CHELSEA TELFORD
ARC3002 - BABYLON STUDIO
Babylon studio focused on forming a position and developing an individual reading of the image of Melbourne CBD. Projects furthermore address strengthening, changing or weakening this image, through interventions and finally a ‘tower’ design.
Melbourne City is continually transformed by the events that take place in and around its places. Our city operates as a heartbeat, changing rhythms via activation, altering how we experience the city at different times of the day, week, month and year.
My project reconstructs the annual events calendar in Melbourne through the introduction of three new interventions. This creates a new experience, alters the image of the city and celebrates the spectacle. The three interventions exist in Melbourne for 3-4 weeks.Each intervention acts as a metaphor for a tower and inhabits a different level/height within the city.
Aboveline is an extension of the tower, an intervention which inhabits the top of significant buildings over areas of Swanston and Russell street. The interventions create events and facilitate a spectacle for people to enjoy, as well as a establishing a new experience within the city. The device re-introduces play to the people of the city and provides an escape from the reality below. The performance of inflatable architecture recognises the potential for new relationships and languages to be created between individuals within the city. Interaction and movement of the intervention redefines behaviors between people within the cit.
The In-Between interacts with the built environment and the non- places within the city. A sheeted canopy which spans across the street, redefines the space below and creates a new experience above. The resulting glow of yellow is seen to intrude on daily life and must be experienced. Old and new relationships between people, space and the built environment are revealed and created. The In-Between can be redefined and inhabited in a new exciting way, in order to draw attention to old relationships within the city and create new ones. The sheet cover creates a new boundary to the streets and alters experiences below, as topography changes, the spacial conditions are highlighted through the addition of the horizontal canopy.
A device which blurs the common/typical image of Melbourne city. A mist projection device creates a spectacle to be seen and felt and alters everyday life. The blurring of elements within the city draws our attention to key features whilst posing the question, what does our city look like on a deeper level? What is Melbourne without the typical visualizations of the city? Covering the commonly associated built environment draws our attention to something new.
