The Big Bees

The placement is the whole idea. Eureka Tower is a very tall glass building with a gold-clad crown, and the bees pick up that gold at street level – so the tower's most distinctive material appears both at the top, where nobody can reach it, and at eye height, where people walk past.

Bees on a building also carry an obvious and rather good reading. A high-rise is a hive: repeated cells, enormous population, constant movement, a single structure containing an entire community. Putting the insect on the outside makes the metaphor literal without labouring it.

Gold is doing double work, referencing both the bee and the tower's Eureka namesake – the Eureka Stockade of 1854, in a building whose gold crown and red line are widely read as referring to it.

Melbourne has an unusually rich collection of oversized objects for a city that does not think of itself as having any: the Public Purse in Bourke Street Mall, the Big Floral Clock with its seven thousand plants donated by Swiss watchmakers in 1966, and seventy-two Commonwealth Games fish scattered across the state.

The record does not carry the dimensions.