3.2 Truth itself is Constructed: Public Space as Public Art
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In contrast, the pinwheel grid used on Federation Square’s facades lacks either the positive or negative implications of Jefferson’s grid. It is simply difficult to see how applying ideas about a ‘self-organising’ universe to the buildings’ facades relates to the cultural institutions housed in them, which are, patently, not self organising.22 It is, perhaps, an attempt to design in a new way that is innocent of negative associations conjured by historical precedents—whether the baroque seats of despots or the mechanical forms of Miesian office blocks. However, this too is really a kind of neutrality rather than innocence. It is aware, but aloof from the institutions and from familiar frames of reference for people using the spaces. How to order and design landscapes, spaces and buildings to express the varied functions of a modern city is an unresolved question. Attempted answers include arbitrarily imposed patterns—fractal geometry or otherwise—or using something that is somehow related to the site, its surroundings or the activities to be supported, or that is metaphorically associated with the activities or users of the place. But what system is used to order a design is probably less important than two potential traps with any of them. The first is failure to recognise that the system is meaningless to most people. I do not believe that growing up in a landscape defined by an immense square grid, in the Midwest US, significantly affected my perception of social and political relationships in a way that differs from any other geometry of property boundaries and road alignments; other factors were infinitely more important. To most people in the world, an argument about the relative merit of different types of grids is pseudo-intellectual claptrap, of interest to cabbalists seeking an occult order in things but basically irrelevant to the task at hand. The second trap is designing the medium rather than the message. Any ordering system such as a geometric grid in its basic form is empty of meaning. Consider musical scales, which are systems of ordering sound. A scale is not music, but it allows the creation of expressive music using variations within the system—notes at different intervals, in different combinations, etc. Ironically, the simpler the system, the more expressive potential it has. Complexity in a system obscures variations created within it. The chromatic scale (with sharps and flats) offers greater musical potential than a diatonic scale (no sharps or flats, but actually a more complex harmonic sequence). The complex pinwheel grid in Federation Square One pattern that repeats across several of TCL’s projects made me wonder for a while what they were aiming to do with it. North Terrace, the Australian Garden, the Canberra Arboretum and initial concepts for Harbour Esplanade in Melbourne Docklands are all, conspicuously, striped. Even the arcs of the giant pergolas in Victoria Square form a plan of big distorted stripes. The giant ‘louvres’ along the Craigieburn Bypass are vertical stripes. TCL’s description of the parallel lines ruled across the Australian Garden as ‘ordering marks’ is spot on.23 This is an ordering system—about as simple as possible— which they adopt and then proceed to re-scale, twist, distort, and overlay to create varied spatial experiences and expressive designs. This generates varied effects that anybody can perceive directly and appreciate, especially in combination with movement: along or across the grain or meandering independently from it; and with dynamic effects caused by passing stripes at varying speeds or with their varied spacing implying different speeds.
The stripes as Ron has suggested aren’t derived from an interpretation of site. These interpretations often occur at more of a macro scale where we attempt to stitch the project into its context like the parallel paths at North Terrace or the hinge at Auckland. The stripes are utilised at the middle scale of projects and are often motifs that respond to the way people move through space. The stripes on North Terrace allow a permeable network. The fins in Geelong are arranged to highlight the varying speeds and experience between vehicles and pedestrians and the louvres at Craigieburn and Sydney University are similarly interested in animation via movement. The stripes are graphically similar to the patterns that Peter Walker utilises in say the University of San Diego. This project establishes a repeated banded pattern along a promenade. It’s a neutral background pattern that isn’t attempting to animate how a setting might be experienced.