Switch Box explores the imaginative and material connections between architecture and photography through the adaptive reuse of early twentieth-century electricity substations across Sydney. These modest brick buildings, once purely functional, become the starting point for reinterpreting how architecture can both shape and record its surroundings.
Each substation is investigated through observation and archival research before being transformed into an architectural-photographic instrument, an apparatus that envisions its site through light, material, and time. The camera obscura provides a point of reference, operating solely with light, an aperture and a darkened room, yet the scope extends far beyond it. The project might engage less articulately with photography, concerned more fundamentally with optical, chemical, even alchemical processes that might have the duration of an F-Stop, a day or a year or more.
The project also integrates supporting spaces such as an atelier/workshop/darkroom, reference library or archive, gallery or exhibition space, a bathroom, kitchen, ensuring the intervention remains both conceptually rich and practically grounded. Ultimately, what is at stake is something elemental – the relations between matter, form, time and light.
With thanks to the following contributors and critics:
Jason Dibbs, ADP, Jasper Ludewig, UTS, Hannes Frykholm, ADP
Janelle Woo, Mori
