waverton coal loader
The Forest Above, the Catacombs Below.
This studio involved the remodelling of Waverton’s historic coal loader site to construct a public centre for art creation and exhibition. This required working on a Sydney foreshore site with indigenous and industrial heritage.
The studio process for this design required the crafting of an individual, unique and intellectually driven design response to an architectural problem on a challenging site. A sculptural response to the site was the starting point for the design, and this three dimensional concept was used as a form of conceptual diagram for how the rest of the work unfolded.
My response to the site stemmed from an understanding of creation as a product of decay. My sculptural model includes a figure sitting in a concrete space. This space is defined by the wax roof that is melting into and so fuelling the wax candle that warms the figure. This was a scene drawn from the fire of the coal that was loaded at this site, from the excavation of the rock to create the coal loader space, and from my experience of Sydney’s underground art scene.
This design was intended to respond to Sydney’s young artist scene. At this point in my degree I had attended a number of art shows run by young artists in rough residential homes, in abandoned warehouses and in other makeshift spaces, intertwined with Sydney’s underground music scene. These spaces were free to use, possessing democratic accessibility and exploding with cultural vibrancy. In creating this design I wanted to utilise the coal loader site’s industrial character to fuel this space for unbound creation.
The resulting design utilised the idea of decay and preservation to create a sort of cultural time capsule. Over a long enough timescale, the buildings atop the coal loader would collapse at their thin supports, becoming a forest where vegetation grows over crumbling cuboid shapes. The catacombs below that the title references are spaces excavated even deeper than the existing tunnels, lit from above by vertical tunnels to the surface. This would create the kind of free space needed to foster young and radical art spaces in Sydney…
