and echoes the shape of a much-loved older seat in town, on a pentagonal deck lit at night by five LED ground lights.

Cast seats. Individual cast aluminium seats that can be clustered in different arrangements before being bolted down. Local children created the mosaic tops.

Bollards and lamp posts. Custom street lights and bollards cut from steel on the CNC and set with rebated mosaic panels. LEDs are built into the decking and planter beds.

The anti-loitering seat. A conceptual piece made to look like a remnant of turn-of-the-century streetscaping. It doesn't actually work, but it is built as though it could: sitting down starts a mechanical timer, and after ten minutes the seat rotates and tips the loiterer off.

Client

Booringa Shire Council, then Maranoa Regional Council

Scope

Seating, lighting, bollards, decking, planter beds, mosaics

Materials

Ironbark, CNC-cut steel, cast aluminium, hand-cut mosaic, recycled machinery parts, LEDs

Completed

2002–2008