The Precinct Facade

Undulation & Flow wraps the podium of The Precinct apartments at Canning Bridge in a rippling skin of folded white aluminium. By day the facade catches the sun across its faceted diagrid, a surface ruffled like water under breeze; by night it becomes an instrument of light, 2,100 individual LED nodes washing slow, flowing colour along the building's public face to Canning Highway.

The work is a study of flow at every scale the site offers. The initial inspiration is the micro-tidal movement of the vast water bodies of the Canning Bridge area and Melville waters, the constant subtle breathing of the river. Above the surface, the same fluid behaviour appears in air: the river breeze drifting through pennants, flags and yacht sails. On a more prosaic scale, Canning Highway itself joins the study, an artery of a living system with traffic pulsing and surging along its length, its own ecosystem of ebbing and flowing swells. Water, wind, traffic: three currents crossing at one corner, and the artwork holds them all.

There is a fourth flow, invisible to any passerby. Beneath the river's surface, salinity shifts with season and depth, and the nutrient levels and phytoplankton populations of the Swan and Canning system rise and fall in abundance, each in succession to the other, in undulating, overlapping, repeating patterns over time. Graphed scientifically, this living data draws itself as interweaving sine curves, and those curves became a central motif in the programming of the lighting. When the facade glows and shifts at night, it is playing the river's own rhythms back to the street: the ecology of the water rendered as slow light.

The materiality keeps the concept honest. The bird beak cladding panels are powdercoated white aluminium sheet, arrayed in a folded and welded diagrid whose facets angle light differently across the length of the screen, so even the unlit facade undulates as the sun moves. The Philips Color Kinetics lighting system runs seven dynamic animated programmes that alternate nightly, developed in collaboration with Light Application, meaning the work is never the same two evenings running. Beautiful flowing abstract patterns of light, drawn from the proximity of natural forces.

On one of the city's busiest arteries, where thousands pass in the surge of the commute, Undulation & Flow is a nightly reminder of the quieter currents that surround the road: the tide under the bridge, the breeze in the sails, the invisible seasons of the river's smallest life, all moving at their own pace, all still flowing.