A 13-metre-long installation of 832 precision-cut mirrored steel blades. Eleven eagle rays, each over 2.8 metres wide, stitched together with 6.5 kilometres of fishing line. One psychedelic lion, 15.4 metres high and 18.7 metres wide.
As a quantity surveyor, I love numbers like these. Measurement is what we do. We take ambitious ideas and translate them into quantities, materials, labour, time and money. We help clients understand what something will cost, whether that cost is reasonable and how an idea can make the journey from imagination to built form.
But every now and then, a project reminds us of the limits of measurement.
Looking at the finalists in the 2026 Rider Levett Bucknall Award for Best Public Art Project, presented as part of the Property Council of Australia’s Innovation & Excellence Awards, I found myself wondering about this.
We can measure almost everything about these artworks except the thing that makes them worth having.
The immeasurable line item
Take Nepean Looking Glass at the Pullman Sydney Penrith. Inspired by the nearby Nepean River, the 13-metre artwork twists and curls through the hotel lobby. We know exactly how many blades it contains: 832. What we can’t count is the double-takes.
Or consider Mermer Waiskeder: Stories of the Moving Tide at Barangaroo in Sydney. Eleven suspended eagle rays, each more than 2.8 metres wide, are made from 6.5 kilometres of recovered ghost nets, abandoned rope and fishing line. The stitching alone took 314 days, but how do you measure the value of looking up on the way to work and finding a school of rays swimming above your head?
Then there is Guardian Lion at Melbourne Square: a 15.4-metre cat in vibrant, proud colours, clambering across a wall. Drawing on Chinese and Japanese guardian lions, artist Troy Emery has created one of Melbourne’s largest wall-mounted public artworks. But there is no metric for the pleasure of stumbling across a gigantic, LED-lit lion in the middle of the city.
The limits of the ledger
We can measure cost per square metre, embodied carbon and operational costs. Increasingly sophisticated digital tools help us to measure, model and manage. Better information helps us make better decisions.
So consider that researchers have found ingenious ways to measure some of art’s effects. In a 2024 experiment, published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers fitted people with mobile eye-trackers as they moved through Vienna’s streets, finding artistic interventions held their gaze longer than greenery. A separate study, published in Cities in 2025, found a correlation between public murals and an uplift in pedestrian activity.
However, trying to value art has its limits. Other recent research published by Creative Australia explores the growing “skew” from “qualitative to quantitative” measurement of art, and argues that return on investment can capture only part of art’s value. What matters to us can be intangible and deeply personal: how art makes us feel, what it enables us to do and how it interacts with place to create a legacy.
There is a risk that, as our ability to measure and cost unique works improves, our definition of value narrows to what is easiest to count: audiences, attention, exposure and economic return. But foot traffic and eye-tracking statistics can’t tell us about the things that make art matter, like beauty, surprise and delight, humour and memory, craft and cultural expression.
Beauty between the numbers
At Martin Place, one of Sydney’s newest pieces of transport infrastructure has made room for some of the city’s past. Significant mid-century works salvaged from buildings previously on the site have been conserved and returned to public view alongside new contemporary commissions.
In the Queensland city of Toowoomba, a silo is an unconventional canvas. First Nations artist Kim Walmsley’s We remember, never to forget wraps the industrial structure in an explosion of colour and symbolism, from native flora to a young girl representing future generations.
And at Denman Prospect in Canberra, 12 sculptures are scattered through the suburb. Some have become landmarks in their own right but what I like most is the simplicity of the encounter. You don’t need a ticket. You can be walking the dog and find a sculpture turning in the wind above you.
Counting what can’t be counted
Public art could be considered unnecessary. A giant rainbow lion does not make a building structurally sound. An eagle ray does not get a commuter to work faster. A sculpture trail does not make a house more habitable.
Yet, these apparently unnecessary things can change our experience of a place completely. They give us reasons to stop, look up, wonder or smile. Their value is in the encounter.
Of course, quantity surveyors will keep measuring. We should understand what public art costs. But we should never confuse what can be counted with what counts.
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