Gold Coast gateway sign made from street lights set to be switched on
Already being compared to the Hollywood sign that is arguably LA’s most famous set-piece, the Gold Coast is this week turning on Hi-Lights, a pair of new signs that literally put its name up in lights.
The bucketing rain of early March delayed the switching on of the main, 100-metre-long sign at Staplyton, on the Pacific Highway, which is the northern entry point to a city that will, by this time next month, be welcoming an anticipated 650,000 extra visitors for the Commonwealth Games.
Although it doesn’t actually spell out “welcome”, Cr Gail O’Neill of the City of Gold Coast reckons that’s effectively what’s implied in the two part Gateway Public Art project.
The main Hi-Lights sign is 100 metres long. Image: LOT-EK
In her southern sector electorate and set up near the airport in a place where a parking bay has been provided to allow those interested in taking selfies to park, the smaller installation only uses the “GC” initials and the lights there have been illuminated since December.
She says they are also visible at night to travellers arriving by air. “And all the comments so far have been ‘Wow!’ ”
At 20 metres long, “the GC sign is also the first thing you see on exiting the airport. I love it”.
Proposed and co-funded by the Queensland Government to the tune of $2 million, the Gateway project was put out in an international competition in 2016. The commission was won by a fascinating New York-based practice renowned for its imaginative re-use of everyday objects.
LOT-EK Architecture and Design, headed up by Italian trained Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, revels in “upcycling existing industrial objects not intended as architecture”, into novel new applications.
They do it all over the world. In this case, they’ve used clusters of arcing highway light poles to hold up the lightbulb letters.
Artist’s impression of the smaller sign, made of highway lights, at the southern end of the city near the airport. Image: LOT-EK
Painted yellow at their bases, 100 poles have been used in the larger sign on the Goldie’s busiest road and therefore no place to stop for a photo. Nevertheless, Cr O’Neill says even whizzing past at 100 kilometres an hour “the sign looks fabulous”.
Although not a judge for the competition, Cr O’Neill did see other final entries and says “this is the one I would have chosen too. The others were great but they were just items”.
The LOT-EK artist/architects who also teach at Columbia and New York universities, and whose studio has one of the most engaging and provocative design websites going round, Tolla and Lignano will be in Queensland just as the lights do officially come on.
They are arriving to be keynote speakers at the “Architecture Symposium” on March 16, which is the feature event of the two-week-long Asia Pacific Architecture Forum held in Brisbane at this time every year.
With a methodology they explain as looking “under tables…we look for the dirt…for the backstage objects and products and artefacts”, LOT-EK is obviously having a lot of fun shaking up presumptions and paradigms in the built environment.
In the instance of the Hi-Lights, and by their habit of “looking at the wrong side of things”, they’ve made a very beautiful new cultural icon for Australia’s sixth-largest city.
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