Location: Sydney, Australia.

Architect: Studio Chris Fox.

INTERLOOP is a sculpture by artist Chris Fox that hovers above the York Street escalators of Sydney’s Wynyard railway station. It is a major landmark for Sydney and for Transport for NSW, who commissioned the installation. The sculpture is made from the reuse of the 1930s OTIS escalator treads and provides a dynamic and potent signifier of Sydney’s past while embracing the future. It resembles, in part, the original escalators whilst creating an otherworldly space above people’s heads. The sculpture resonates with people, referencing all those journeys that have passed and are now interlooping back. INTERLOOP provides an important legacy, helping to maintain and celebrate the historic identity of the city, while also looking to its future. The installation took 6 months to design and engineer, 12 weeks to fabricate with over a kilometre of welding, before an intensive 48-hour installation period. The vast twisting accordion-shaped sculpture reconfigures the heritage escalators into a stitched form. Suspended between two ends of the building, INTERLOOP measures more than fifty metres in length, weighs over five tonnes, and weaves in 244 wooden treads and four combs from the original escalators. The historic timber-escalators served Sydney’s commuters for over eight decades and held a sense of time, journeys, and travel before they were removed in 2017.

Photo credit: Josh Raymond.