5 December 2017, Alex McKinnon, The Guardian
Sydney underground station’s repurposed wooden escalators are a charming anachronism in a city too eager to bulldoze its own history.
It is extraordinarily difficult to make people stop in busy train stations. A virtuoso violinist can be playing a masterpiece on a $3.5m Stradivarius and most people will be so intent on making their train they won’t even slow down.
So it says something about Wynyard Station’s new artwork, Interloop, that people stop in their tracks mid-rush hour to look at it.
In 20 minutes either side of 9am on Tuesday, dozens of people slowed, stopped and gazed up at the four entwined loops of old wooden escalator stairs hanging above the concourse, curving over and under each other like a living scene from Inception. Office workers and public servants snapped pictures for social media, taking selfies with it or just staring: little islands of stillness in rivers of fast-walking travellers.
Ten-year-old Toby was entranced by it, grinning his head off as he craned his neck; he and is mother knew the project manager, John Sung, who died several months before the work was unveiled. Jessica and Nick, two 20-somethings on their way to work in Barangaroo, were delighted the wooden stairs “we used to take to work” were reappropriated rather than thrown away.
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