Cooper Freeman

FINALIST

‘Fabricated Dialogues’

Canberra has an affection with fabricated landscape. The exchange between natural state and human intervention is constant and has generated a very particular materiality. The ordinary garden hedge within the garden city is the distillation of the city’s macro-scale declarations and its human-scale revisions.

The hedge’s inherent malleability and commonplace prevalence provides the opportunity for tangible citywide dialogue, recorded in the simplicity of topiary maintenance. A dialogue between the proceedings of control and neglect, city and street, street and home, neighbour and neighbour.

The tapestry proposal imitates these observations and perspectives of dialogue in the specific context of the NGA.

Utilising the conflict of the proposed location, the tapestry sweeps from the new building walkway floor to the existing bush hammered concrete wall, signifying a dialogue between the two. The tapestry rises above eye level to conceal the distinction between new and old.

The pattern warp of the tapestry reflects the original buildings organizing geometry as a reflection of the city scale. Applying a knot and weave of tulle the tapestry is imagined in an ongoing state of fluctuation, consistently carved and re-weaved during its display.