Transformative Surface

Transformative Surface
State of Design 2009
Curtin House and Stevenson Lane, Melbourne

A project concerning with the mapping and re-constructing of various conditions, trajectories and forms of the city.
In collaboration with OUTr] [RTNo

View project site at kwodrent.com/transformative_surface2009

Transformative Surface is a field of luminescent tubular structures which responds to the transformation of light, wind and temperature. The tubular structures vary in length from 8 to18 metre filaments.

Transformative Surface was a project specifically designed for the State of Design festival, Design for Everyone program in 2009. The project was the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Grace Tan [design/fashion], Rosalea Monacella [landscape/arch], Craig Douglas [landscape/arch and Bridget Keane [landscape].

The project, a temporary installation, was situated in the light well of Curtin House, suspended from the height of the Rooftop Cinema was an investigation into how landscape could be continuously reinterpreted to generate a ‘surface’ that acted as both a device to register the various forces of the landscape and a means of transforming those forces into the landscape of the city.

The collaboration used techniques such as terrestrial scanning to derive information from the city and 1:1 prototypes to test the design.

Operating as a mapping and remapping of the city the material transformations considered the landscape [or city as landscape] as a dynamic entity. The structure itself behaved as a single, yet differentiated entity that shifted notions of time, space and material. The surface could be viewed from within the building and from various vantage points in the city including a number of public accessible roof tops, and Stevensons Lane. From these various points of view, and engagement, the installation resonated a range of different effects at various scales

The project is interesting in that the physical form of the installation is only one component of the project. Other facets of the project serve to reveal, respond to and negotiate [or at times fail to] council definitions of site, landscape, city and project. A series of posters installed in and around the project ‘site’, expanded the scope of the project and allowed for a communication of the process of ‘making’ that the project had gone through. Rejecting traditional conceptions of a lifespan and ‘product’ of the project.

Source: OUTr] [RTNo