From the architect:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’“

- David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life.

This commission seeks to make air present. This matter that we spend our lives swimming in and through. Air and breathing are our common act. Both equalising and non-discriminatory, it is the defining feature of life on Earth.

We propose a pavilion that breathes, its total volume approximating the consumption of one human across one year. It is alive, dynamic and multi-faceted. It will remind us of how we are all interdependent and connected. It will represent a hopeful future.

Throughout the day air will be inhaled and then released in a natural cadence and in this process the commission will morph and evolve. As it deflates, the irregular form will alter in unpredictable and intriguing ways, composing an endless array of new cloud-like configurations. The heavy expelled air gushing and rushing from the base, becoming heard, felt, and present.

A playful study of air and time, it will take shape as a giant sphere that is large, proud and full of optimism. Its counterpoint, deflation, is sullen, flat, enervated. Deflation is not the conclusion, however. As it is re-inflated, a whole new narrative begins. This proposal is a catalyst to examine our own misconceptions around control and that change, adaption, and imperfection are often more beautiful and interesting.

The NGV Triennial themes of Magic, Matter, and Memory are to be read out of the proposal and we place no one particular meaning or reading on it. Broader vectors of interconnectedness, collective memory, and making the unseen visible are at hand.

Magic is in the celebration of that which is not seen, whether it be material or immaterial. Encouraging us to pay closer attention to our lives and the moments that comprise them. The extraordinariness of the commonplace, this is where magic is found.

This commission will utilise a material, a matter, that is in abundance and always readily available. Everywhere but invisible, the work will act as an invitation to reconsider our relationship to air, making it both visible and felt.

It engages in memory, both past and future, collective and individual. Air, and the transferral of matter on it has been the defining theme of these last 3 years. Air is the agent. Our shared memories and visions for our futures have been markedly shaped by this period. It would be remiss to not mention it.

Specifically in this very location a new architectural commission is coming. This sphere foreshadows the spherical hall proposed at the NGV Contemporary. It is a future memory, a void made real, the cast to the NGVC mold.

The commission is programmed to breathe at regular intervals. A rhythmic cadence of inhalation and exhalation. In this way it is a marking of time. A reveille. A moment to plan for and anticipate.

It has three distinct states; inhalation where the outer sphere is inflating over a period of 30 minutes, a hold state, where it is fully inflated for a period of 28 minutes, and then exhalation, where it deflates in a gust over a period of two minutes.

While the inhalation state is dreamy, soft and changing and the hold state is figural and bold, the exhalation is the counter the these, violent, energetic, and haptic. A reminder that it is easier to destroy than to create.

The proposal has been designed as a closed loop circulatory system. In material, it is nothing but two thin skins held aloft and all materials are selected so as to be fully recyclable upon decommissioning.

Seasonally, the pavilion will show many countenances, a blank sphere to reflect back the moods of sun, wind, storm, and rain. As an object, it talks of the universal and is reflexive, only communicating back what is real and presently occurring.

Time, and watching it pass, will be an essential element to this work. Representative of the past, present and future, air has been present throughout history, remaining impartial to all. The democracy of air and its presence seen and felt via this proposal, invites a collective discourse around the oneness and fragility of the human condition.