www.backtothecity.com.au
Train of Thought
Jason Elsley and Mark Bligh
Site: Rail Corridor Hunter Street
This project is a collaboration between designer and architect and responds to a little used and remnant space below a rail overpass on Hunter St. The work is a direct criticism of the fracture by the rail corridor between the harbour and the city. They quote Elizabeth Farrelly in a stinging critique of Newcastle’s urban design. “Railways in cities are like staircases in houses – functionally crucial but somehow always in the way…In Newcastle, as in Sydney, the 19th century’s near-total disdain for waterfront-as-leisure allowed the railway to run right along the harbours edge, linking the town to its fertile backyard, but severing it from its own front room.”
The site is used to pronounce the underutilised and derelict spaces along the rail corridor with a series of plywood profile human forms attempting to reveal displacement and detachment.
