Taopu Smart City Headquarters, Shanghai
Echo-space is a permanent art installation created for the new Taopu Smart City headquarters in Shanghai as a reflection of the site’s transformation from one of the top ten polluted areas in the city, to low carbon eco-district with a vast regenerated green space inspired by New York’s Central Park.
The project brief called for a dramatic arrival statement for visitors to the building that could be appreciated from multiple angles, whilst also providing a more human scale for the large atrium volume where people can pause to meet with one another or relax.
My response was to create an artwork that appears to have been born out of the architecture and has momentarily come into being. Evoking transformations that occur in the natural world and offering a sense of wonder that could be explored as visitors arrive at the atrium and transition throughout the building.
In order to create this experience, I chose to work with sustainable metal mesh. It’s ability to be both solid and permeable provided an opportunity to create visual interplay between many different opposing elements; light and shade, chaos and order, opacity and transparency, movement and stillness. This dualism is repeated in the illusion that the artwork is light in weight, despite the steel coil mesh with which it is constructed tallying up to one tonne.
Aligning with the brief, Echo-space can be appreciated from multiple angles. As visitors change their vantage and light shifts throughout the day, moiré patterns flicker across the overlapping mesh surfaces and transparent layers conflate or expand. Culminating in the appearance that this object in space is both there and not there. As these binaries interchange, a sense of transformation comes forth to be perceived as an entity.
Echo-space creates a dramatic arrival statement for visitors. It is a seemingly impossible suspended form with a continuous surface that, if travelled upon, can be followed back to the point of origin. Much like an echo bounces off its environment and returns to the listener. Taking cues from the surrounding architecture, this artwork echoes elements of transparency, line and repetition. Re-imaging them into an ephemeral entity that evokes the natural world and a sense that transformation is unending.
Artwork Details
Title: Echo-space, 2020
Materials: Steel coil, steel and acrylic powder coat
Dimensions: 14 x 7 x 5 m
Weight: 1 tonne
Project Management and Fabrication: UAP Shanghai
Photography: Rex Zou.