Oxford street profile

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Copyright: Quirk, Philip
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Abstract
Oxford Street Profile (OSP) is a visual narrative of a Sydney street in the early 21st century. How do we relate to the streets we are most familiar with? Citizens use the street for their specific needs, whether it be for business, pleasure, shopping or traversing the suburbs, with a familiarity that assumes everything will be the same and often it is. However, change is inevitable and ongoing. OSP argues that the more we use our streets, the less we perceive them as they are. The purpose of this document is to observe Oxford Street from a pedestrian’s point of view, to note the human occupation on the street, and to record the street as it is in the second decade of the 21st century. The proposition of this thesis is that people have an image of Oxford Street that is set in their minds, and perhaps such perceptions differ between various users of the street. This work challenges that image by creating a continuous profile, which became the basis of this typological documentation of the street. In 2009 this researcher set out to photograph every building on both sides of Oxford Street from Queen Street, Woollahra to Taylor Square, Darlinghurst. The resulting images illustrate the continuity of one streetscape in inner Sydney. This sequential profile provides a different way of visualising a street in Australia by combining 130 photographs into one photographic record of Oxford Street. How OSP was conceived is explained and the artists whose works were important in realising the sequential profile of Oxford Street is acknowledged and summarised. OSP is a document that is as much about a Sydney street today as it will be for another generation considering the built environment in the future. OSP links the fundamental structures of the street, defining their spatial relationships in a typology. From this point of view Oxford Street Profile is a significant example of a place in time.
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Author(s)
Quirk, Philip
Supervisor(s)
Roberts-Goodwin, Lynne
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Publication Year
2011
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Masters Thesis
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download whole.pdf 1.17 MB Adobe Portable Document Format
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