Casting A Timely Shadow Over 120,000 Carlton Stones

The Age

Wednesday October 12, 2005

By LIZ MINCHIN, CITY REPORTER

A GIANT sundial has been unveiled in the long-awaited piazza in Carlton's Argyle Square - but it works only if you stand on it to cast a shadow.

Although the square is not due to reopen to the public until February next year, The Age was given a sneak peek at the newly completed northern half of the square, with a 45-square-metre sundial as the centrepiece of the spiralling cobblestone design.

The sundial has no permanently installed shadow-casting pole, or gnomon, but visitors to the piazza will be able to tell the time from their own shadow.

The $3.5 million redevelopment, funded by the City of Melbourne, has been a decade in the making, with several contentious plans - including a private car park under the parklands - scrapped before the piazza proposal went ahead.

Controversy also threatened to disrupt the current redevelopment, when the CFMEU construction union considered banning the project over news that the council would spend almost $300,000 on using Italian stone and stonemasons - Enzo Holler and Nello Ravanelli from Trento - to build the piazza.

The dispute was settled when a deal was struck to apprentice two Melbourne stonemasons, Arthur Tsakonas and Gabor Simon, in the art of laying the Italian porphyry stones.

Together the four men recently finished the painstaking five-week task of hammering in 120,000 stones, which can be broken into a variety of sizes, creating more intricate patterns than is possible with Australian porphyry stone.

"We still have to look at all the pieces to find the right one, but Enzo and Nello seem to grab the right piece without even looking," Mr Simon said. "It's like a big jigsaw puzzle to us."

While still much slower than their Italian counterparts, the local stonemasons now hope that the redevelopment will spark demand for other Italian-style piazzas around the country.

"Nothing like this has ever been done in Australia before as far as anyone knows. It's different to what you see in places like Federation Square, where it's all cubes and uniform patterns," Mr Tsakonas said.

© 2005 The Age

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