The Big Rubik's Cube

A council running a consultation is the clearest possible evidence that people care. Stormwater outlets are ordinarily invisible; this one generated enough feeling that its future became a question worth asking residents about.

The painted-infrastructure branch of the tradition is larger than it looks – the Marrickville silo as a pale ale can, the Mourquong purification building as a wine cask, the Rutherglen water tower given a mesh top to make a wine bottle. All of them convert something functional. What separates the cube is that the conversion is purely graphic: no shape was changed at all, because a concrete box already is a cube.

A Rubik's Cube is a shrewd match for that. It is the one globally recognised object that consists of nothing but a cube with coloured squares, so the paint alone completes the transformation. Nothing else could have been done to a concrete block this economically.

Maroubra is a working surf beach in Sydney's eastern suburbs with a strong local identity.

Who painted it, and when, is not on record here.