Levelling_Description — Trower Falvo Architects

Levelling

Exhibition
Ongoing

Model Photography
Garry Smith

“Despite their consideration, precision and intricacy, there’s an elusiveness to the works of Trower Falvo Architects. Meticulously crafted from slender layers of plywood, they drift between disciplines, formal and conceptual directives; they occupy and eschew the tropes of the architectural floor plan and model, the sculpture and installation. Their topographical visage, the curve of the land and the geometry of the built form, is at once familiar and disorientating.

In the one sense, the body of work that comprises Levelling arises from a purely architectural vantage. Indeed, Trower Falvo modelled these diagrammatical sculptures on suburban Melbourne intersections and their surrounding structures. But where the traditional architectural floor plan cuts a horizontal stratum approximately one metre above floor-level, so as to articulate architectural details and facilities, Trower Falvo’s models are cut at a foundational level, effectively exploring how the building interfaces with and mediates the environment in which it’s set.

The effects are multipart. On the one level, Levelling unbridles the architectural footprint from the built form itself, almost as if an act of erasure. We are left with little but the evidence of what once was, a fastidious constellation of gouges, planes and imprints, not so much ruins, but shadows and wraiths.

That Trower Falvo recast these works by hand so methodically, let alone presents them in a fine art, gallery context, seems to push them toward the realm of the artefact. These functional, albeit unconventional models could, in this sense, be read as odes to the architectural craft.

But one would suggest that there’s far more at play here. Indeed, there is perhaps a philosophical missive that punctuates these meticulously planned and rendered depressions; an intimation as to our inherent, though all too often unconscious and unrealised, connection and responsibility to the land on which we design, dig, construct, drive and walk. While Trower Falvo’s works render the architectural with a particular sense of reverence and admiration, they also suggest built structures to be a mere patina atop a melange of histories.

In a post-colonial context, the language of design and the urban plan can only stretch so far back (and deep) before collision. In drawing us down to foundational level, the point at which the city imprints the land , Levelling invokes and unearths just how entrenched and implicated we all are in its ancient and unfolding story.”

Dan Rule