trees of light

The motorways that cut up our cities have a certain brutish beauty: their utalitarian scale is monument to the motor car and far greater than anything built for the edification of other endeavours. They also unfurl a bittersweet poetry of urban alienation: cars forever speed along striated concrete slabs, either above, past or away from us. You're not part of it unless you're vehicularly endowed.

This poetry of alienation is no better illustrated than in the dead and dirty spaces beneath elevated motorways that at best give shelter to the homeless or provide shortcuts beneath the traffic sewers while giving the architecturally sensitive a frisson of dramatically lit structural delight.

In one such space under the Western Distributor at the corner of Bulwarra and Fig Streets in Ultimo/Pyrmont, the City of Sydney has commissioned Warren Langley to do something. He's created Aspire, luminous cartoon cacti that mockingly appear to hold up the highways. They're a light and frolicksome intervention that transforms the area, somehow removing the gritty fear that often lingers in such places. While some might say there's an awful lot more practical things the City could do with its money, Aspire is an uplifting step toward quality environments.