Roof for stray thoughts, 2022
Coated steel, mirror polished stainless steel
5 × 30 × 55m; 88 metric tonnes
LocationQuay Quarter Tower, 50 Bridge Street, Sydney
CommissionerAMP Capital
Architects 3XN, Studio Bright, Silvester Fuller, SJB
CuratorBarbara Flynn, Art Advisor
Award Property Council of Australia Innovation & Excellence Awards,
Award for Best Public Art Project 2023
PhotographyAdam Mork
Downloads
A passion for breakdancing as a teenager is intriguing and seems to link to the kind of art he would go on to make. With his three-man troupe, Harlem Gun Crew, Eliasson won the Scandinavian breakdancing championships in 1984. Could the art form have taught him how to judge his own body, and how people move in space, and was that a kind of perceptual training for the works to come?
He experimented with light installations as a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then, as now, he would often recreate something he had witnessed firsthand, without hiding how it was done: ‘You see the hose pipe, the spotlight, the things creating the rainbow even as you see the rainbow.’ You are not just having an experience; you are also conscious of having that experience. Eliasson’s art encourages people to be self-aware and adventurous – as he was himself, putting it all on the line with the artwork that made him known to the world: The Weather Project, created for the Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2003. Using the most rudimentary materials, he created an effect of wonder that dazzled millions.
Titled Roof for stray thoughts, the artwork by Eliasson for Quay Quarter Sydney (QQS) exists in dialogue with the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the two form a triangle with Sydney’s other icon, the Sydney Opera House. The relationship underscores the importance of the artwork as a component of the City of Sydney’s urban design objective to revitalise the northern part of the city at Circular Quay, and to connect it to the other two main squares, Town Hall Square and Central Station. The sculpture contributes a new icon to Sydney and creates a welcoming place for people to meet. It sends tendrils out that are visible from afar and alert passers-by to its presence.
What’s it like to experience this work? The ‘roof’ of the title locates it and immediately conjures a picture in the mind of its perch up high. ‘Stray’ gives us licence to roam, relax and reflect, perhaps while observing the fall of sunlight across the work as it creates a changing shadow play throughout the day. The form of the sculpture is intriguing – as the eye meanders across its surface, it can appear to keep growing. An earlier concept took a species of coral that lives in nearby Sydney Harbour as its inspiration. A feeling of being immersed in an all-encompassing environment is retained in the final work, just not an underwater one. Instead, in its final iteration, a living tree is the model, but the reference is poetic and approximate, never slavish. ‘Thoughts’ – the artist seems inclined to elicit a feeling of indeterminacy that will keep us guessing and thinking about what we have just experienced. Eliasson’s is art that will spur thought or even changes in our relationship to our surroundings: ‘He was interested in the connection between an experience that might take place … and the way it might affect your behaviour when you leave … in relation to the world around you.’
The sculpture exhibits a deep understanding of the power of architecture as well as the power of art. The connection between art and architecture expresses itself in visual correspondences like the relationship of the sculpture’s network of arcs to the lines of the 3XN façade. But the artwork transcends any obvious relationships to become a category in its own right – much like the artist’s projects with his collaborator, Sebastian Behmann, Head of Design at Studio Olafur Eliasson, which are posited somewhere between art and architecture. The two founded Studio Other Spaces (SOS) in 2014 and have created structures that are hard to categorise, such as Fjordenhus in Vejle, Denmark (2018).
In 2018, curated by Barbara Flynn, Studio Olafur Eliasson was commissioned to design and manufacture a significant work of public art, a sculpture which would be the centrepiece of one of Sydney’s largest and most ambitious urban regeneration undertakings to date – QQS. The artist had been identified and discussions about an artwork commenced two and a half years earlier, in a conversation on 28 August 2015 among Behmann; Kim Herforth Nielsen, founder and Principal of Danish architecture firm 3XN; Barbara Flynn; and Caroline Choy, then Senior Project Manager, AMP Capital, Quay Quarter Sydney. The QQS development features, at its heart, a comprehensive contemporary remodelling of one of Sydney’s original skyscrapers, the AMP Building at 50 Bridge Street, by 3XN. Eliasson had his pick of sites for his artwork. He chose the rooftop podium that connects the original AMP heritage tower at 33 Alfred Street (Peddle Thorp and Walker, 1962) to the re-envisioned Quay Quarter Tower.
Following a presentation to the City of Sydney by Flynn on 28 August 2018, the work was endorsed and approved as developer AMP Capital’s public art contribution under the Development Consent conditions for QQS. It is a condition precedent to occupation that the work be complete to the satisfaction of the City of Sydney. To this end, Bridget Smyth, Design Director, and artist and Public Art Advisory Panel (PAAP) member Janet Laurence visited the site to inspect the sculpture on 7 October 2021. Flynn and Reinhard Ostendorf, Studio Olafur Eliasson’s lead for the artwork, hosted the City’s visit. Eliasson himself had visited Sydney for meetings with AMP Capital in December 2019. He met with Smyth, Laurence, and other representatives of the PAAP and the City’s Design Unit on site on 9 December 2019. Sebastian Behmann and Taylor Dover, Co-Director of Encounters at Studio Olafur Eliasson, had visited Sydney from Berlin on an earlier trip, 3–6 December 2018, to present the artwork to the PAAP.
Following two years of successful collaboration between City of Sydney, Studio Olafur Eliasson, fabricators CIG (The Netherlands), AMP Capital, contractor Multiplex, and installer Icon Metal (Sydney), the $3 million sculpture was completed, packed and shipped in ten containers to Sydney. Components of the work were on the seas from the beginning of May to the end of August 2021. The artwork was inspected upon arrival at Icon’s yard and again following delivery to the Quay Quarter site. Installation on site commenced on 14 September and was completed on 9 October 2021.
Twenty-six columns support the canopy of the sculpture, which is comprised of three layers. Columns and canopy are flawlessly fabricated of hollow steel, zinc coated and painted with a C4 system of paint in a papyrus white colour for the columns and a sulphur yellow colour for the canopy. Hand-polished, marine-grade stainless-steel sections form smaller, mirrored c-curves that reflect the buildings surrounding the site; once the site is open and people visit, they will see themselves reflected.
The work weighs 66 tonnes and covers an area of almost 2000 square metres installed. Complex components are almost too long to take in at a glance; they fork in unexpected directions and connect to other components in unexpected ways. In its detailing, the sculpture is precise and delicate, a delicacy that seems to be at odds with the work’s giant size. The beauty of the fabrication strikes a note of awe: the whole structure fell into place like a key slotted into a keyhole at installation.
Text by Barbara Flynn, February 2022
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Quotes from Mark Godfrey and Maisie Skidmore, ‘Yes, but why? Olafur Eliasson’, WePresent, 2020, https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/yes-but-why-olafur-eliasson/.