︎WHEATBELT OBSERVATORIES RELEVANT WORK ︎RESEARCH ︎COMPETITIONS ︎NGV PAVILION 2019


NGVV1.1

A field of poles: dispersed through the whole garden: a city of small towers: a sketch for a large room: a virtual map of Victoria. There is an pole object for each of the seventy nine local shires of Victoria; one for each of the platforms of the vline network. Together they interact with the varied objects of the garden, even at its edge, and draw them into a map. Together they cluster in the view, are assembled in the brain, and are experienced close up through a walk through the whole space. The proposition for architecture is that it maps space through points; infers space by objects, but is not an object. And in this case, acknowledges all of Victoria, so dominated by one large city.

Imagined as a 1:8000 model, each object one day returned to its inferred location would form the world’s largest piece of conceptual/land art.







NGVV.1.1 is simultaneously: A virtual or conceptual Map of Victoria; an Urban Landscape of Towers; a single Architectural Space inferred by Columns.

Virtual Victoria: We placed an abstracted map of Victoria on the garden, at roughly 1:8000, to set out a field of points.

We aim to acknowledge the edge of Victoria and the edge of the Garden, and spread out to its full extent. Just as the 2016 pavilion acknowledged the periphery of Melbourne in the NGV, the periphery of Victorian territory is marked in its represented centre.

Each of the 79 municipalities of Victoria is marked with a point and a pole; a survey pin.
The seven lines of the Vline network are similarly sketched out and each station marked with a plinth.
The points in the garden are joined with a network of ground markers; reflective discs between the poles; planted grass strips between the vline plinths.

We imagine the possibility of de-installing the piece from the NGV and the placement of its objects in their inferred place – spreading them across Victoria, and making an enormous conceptual land art sculpture.
Urban Landscape of Towers: The design makes a landscape of small towers; a miniature city, seen against a backdrop of Southbank towers, of the Arts Centre Spire, of 101 Collins Street, each visible from the garden.
This field conceptually joins up the field of objects already in the garden creating chance interactions with them. A network of trees; of ground lights of sculptures. The poles appear beside artworks; in the arbour; between trees and on paving, drawing these elements into the composition, and offering a place to sit at odd locations.

The abstracted field is experienced as a forest, adding to the trees, at its most dense near its centre, but still planted near its outer edges. Illuminated at night the field of poles reads as a constellation of points of light seen from above in the many elevated viewpoints surrounding it.
Architectural Space of Columns: Imagined as an architectural space, this is a large room without a roof, defined by its columns and one hundred metres long at its points, and five metres high at its springing point.
In addition to the shire poles, the twelve columns of the NGV Great Hall are inserted into the composition at 1:1; a scaling reference for the great room. Seven of the twelve absorb a shire pole; an extra five make up the dozen. The ceiling is lightly sketched out onto the bluestone, as a shadow
It asserts architecture as a tool which defines space through a composition of objects. This is a thinned interior, with the barest of objects and perhaps never visible from a single gaze, but only ever assembled mentally.
It asks the question of architecture; how little do you need to infer space? How thinly can we define an architectural environment?










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