Architecture
The redeveloped St Kilda Pier is a shining example of a structure that’s well conceived, designed and built, and brings new possibilities to a public space. By Naomi Stead.
It’s all happening at the redeveloped St Kilda Pier
St Kilda. What a town! Kugelhopf and rumball, pigeon and seagull, Espy and Stokehouse. At present the toothy leer of Luna Park is scaffolded over for a facelift, but everything else is still there: the palms, the stately paths of the Catani Gardens and, of course, the pier, which has just reopened following a major redevelopment.
I went to see it on the Invasion Day public holiday, a day of spectacular cloudage – a pageant of piled white confections gliding overhead. The weather was mercurial, with a sudden stormy downpour followed by temperatures soaring above 40 degrees.
This unsettled heat – or the end of school holidays – maybe explained the frenzied energy with which hordes of teenagers were hurling themselves into the water at the end of the new pier. Some half a kilometre out, the redesigned structure widens to form a shallow amphitheatre of tiered steps, sheltering a kind of small artificial bay within the open sea. The youngsters, blithely ignoring the signs forbidding jumping or diving, leapt off these stepped timber terraces, splashing and yelling, then emerged to loll on the terraces, taking up every square centimetre with towels, music players and flesh roasting in the sun. It reminded me of a haul-out: when seals or walruses drag themselves onto a flattish rock to regulate their temperature, rest or mate. These bodies may be spindlier, paler and more tattooed, but their behaviours seem markedly similar.
Construction of the new pier began in February 2022, and it opened last December, at a reported cost of $53 million. The design emerged from an unusually long, close and harmonious collaboration between architects Jackson Clements Burrows, landscape architects Site Office, and more recently the specialist coastal engineers AW Maritime. It’s been a long time coming – the earliest design inklings appeared in the St Kilda foreshore promenade project of 2004, inching forward through many stages until a crucial inflection point in 2017 when Parks Victoria put two design options to the St Kilda community for a new pier to replace the then-extant structure coming to the end of its life.
The designers proposed one option that was perpendicular to the shore, running straight out and replacing the existing pier like for like. The other option struck out on a new angled alignment curving back to approach the iconic Kerby’s kiosk on the oblique. Creating a north-facing, sheltered elbow in the sea, this option reminds me strongly of White Arkitekter’s sublime Kastrup Sea Bath. It was the community’s overwhelming favourite, which was not a given: despite the many iterations of a pier damaged and rebuilt multiple times since the mid 1800s, it’s an object of ferocious affection and protectiveness from its highly engaged local community. What this consultation process demonstrates is that such communities are also open to change – when the idea’s good enough.
Cranking the alignment of the pier was a brilliant design move. It enabled the deck to fan out above the promontory of the southern rock breakwater, creating a generous new promenade that fulfils a complex functional brief, including emergency vehicle access and ferry management, while producing a whole new public space that feels like a place, like a vibe, like it’s happening.
Many of the design’s smaller moves are also successful: the balustrade with its curves, splays, and canting angles has a fishbone delicacy that meets the designers’ aim to be more like a domestically scaled screen than a piece of safety equipment. The new pier has to manage storm events and the possibility of “wave overtopping” – exposing users to being drenched or swept away – and it manages this elegantly with a vertical “wave wall” emerging through the pier deck as a deep concrete bench. The new penguin-viewing platforms are cheery, a low string of wiggly-edged kidney-shaped podiums, clear of the breakwater but crouched in its shelter, that keeps penguins and humans safely separated while offering vantage and seating for crowds.
I was less convinced about some of the material choices – avoiding the concrete-floored parts, which were both stupefyingly hot and blindingly bright. The surface will dull down as it’s besmirched with fish guts and chewing gum, but this only underscores how the timber decked parts are more pleasant in every way.
I also had quibbles with the new amenity and shade structure attached to the side of the old kiosk. It provides sorely needed shelter on a brutally exposed site, but its grand arches open onto an oddly shallow space that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. The new toilets are few, oppressively vandal-proof and squashed awkwardly around the back. Most confusingly, the structure somewhat obscures the entry to the penguin viewing area, which is tucked in behind.
Maybe this is an indication of the genuine complexities brought by the little penguin rookery. The bluestone breakwater in which they live was built in 1956 to provide safe harbour for the Melbourne Olympics. So these sweet and stinky little birds are recently arrived opportunists who, finding a spot to their liking, colonised it to create their own “artificial” urban ecology. When humans got wind of it – a cheaper and easier way to see wild penguins than travelling all the way to Phillip Island – managing crowd size and behaviour became increasingly difficult. Parks Victoria at one point wryly observed “an extraordinary increase in visitor numbers to view the penguins … despite no active promotion or provision of dedicated facilities”. A logic of “if you don’t build it, they won’t come” didn’t hold. This all makes the new pier’s rhetorical contortions around swimming all the more amusing: now it’s more a case of if you do build it, pretend you haven’t.
St Kilda has long been identified with sea bathing: the St Kilda Sea Baths, built in the Moorish “pleasure dome” mode, was the most magnificent of the many caged open-water pools along the Victorian coast. The redeveloped St Kilda Pier unquestionably sits within this lineage.
Even so, while all of Parks Victoria’s official communications about the new pier give plenty of breezy discussion of fishing, walking, sitting or looking at the city view, there’s no mention of swimming. Not a peep and definitely not a picture. Even the ladders by which teenagers merrily haul themselves out in order to jump back in again can be explained away as emergency safety egress for anyone who happens to “accidentally” fall in. Even though it’s beautifully afforded and tacitly encouraged by the design, swimming is the new pier’s blind spot, despite obvious and enormous popularity.
We all know “no diving” signs are mainly liability-management, providing cover if somebody sues. Telling people not to jump or swim is like telling teenagers not to have sex. But what about the absent changing facilities, with only four public toilet cubicles to serve hundreds of swimmers and sunbathers? It’s not the designers’ fault – they met the brief. What’s curious is why the brief itself was so stingy on this front. Perhaps because offering dressing rooms or showers would acknowledge that this is, in fact, a swimming place: it might feel Orwellian if it wasn’t so farcical.
Be that as it may, the redeveloped pier is a shining example of a well-conceived, designed and built public space that brings new possibilities: preserving habitat for penguins, rakali and seagrass, and enabling people to be together, connect with nature and enjoy the pleasures of the sea. It turns the genteel social rituals of the beachside promenade up to 11: still about seeing and being seen, mingling with friends and strangers, showing off and hanging out, only now with smaller bathing costumes and more backflips.
Back at the amphitheatre, I’m touched by the mating displays. See there, that apparently nonchalant young man carefully flexing his abs, that young woman making constant anxious micro-adjustments to her bikini – it’s a constant game of mutual observation, peeps and glances. If the sandy beach at St Kilda is now the preserve of families, singletons, elders and the infamous cabanas, the pier is a new public place especially for gleaming, wastrel youth – at swim.
ARTS DIARY
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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 8, 2025 as "Pier review".
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