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Error: API requests are being delayed for this account. New posts will not be retrieved.
There may be an issue with the Instagram access token that you are using. Your server might also be unable to connect to Instagram at this time.
The expansiveness of the Sydney Basin often means it as a geomorphological entity, lacks legibility. Plagued by development and a population boom pushing west, it has left us as its inhabitants losing a connection to the place and the land in which we live. Working with this is a huge challenge landscape architects face, how can we allow a shift in perspective to highlight the huge, and often minute, ebbs and flows of such a large landscape? The portal, a type of landform that exist on the fringe of the basin, exists in counterpoint to the vastness of the plain, augmenting the scale of the basin and making its rhythms and systems tangible. The Glenbrook Gorge, geologically made up of Hawkesbury sandstone and Wianamatta shale and existing because of the Lapstone monocline, is comprised of huge cliffs – a biproduct of a unique fracturing pattern that allows rock to more easily fall away. These patterns of violence seen in the gorge mirror the patterns of the larger landscape but make them very explicit, and at a scale that is perceptive to us. As an entrance to the plain, things experienced here may affect one’s experience of other places on the plain.
The Glenbrook Gorge is special in its geomorphological makeup, with the body feeling insignificant in the landscape’s scale. The violence of rockfalls and floods, plus the intense stratification of the cliffs, nod directly to deep time and our situatedness within it, something that is often hard for the human psyche to grapple with. This transportive nature makes the visitor feel very far from home, but ultimately very comfortable and connected. As a portal, a window to the Sydney Basin, other landforms perhaps in a more urban or suburban context can act in the same way.
Working through sublime ideology, operationalising both masculine and feminist viewings of this theory, the relationship to the body and space, the encounter and the psyche and the disarming feeling of interconnectedness can be brought forward in the same explicit manner as violence and the gorge. The project does this through construction of views, compressing and releasing the body in space and the oscillation between large, small, near and far experiences. Built elements merge unsuspiciously with the ‘natural’, existing to work with the landscape to alter our perception of the world around us. Engaging with the act of walking, exploring, and experiencing, pathways mediate the feelings of the partaker, at times awash with sheer encounter, others intense interconnectedness, ‘jolting’ one into epochal consciousness that, once experienced, can be taken from the gorge and explored elsewhere.