The original centre disrupted natural pedestrian flows and was difficult to navigate. Visitors got lost inside; others saw it as an obstacle rather than a thoroughfare. The retail model – anchored by major department stores, designed to trap shoppers – was also looking like the wrong bet. Melbourne had always had another kind of retail culture: laneways, destinations, the dedicated record store, the bookshop everyone knew by name. ARM's move was to make that culture the subject of our strategy.

It was simple and radical at once: cut open a matrix of laneways, connect the underground station to the street through the building rather than around it, and turn three entrances into seventeen. 60,000 square metres of net lettable space become navigable from all directions. Retail lines the desire lines rather than blocking them. Shopping and commuting become the same experience.

This is a 25-year conversation about how a city evolves. The food court moved as the centre grew. New attractors repositioned foot traffic. Stage 2 added more. New work is underway now. Each intervention builds on the last, deepening ARM's understanding of how retail and urban design interact in a real environment. Its success isn’t because we did something cool a quarter of a century ago (even though we did); it’s from paying attention to the relationship of shopping, commerce, making money and urban design. That’s the organism of the city.

The AIA jury called it "a metamorphosis from an ugly duckling into a kind of psychedelic swan." Twenty years on, Melbourne Central is at the sharpest end of convenience retail in Australia – youth-forward, multicultural, democratic.