CORNERS: THE BILLBOARDS PROJECT

At Sydney Customs House yesterday I unveiled the ideas and people behind a public art exhibit on the subject of corners. This was part of the Sydney Architecture Festival. The project consists of 2 public billboards at the intersection of South Dowling and Flinders Streets (Sydney) that forms the main eastern gateway into the city from the airport. 

The idea was based on a Barcelona exhibition, titled “Cities Corners” that was curated by the architect Manuel de Sola-Morales (who I used to work for). Drawing from cities as diverse as New York, Tokyo and Mumbai (to name a few), the exhibition offered a critique of how corners generate the social and physical spaces of cities. Taking something from the original I wanted to look it anew using Sydney as a filter. At the time, I had just started my PhD and was interested in the way ideas are translated to Australia from overseas. The idea to develop something new here in Sydney formed part of my PhD research.  The decision was eventually made to take the exhibit out of a gallery and put it into a public space, thereby giving it a much wider public showing. This gave rise to the billboards project.

For me personally, the trigger for this was a project by the Cuban-American Felix González Torres, an artist who had a major influence on the development of my PhD. González Torres located a minimal and yet highly personal image of an unmade bed on billboards throughout Manhattan. This was a commentary on the political nature of desire and the right of two men to share the same bed. What this shows is that a single image can contain a broader question. In our case, the question isn’t dealing with sexual politics but it is about the power of suggestion: About drawing attention to a major crossroad in the city (for even just moment in people’s minds), and asking: What kind of place was it in the past and what could it become? This is the crossroad of South Dowling and Flinders Streets. The way these 2 streets intersect and connect two different conditions in the city making it one of the most significant corners.

Corners determine the shape and energy of cities though the intersection of people, construction, and movement. The design of a corner, the way it resolves the junction of different converging surfaces, accommodates the movement or scale of a person, the passage of a hand, the visual connections from one side to the next all form part of our close physical appreciation of corners in a city. This process shifts between the large and small-scale boundaries of things that surround and contain us. For example: A corner space in the city (Whitlam Square), the design of a building on a corner (New York), the refuge of an urban park, and the corner of a room, all form part of our understanding of spatiality and design.

I decided to explore this idea with 4 other architects. It has therefore been a collaborative effort between myself, Neil Durbach, Rachel Neeson, Nick Murcutt and Marcus Trimble. I thank them all for their contributions. It is not easy to get 5 architects to combine their thoughts and creative instincts to the task of producing just 2 images. Each of them brought their own interpretation to the project. 

The Flinders / South Dowling Streets crossroad is experienced fleetingly as a point of arrival into the city: A place between garden and city. It is situated at the pinpoint between a vast park extending south, that formed part of the city’s initial water supply, and the urbanised city to the north.  When seen at the scale of the city, this pinpoint is marked by the intersection of South Dowling and Flinders Streets. 

As architects, we’re interested in asking questions about things. And reflecting on what they could be. When we were still thinking of doing the exhibit in a gallery, I was looking at ways to describe the experience of scale difference at this intersection through the velocity of transit. And the role that the intersection plays as a corner between garden and city. This is what we decided to focus on.

Since white settlement, the growth of Sydney has created intersections between landscape (which you can imagine in their original state of verdant natural forest) and the ever-expanding reach of urbanisation. You could imagine them like fingers of urbanization extending outwards from the CBD. Sometimes parts of this landscape is maintained as parks in the city (as in the case of Centennial and Moore Parks), as residual (and substantially weakened) reminders of what the city was like in the past. 

At South Dowling and Flinders Street, a gateway is created between this landscape and the urban form of the city.  To the south, Moore Park is a series of playing fields edged with large trees along Anzac Parade and a road landscape of camouflage to the eastern distributor. Coming from the south (or east) it is the through traffic that forms the experience. In a car, we experience it only incidentally while passing through.

What we did was to produce 2 images: one for each billboard. They create an abstraction of this crossroad and its place as a point between garden and city. On the lower one, you see this representation of the city as garden, extending south from the intersection to Kingsford. On the top, there is a representation of city’s urban experience, extending to the north. This is an amalgam of an existing pattern and what could be seen as a more intense experience of urbanity with tight courtyard buildings, of a public use and nature, and a series of interconnecting public spaces. These could be considered as extrusions and intrusions into the existing pattern of the city.  

The corner (between the two billboards) has a 3 storey terrace on Flinders Street and a one storey building on the corner of the lane. This twists with the alignment of the lane to another 3 storey building on the corner of South Dowling Street. Given its prominent location, it is an unremarkable corner in either architectural or landscape terms. The shifts in scale and alignment reflect the topographic condition of Sydney (the corners can not be at right angles because the streets could not be laid out orthogonally on a flat plane).

The position of the 2 billboards with respect to the each other, allowed us to play upon the way they are seen separately and sometimes in alignment. Extending this idea of the connected and disconnected nexus between garden and city. From certain vantage points the two boards are seen together. These change & shift as you arrive at the crossroad from different vantage points. The corners that make up the intersection await further architectural and urban definition. What should they be? Could the design of this corner intensify the experience of the city (in either urban or landscape terms)? This is the question that we are interested in asking. What would happen if we filled the park with more trees? Introduced more public buildings. What would it be like if the urban area was reconfigured to make it more public at its centre? If we introduced pockets of green into it, and inserted a public building into the park, a building that would sit unbounded by fences and divisions and connect to the landscape on all sides. 

It’s important to note that we are not advocating one solution over another. We get the urban environment that we deserve and by inviting you to question the use and design of every corner in your city, we invite you to imagine the kind of exciting and exhilarating place it could be. 

The billboards went up on September 11th without any direct reference to what they are or who has been behind them. Since then they have been seen by thousands of people and our intention was that they encourage you to question your environment on a daily basis.  

The project has been generously funded by Bluescope steel, through the Lysaght Scholarship which I was awarded in 2006. I’d also like to thank the Australian Institute of Architects for their support and Brett Boardman for his great photos of the billboards.