Progress Park

It’s called a business park! “Strategically positioned and master planned” says the developer.  But in reality there are dozens of identical places throughout the outer fringe. Not much “master planning” in that is there?  

But why call it a park? It’s not like anything I’d call a park?  As a kid a park was a place with a playground. But these parks are just empty blocks and lots of concrete slab buildings. Buildings that would be impossible to separate if not for the paint color (if applied), precast patterns, surveillance cameras, pretend “gardens” and graffitti (not actually part of the design apparently).  

I guess there is a lot of nature in business parks. What with the vast empty paddocks of roughly mown grass, endless rows of evenly spaced bushes, thin pencil pine clusters, the ever present nature strips, established trees awaiting destruction (or a home in a micro park) and the already dead plantings.  The combined effect occasionally achieves ironically idyllic. Could the very very controlled plantings of these business parks hint at an underexplored relationship between our culture and nature. A repression of the unplanned and unexpected perhaps considered “a key ally in the prosperity of” well … everything. 

Progress Park is a photographic exploration of business parks with an eye fixed firmly on their massed plantings, paddocks and weeds.

Aesthetically this work could be considered as the love child of “New Topographics” and The Situationists (specifically a psychogeography of the social landscape).