WEST LOBBY
PROJECT INFO
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
NEW CONSTRUCTION
RESIDENTIAL LOBBY INTERIOR
The entrance of One Central Park’s lower West Tower is an installation 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.
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.
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. We used a view camera and 4x5 sheet film to control parallax and allow for a very large-scale print. We developed toned prints, using a different primary color (red, yellow and blue) for each forest scene we had photographed. We created a palimpsest landscape image with the layered three scenes, and made it dynamically controllable with RGB lighting to generate a chromatic mood change between day, night, and season. We 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. We 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.
