The valley from above - the Facebook building and floating offices in the foreground, with the Coca Cola Building in the background joined by the bridge.
The Facebook Building from the front/exterior.
The valley and bridge.
Entrance to the Coca Cola Building.
Ground floor offices of the Coca Cola Building.
The Coca Cola Building lobby.
The Coca Cola Building elevator.
View as the Coca Cola Building elevator rises.
The entrance to the bridge exiting the Coca Cola Building's penthouse offices.
Looking up the bridge towards the Coca Cola Building.
The dining room chairs which ascend to join the table above.
The ascending dining room.
The Coca Cola Building seen from the rising dining room chair.
The elevating-floating multipurpose Facebook office dock at the end of the bridge.
The elevating/floating multipurpose Facebook offices in Alexandra Canal.
The descent of the elevating/floating multipurpose Facebook office.
The valley - I have decided to use the shipping crate storage area at Tempe, on the Alexandra Canal which separates Tempe from the airport and Botany Bay. I have chosen this valley because
the industrial nature of the valley allows me to play with themes present in futurism and modernism which I am interested in.
the area is directly in line with the flight path of international flights allowing maximum exposure to the companies
the melancholy and repetitive nature of shipping containers will provide an interesting contrast to the dynamic buildings that I want to put within them.
I am imagining the valleys in a future where the shipping containers have been stacked to form mountains and valleys around the canal (which has risen due to melting polar icecaps!!)
Having played around with CryEngine and creating some beautiful paradisiac scenes I felt it was time to reflect and decide on what sort of environment my monument should sit in. I wanted it to convey the concepts I was trying to explore in my electroliquid haiku:
"Lightness of Concept:
(mass mu) transience
of fragile nothingess"
I found the idea of fragile nothingness particularly poignant. It reminded me of a scene in the movie El Topo, an acid western by Jodorowsky from the 1970s (if you haven't seen it, don't watch it because it is scarring). Nihilistic and melancholic, the perfect atmosphere for my monument.
In the meantime I was googling ancient Japanese paintings for landscape ideas, came across the important idea of oku - the Japanese word for depth and centre. In Japanese cities, painting, theatre and architecture there are two centres - the real/commercial/material centre at the fore, and the mysterious/spirital/unnatainable centre in the distance. The space between these centres is one of my original concepts - mu/ma. So I spent some time sketching out a "Japanese" style drawing of my setting with my Sundial as my first centre, and my obelisk as my oku - spiritual centre. What came out was some sort of mountainous, lifeless space which was still full of movement and energy.
Environment Sketch
I then set about modelling this scene. CryEngine allows you to play with the diurnal which I loved and I wanted to incorporate the idea of "broken symmetry" by cutting the suns circularity by the obelisk. The continuous circle is a representation of infinity. The break in its bottom reminds us the "nothing is infinite." I can design infinity/nothingness in the same way that I understand the concept - through a paradox or series of paradoxes, which I tried to sketch in my original axonometric for Mu and Lightness (of Mass).
