New South Wales Projects & Sites
Seven Metre Bar
introduction / overview / images / location / Projects
Landscape Architects: Richard Goodwin | Russell Lowe | Adrian McGregor
Location: Sydney, New South Wales
Introduction
At the Seven Metre Bar On 1 October 2009, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore MP officially opened the City of Sydney By George! Laneways festival. Created by artist/ architect Richard Goodwin, 'architect/gamer' Russell Lowe and landscape architect Adrian McGregor, Seven Metre Bar was one of eight temporary installations that transformed forgotten laneways for three months in Sydney’s city centre as part of Art & About 2009. This installation combined the landscape of weather, an architecture of catastrophe and the technology of games. Intense weather projections flickered across the bar built from storm surge detritus increasing in ferocity as bar patronage grew.
The Seven Metre Bar hidden in Underwood Street, near Circular Quay, was located at an elevation of 7 metres above sea level. If the ice poles melt we will experience a 75 metre sea level rise according to NASA scientist James Hansen. At 8 meters Underwood Street will be underwater. The installation was made from recycled junk including cars, boats, building materials and bodies tangled within building columns like seaweed at the edge of beaches. The project concept was chosen by the jury from over 500 registrations and 68 submissions.
The concept
Today 2/6/09 it was reported that the oceans are becoming more acidic. This is yet another in a series of markers on the road to irreversible damage of our environment.
When the oceans reach a certain point in this cycle all life within the water dies leading to death on such a large scale that the decaying bio-mass will create a future store of liquid oil equal to the stores we have burnt. The cycle is thus completed and we as humans may not survive.
So do we raise the bar? Do we build a bar? Do we measure the bar?
At an elevation of 7 metres the bar marks a reading of possible worst-case sea level rise at the turn of the century. At 8 metres Underwood Street will be underwater with tidal surges and the flotsam and jetsam of our civilisation. Our proposal for Underwood Street celebrated inaction on climate change with a drinking bar built inside the detritus of our age of progress and rampant capitalism. The bar responded to visiting crowds and their collective inaction with the force of virtual weather. This weather projected through digital beamers and broadcast through the installation built in ferocity as a response to increasing numbers. Harnessing the power of computer gaming engines a digital replication of the street united computer imagery with reality to create an atmosphere of confusion and excitement. Participants saw and felt the consequences of their inaction. At what point do we raise or lower the bar?
The bar was a reaction to our progressive drowning until at 75m depth, Sydney to the Blue Mountains is swallowed for all time as the North & South polar icecaps disappear entirely. This installation was a place of questions. It was interactive as a place of drinking and entertainment and interactive in the intensity of the message each participant took home.
As a collaboration the work combined the landscape of weather and topography with the physicality of the architecture of catastrophe and the technology of digital games. It was a merging of art, architecture and landscape architecture designed to provoke and challenge our inertia in dealing with climate change.
introduction / overview / images / location / Projects
2011
