Melbourne's central grid was laid out in 1837 without a great public square, and the absence nagged at the city for over a century. Proposals to roof the railway yards on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets surfaced as early as the 1920s. An attempt at a City Square nearby in the 1980s was judged a failure. Then in 1996 Premier Jeff Kennett announced that the unloved 'Gas and Fuel Buildings' on the site would be demolished and the rail yards finally decked over to create a true civic heart, timed to open for the centenary of Australia's Federation in 2001. After more than 160 years, Melbourne would get its square - though not on schedule, and not without a fight.

An international competition drew 177 entries from around the world. The winner, announced in July 1997, was a consortium led by Lab Architecture Studio - the London-based partnership of Donald Bates and Peter Davidson - working with local firm Bates Smart. Their design was deliberately disorienting: a deconstructivist composition of 'cranked' geometries, angular metal-and-glass 'shards,' and buildings split by narrow gaps that echoed Melbourne's famous laneways. The architecture community admired it. Much of the public did not. When critics realized one freestanding shard would block the cherished view of St Paul's Cathedral from Princes Bridge, the incoming Bracks government ordered it cut down to no more than eight meters. The square was being redesigned before it was even finished.

Decking over a working rail yard is brutally expensive, and the costs spiraled. Originally estimated at between 110 and 150 million dollars, Federation Square ended up costing roughly 467 million - more than four times the first figure. The delays were just as embarrassing; named for a centenary it missed, the square finally opened on 26 October 2002, nearly two years late. To save money, areas meant to be paved were instead concreted. The construction manager was Multiplex, and when it was all over, the designers reportedly went six months without a single new commission, fielding hate mail instead of congratulations.

The main plaza is paved with around 470,000 blocks of ochre-colored sandstone quarried in Western Australia, giving the square its warm, desert-toned glow. The buildings wear a second skin of zinc, glass, frosted glass, and sandstone arranged in a fractured, camouflage-like pattern built from a mathematical pinwheel tiling. But the cleverest piece of the design is invisible. Beneath the square, sandwiched above the rail tracks, sits the 'Labyrinth' - 1.2 kilometers of honeycombed concrete walls. At night, cool air is pumped through them, chilling the concrete; by day, that stored coolness is released into the glass Atrium, keeping it up to 12 degrees cooler than the street while using a fraction of the energy of conventional air conditioning.

Federation Square was never just a plaza. It houses the Ian Potter Centre, home to the National Gallery of Victoria's Australian collection of more than 20,000 works, including Tom Roberts' Shearing the Rams and Indigenous masterpieces by William Barak and Emily Kngwarreye. It holds the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the Koorie Heritage Trust. Its fights have continued, too: in 2017 a plan to demolish one building for an Apple store provoked such backlash that the square was given heritage protection in 2019 and the plan abandoned. Slowly, the insults faded. The Financial Review noted Melburnians had learned to love the place, and the visitor numbers proved it. The ugliest building in town had become the one the city could not do without.