Emoh Ruo will explore Australian architecture in three modes—vernacular, built and speculative.
The first part of the exhibition is a photographic essay documenting welcome signs that mark arrival at a range of Australian localities. These curiously archaic signs tell us that we have arrived in a city, town or region – that we are here and not there. They silence the child's voice from the back of the car that asks "Are we there yet?" These signs also speak of colonial settlement ambitions, civic pride and tourist promotion.
As the city grows, the visibility of its edges diminishes and the marking power of the welcome sign wanes. Part two of the exhibition gathers a suite of recent Australian projects that operate on the same semantic level as the welcome sign. In these projects the edges of the locality are blurred, indecipherable or invisible. This architecture presents ways of articulating the physical, conceptual or imagined moment of arrival.
What contributes to the idea of a locality as it exists in the mind's eye? The vernacular welcome signs romantically define the image of a place at its municipal boundary. Arrival and image are one. But these bureaucratic or statistical boundaries are generally static, while the built and experienced boundaries of the city are not. Most localities are too big to perceive at a glance, and the view from Google Earth is dissociated from experience – once you're close enough to see your own house, you can no longer see the whole city. If a locality cannot be depicted as a discrete image painted on a sign, how then is the image of it created? Emoh Ruo proposes that architecture can act like a series of magnifying glasses laid over a map, bringing into exaggerated focus the elements that define it. In part three, six practices propose architectural, urban or landscape architectural projects that do just this. Eschewing parochial notions of place-making, the commissioned speculations interrogate the complexities and opportunities of 'The Welcoming City' and describe the global practices of Australian architecture.
Presented as part of the International Architecture Showcase at the London Festival of Architecture 2010.