Living Room
Integrated Public Art Work
Year - 2008
Client - City of Frankston
Scope - Shortlisted Competition. Unbuilt
Location - Frankston Bulky Goods District, Victoria
Budget - $-
Team - CAStudios
Placed at the entrance to a developing Commercial Goods Precinct, which in turn sits in a broader contextual relationship with residential zones and a cemetery, this project’s siting is especially thought provoking. I am particularly drawn to thinking about the nature of commodities/goods and about the place and role they play within our lives. How do goods come to be (as a gathering and mobilization of resources), how do they in turn constitute and furnish our notions of ‘home’, and how is it that it is through these ‘things’ that we come to know and remember a life?
This simple rumination upon the particularities of site, context, commodities and ‘home’ is the starting point for this project. Consequently, I am interested in exploring systems of flow across the site – economic, material, transport, environmental flows – and how they might work to configure and seemingly mobilize an accumulation of domestic / bulky goods into an expression of home/house.
Located on the entrance roundabout, such a form has to be composed in such a way as to present an intriguing image at a variety of scales, to all major view lines and directions of approach, and to engage with a mobile audience, possibly working in such a way as to appear to ‘cohere’ and ‘dissolve’ as one moves towards and around it. Also due to its siting and related traffic safety requirements, the work has to be ‘transparent’ or open, that is, configured in such a way as to allow view lines through it.
Such a work, such a ‘Good’s House’, or ‘Living Room’ possesses a rich associative and metaphorical power. The potential for lighting / illuminating such a ‘house’ are indeed exciting, as are the possibilities for the landscaping of the site. What kind of ‘garden’ would such a ‘house’ sit in? I can’t resist here the ‘house and garden’ reference! Maybe this is too much a one liner, but it lends a certain wit and popular reference to the ‘seriousness’ of the project; an important combination in any successful public work.
