Boiler House Ceiling

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 14mm · f/8.0 · 1/2 · ISO 320
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Looking up from the boilerhouse floor, steel beams, grating and platforms cross in a repeating grid all the way to the roof. Light from the tall windows picks out the depth of the layers and throws shifting patterns of shadow between them. Built purely as utility, the structure reads from below as pattern as much as machinery.

Edition

Open edition

Open edition
Printed to order, no fixed quantity. Each print is hand-signed by the photographer.

Limited edition
A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.

$100.00 AUD

Colour

Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 5 to 10 business days (unframed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.

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In situ

Boiler House Ceiling at White Bay Power Station, black-framed print displayed in situ on a wall.

Boiler House Ceiling at White Bay Power Station, raw timber-framed print displayed in situ on a wall.

Boiler House Ceiling at White Bay Power Station, glass print displayed in situ on a wall.

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Boiler House Ceiling
Series: White Bay Power Station
Catalogue: WBP-121
Process: Giclée
Captured: 24 February 2017
Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 1/2 s
ISO: 320
Focal length: 14 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 297 × 210 mm
Location: Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards

02 LOCATION

Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

The ceiling of the boiler house at White Bay Power Station is the steel-truss roof structure that spans the building, visible from the operator level looking up. Heavy lattice trusses run across the width of the hall at regular intervals, supporting the corrugated cladding of the roof above. Between the trusses, skylight panels admit daylight in regular bands across the ceiling. Steel cable trays run along the underside of the trusses, carrying the cabling that fed the upper-level instrumentation. The ceiling height is significant: the boilers below rose 30 metres to the roof in the original A Station boiler house, and the ceiling sits above them.

The boiler house was the tallest internal volume in the plant, sized to accommodate the towering Babcock & Wilcox boilers that fed the generating sets below. The roof structure carried the loads of the ash conveyors above the boilers, the maintenance crane that handled the heavier components, and the flue ducting that ran up to the chimney stacks outside. The roof was completed in the first build phase, to 1917, and extended in the later phases completed 1928, 1953 and 1958. The plant closed on Christmas Eve 1983. The roof has been holding the building up since.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

Looking up from the ground floor of the White Bay Power Station Boiler House, the sheer intricacy of its engineered patterns unfolds. Steel beams, grates, and platforms intersect in a rhythmic grid, forming a structure that is both functional and artistic.

Brett Patman

The series

White Bay Power Station

124 photographs

White Bay Power Station is a former coal-fired power station on Wanngal Country at Rozelle, at the head of White Bay on Sydney Harbour, built to power Sydney's trams and suburban trains and in service from May 1917 until December 1983. The New South Wales Department of Railways designed it in its own drawing office and began building in June 1912. The turbine hall, boilerhouse, switch house and control room stand on a 38,000 square metre site behind two steel chimney stacks, the main steelwork stamped with British manufacturers' names.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.