The turbine hall is the most readable room I've worked in. No machinery on the floor: the generating plant came out in the mid-1990s, which means there's nothing to navigate around and nothing to accidentally shift. What you have is the structure: the riveted steel frame, the concrete base, 228 metres of building at eleven storeys, and whatever the light is doing on the day.
That's more complicated than it sounds.
The hall windows run the full length of both long walls. That gives the room two distinct lighting conditions depending on the time of day and the season. One side is always working harder than the other. On a clear afternoon, direct sun cuts across the floor at a low angle from one wall. In the morning the balance shifts and the windows on the lake side are the brighter part of the frame, with the interior reading darker behind them. In winter the angle drops and the light reaches further into the space before moving. I've been back several times and I've worked in the same room in all of those conditions.
The first visit I was mapping. Where the light came from at what time of day. Which sections of the building were doing the most interesting things and when. How the three 76-metre chimneys outside the building read against the windows on the far wall. There are angles inside where the chimneys appear in the window frame. That geometry doesn't change. What changes is the sky behind them.
By the second or third visit I had a clear enough picture of the building to start looking for smaller things. The shadow that a particular piece of steel framing throws onto the floor at a specific time of afternoon. The difference between the A Station section of the building and the B Station section. They're under the same roof, but the two halves have their own quality. Different proportions, different air. They photograph differently as the light moves.
There's a particular thing the room does that I keep returning to. It has to do with the scale. At 228 metres long, eleven storeys, 53.3 metres wide, the hall is large enough that you can be inside it and not quite understand where you are. A photograph of it risks making it look either smaller than it is, or so abstract that it doesn't feel like anything. The recurring problem is finding a frame that communicates the actual size without making it feel like a technical exercise.
I use a tripod. The available light in the turbine hall is low except at the hours when the direct sun is on the glass, and even then the interior stays dim relative to outside. Slower shutter speeds mean the light has time to settle across the surfaces of the room. That's part of what the photographs look like.
The building is empty in a particular way. The equipment was removed decades ago, so it's not a space that looks abandoned mid-operation: no half-finished tasks, no tools left where someone put them down. What remains is the architecture. The photographs are about the building itself rather than what it contains.
That's a different problem than a building where the contents are still present. At Woolla, or at some of the other sites where the original fittings haven't moved, the photograph is about the relationship between the space and what's in it. The Wangi turbine hall is just the space. The task is to make that legible: to give a photograph of an empty room some sense of its actual scale, without turning it into a diagram.
I'm still working on it.
