Eucalyptus Garden · One Central Park
Sydney, Australia
© Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Paris, France
ONE CENTRAL PARK – SEVEN GARDENS
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One Central Park’s public spaces are organized as a collection of seven gardens that are treated like individual installations, each with its own distinct theme. Like the planted plateaus rising along the South facades of the towers, the seven gardens extend the presence of the public park into semi-private spaces. They fulfill the same functional and symbolic purpose of staging encounters with nature but do so in more intimate and immersive settings.
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EUCALYPTUS GARDEN
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The entrance of One Central Park’s lower West Tower is an installation by Amanda Ortland that consists of three glowing image screens in an otherwise entirely black room. In this instance, the idea of the garden as a place of encounter with nature is based on images of a forest that come from a different time and place and are overlaid with reflections of the real trees standing outside of the building in front of the entrance.
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The illuminated images are photographs from a native Eucalyptus forest in the Blue Mountains region of South-Eastern Australia, a UNESCO world heritage site. For over 80,000 years and until British colonization these forests were home to the Wallerawang band of Aboriginal Australians. They called the area the Wolgan Valley. The name “Wolgan” comes from “Wolga,” the local word for the climatis aristata vine that grows in the area.
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The photos of the Wolgan Valley forest were the closest thing we could find to a window into the landscape that existed before the city was built. Amanda used a view camera and 4x5 sheet film to control parallax and allow for a very large-scale print. She developed toned prints, using a different primary color (red, yellow and blue) for each forest scene photographed. She created a palimpsest landscape image by layering three scenes, and made it dynamically controllable with RGB lighting to generate a chromatic mood change between day, night, and season. She tried to fine-tune the level of abstraction for the image to be neither a metaphor, nor an illustration, but rather a dream-like archetypal appearance. She blacked out all materials except the screens, so that the limits of the room would disappear, allowing the three image screens to float like a mirage in a dark, abstract space that extends them softly in its reflections.
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