2015, SUBMISSION FOR TAPESTRY DESIGN PRIZE FOR ARCHITECTS
Proposed for the 2015 Australian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, this piece of tapestry is a figurative collage of major Australian skylines and landscape. Like New York City’s diorama at the 1939 – 1940 World’s Fair, a large wall tapestry envelops a grandroom, extending observer’s perception to that of the image. Unlike a picture window, the image do not have to simulate a reality that we know, but rather offers a visual interpretation.
Similar to an actual woven tapestry, the collage is a carefully joining of patchworks that defines a whole. As a nation cannot be adequately defined by the skyline of a city, this piece collages skylines of the major Australian cities; namely Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Gold Coast as well as Hobart, Darwin and Cairns. The word ‘skyline’ is a rather oxymoron when compared to the predominantly flat landscape of Australia. The image here then reflects the central flat plains of Australia, with the foreground dominated by major Australian coastal cities. Canberra, the Australian capital, designed by Walter Burley Griffin and planned between the two largest cities of Sydney and Melbourne is an etching into the inland Australian landscape. While a typical image of a city’s skyline focuses on a tall well-known skyscraper, this collage fixates itself into the natural rock formation of Uluru / Ayer’s Rock – an affirmation that natural landscape defines Australia as much as the skyline of cities.
2014, SUBMISSION FOR SCALE EXHIBITION,
AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL ARCHITECTURE CONFERENCE
Vertical elements of our landscape, as ordinary as utility poles, tree trunks or crop plants are abstracted as black pins. Looking from above it looks like a galaxy of stars in the night sky. And like the countless tree trunks in the forest, the space is dotted by clusters of hundreds of black pins. The placement of the vertical elements defines the space between. Here, depending on the distance of the poles; they evoke denseness or sparseness when read against each other. The absence in the center, the void, a carved out space – like a crop-circle becomes a charged and emergent centric space. This space is ironically a positive aesthetic condition – seemingly pulling the poles together like invisible forces of gravity. From afar, a path leading to the center emerges, a linear spatial condition formed not by literal lines on the landscape, but by imaginary lines joined by the connecting dots in the landscape.
Delirious City Beach: A Sarcastical Manifesto for Roachattan
in collaboration with Andrei Smolik, Amy Quach, Jessie Nguyen & Lee Ren Jian
MERGE SANDCASTLE BUILDING COMPETITION
The sandcastle competition brief calls for the imagining of sandcastles as habitat for cockroaches. Peter Eisenman’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, New York Manhattan’s city grid and Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine for Paris all serves as backdrop to the urban manifesto to the insect species, that is doomed to fail, thanks to the chaotic and erratic nature of the cockroach in contrast to the imposed order and strict cleanliness of the city. It will however serve as a failed example of the parallel modernist experiment for the fellow cockroaches.
THE PINWHEEL is one of the results of a design studio experiment led by Stephen Neille in the narrative of urban strangemaking on the city of Perth. The process includes mapping and recognizing the city as an existing and complete order in any given time, and positing as to slightly reset the familiar order of the city, hence the term urban strangemaking.
The urban strategy seeks to make aware of the distinctive qualities of the city of Perth, in this sense the Perth city grid and its anomalies. Irregularity of the grid such as unexpected streets end up in buildings rather than a continuous line, hence coined as linesight terminations.
The pinwheel plan is formulated due to the unaligned meeting point between Queen Street and Wolfe Lane. As the threshold, the pinwheel in this manner serves to rotate the forces not just two-dimensionally, but also three-dimensionally upwards and downwards. The facade is formed in recognition of linesight termination and dual old and new quality of Perth, serving to bridge the old and new in a gradual manner.
As an urban acupuncture, THE PINWHEEL is introduced as an urban spinning moment within an existing set of constellation of linesight terminations within the city of Perth.
