Realms of Invisibility: Fluid Frames of Thinking for Landscape Architecture is an investigation meant to challenge representations of bodies of water as planar, flat, transparent, opaque, monotonous and horizontal. It brings into the foreground the phenomena of water as three-dimensional, highly differentiated and volatile, and takes this as a fruitful site for landscape architecture.
The project focuses on the territory of and around Garden Island, currently a naval base in Sydney Harbour. It begins with an urban-spatial critique of how planning methods have exploited harbour environments in Sydney. The project offers suggestions as to how a new ‘wet ontology’—a way of being in and of the water, as much as the land—could serve to protect and enhance not only the residents of coastal communities, but also the ecological systems fighting for survival within the waters of Sydney Harbour.
