Now and When: Australian Urbanism

Australia presented its official pavilion at the 12th International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2010 with an exhibition that posed a stark and urgent question: what will Australian cities look like in 2050 and beyond? Co-directed by photographer John Gollings and architect Ivan Rijavec, and commissioned by Janet Holmes à Court, Now and When was structured as two distinct but inseparable halves. Now confronted visitors with the existing Australian urban condition, seen through Gollings’ extraordinary 3D aerial photography of Melbourne, Sydney and Surfers Paradise set against the vast open cuts of the mining pits at Kalgoorlie and Newman, a portrait of a continent both intensely urbanised and profoundly raw. When projected seventeen visions of Australia's possible urban futures, drawn from a national competition that deliberately freed architects from planning constraints, economic realities and political expediency. Floating cities, submerged cities, new desert settlements: proposals that were deliberately provocative, intended as catalysts for debate rather than blueprints for action. 

Bringing the seventeen visions to life were the renders and animations of Flood Slicer, whose work gave visceral form to the competing urban futures on screen, while a haunting soundscape created by Nick Murray and Karl Anderson enveloped the projection spaces, making the experience as much felt as seen. 

The graphic design for the exhibition was conceived to match the ambition of the content, and to extend the central idea of perception and perspective into every touchpoint of the design. Custom three-dimensional typography was developed specifically for the exhibition, built into glowing modular signage elements distributed throughout the pavilion space, reinforcing the 3D nature of the projections and the exhibition's core theme of built-up form. Visitors engaged with the letterforms in the same way they engaged with the imagery, moving around them, allowing clarity to emerge from apparent chaos. 

The same idea translated across every format. The exhibition catalogue used scanimation technology on its cover, a rotating Now and When graphic that shifted as the publication moved, creating a different experience depending on your angle of view. From external signage to publication to spatial installation, the design employed 2D, stereoscopic, lenticular, video and web formats to maintain a continuity of form across a diversity of experience. Signage was engineered as a modular system of approximately 300 individual parts, designed to be disassembled, packed flat and shipped in containers, allowing the exhibition to travel to venues across Australia and internationally throughout 2011. 

The design did not illustrate the exhibition's themes so much as embody them: the idea that how we see something depends entirely on where we stand, and that the future is not a fixed image but a matter of perspective.