Location: Homebush, NSW
Date Completed: 2007

This project rectifies an unexpected problem arising from the an existing public artwork at Sydney Olympic Park. The “Luminous Threshold” artwork created by James Carpenter and Richard Kress sits adjacent to Haslams Creek Bridge, the northern gateway to Sydney’s Olympic Park. The work is composed of five masts with misting nozzles and a sixth mast that houses a heliostat and searchlight.

During the day the heliostat refracts the suns rays through the mist emitted by the masts and a flaming luminance is emitted as the two elements coincide. At night this luminance is achieved by searchlight. Unfortunately the light was projecting well beyond the artwork and disrupting houses over a kilometre away at Newington.

TCA’s brief was to address this problem while maintaining the intent of the artwork, and engaging a methodology and approach that minimized cost to the Sydney Olympic Park Authority. TCA’s design response is a series of poles that when viewed from the adjoining spaces and roads present slim, tall elements that compliment and connect the existing artwork into the landscape and context. Only when these poles are viewed from the alignment of the search light beam the overlap creates a solid wall effectively creating a tableau for the projection.

As this artwork is located on a roadway, the TCA response also references Freeway side artworks and the observation of a paling fence from a moving car. The artworks nature can only be fully understood as the viewer moves past the work and the long alignment of open poles visually closes, becomes solid and opens up again.