Abstraction, Fantasy Landscapes and Interior Luxury

In November 2020, once the concrete had been poured and the glazing was placed, Crown Resorts Limited began to clad, fill and finish the penthouse apartment at One Barangaroo.

The materials used are unbundled. Unbundling is the separation of land into constituent parts, economically and culturally removed from each other and the surrounding ecology.¹ The unbundled materials can be freely defined. At One Barangaroo, the domestic interior is not understood as a collection of external landscapes, but as a collection of things from landscapes. The interior material is abstracted from its before-state, the rest is excluded. The material is real in the apartment however its unbundling and resultant abstraction means information is missing. Myth-making must be used to complete the material and make meaning in order to conceive of the material “fully.”² These fantasies only reveal before-state realities where favourable.   

By mid-2024 the penthouse had not sold. Vacant, it acted as a stage set of generic rocks, dislocated air, and performing-new column covers. Read aesthetically, these abstract materials are used by Crown to construct a market-based image of luxury.³ This image is generic to appeal to the non-specific buyer.⁴ It is helpful to attribute extraction and material processing to Crown’s design choices in order to understand how generic luxury is made.⁵ Crown muddles residual, dominant and emergent aesthetic relations to ‘nature’ to conjure fantasy landscapes beyond the periphery of the city—selectively linked to each material's literal origin only where favourable.

Thin chunks of 200-million-year-old earth are pattern-matched and glued together at a mitred angle to appear as a large single rock. The hollow rock is glued to particleboard, making a kitchen benchtop suitable for use. The ancient rock is then plumbed through with fresh water. 

Limestone rich in calcite forms in the Liassic strata. Across the next 180-200 million years this metamorphoses into marble. Impurities such as silt, clay or oxidising soil present during the chemical formation of the stone cause surface striations.

16,494km from One Barangaroo in Carrara, Italy, three holes are drilled by a worker into the already exposed white(ish) face of the mountain, into which two more workers insert a diamond wire. There is a chance at this moment (small, though severe) that the cutting wire will snap and cause whiplash injuries, or that “faults” in the block will crumble from machine vibration and crush limbs.⁶ As the workers breathe, dust is likely to be settling in their lungs. Two workers must manually break the block and hopefully avoid repetitive strain injuries. 

The mountain range is slowly and rectilinearly augmented and moved around; tailings of excavated earth are layered on top of older and more stable quarry waste.⁷ The grey and brown non-marble—coated with a thin layer of more favourable white marble dust—forms the backdrop landscape behind Carrara (Figure 1). The disturbed land is more soil-scarce, resulting in increased ruderal plant species: the workers are incidental gardeners.⁸ A worker inside an excavator machine—supervised by two others—places the separated block onto the bed of a large truck. 

Water is constantly directed along the surface of the quarry, clearing marble dust too fine to sell away. Cleaning moves the discarded dust from the mountain to somewhere else,⁹ and so Marmettola (water runoff bleaching) is “designed” (Figure 2):¹⁰ marble slurry is washed down the mountain, temporarily polluting the domestic drinking water in Carrara and Colonnata and coating the fauna. The streams are rich in the high purity stone. 

The loaded truck drives to a nearby factory where the blocks are sliced—alongside other rocks being made—into the kitchen benchtop. A worker applies a polyester resin (a material relatively old compared to the marble itself)¹¹ to correct any overly natural imperfections in the surface. 

The marble benchtop is unbundled. Despite this, its before-state is crucial to Crown’s need to meaning-make.

The benchtop (Figure 3) is expected in the $100,000,000 penthouse apartment because other similar apartments have similar benchtops. Its familiarity means the marble is perceived not as a geological phenomenon but as an expected surface: it is the generic rock. The generic rock’s present context does however create an expectation of provenance loosely associated with its literal before-state. The benchtop is visually similar to the marble countertop in Gong Cha, Newtown (Figure 4), but we do not expect a desirable provenance landscape. The aesthetic classification “Carrara Marble” is contestable. Carrara marble is not a single stone: it is diverse in colour and calcium carbonate purity across specimens. A white marble from Warialda, NSW (Figure 5) may look exactly the same as an individual rock from Carrara. However the former, according to geological branding, is not marble. Even if the Warialda stone were as “real” as its Tuscan counterpart, it would be too local, too available, too “cheap.”¹² Perhaps marble from Quanzhou, China could instead be used. A benchtop from here would be harder to transport to Sydney than from Warialda. The “Inorganic Marble”¹³ (Figure 6) can be designed to resemble Carrara marble from any century. Composed of small rocks and fossilised ancient plants, the marble made by machines in Quanzhou is no worse at fulfilling the functional or visual needs of the penthouse apartment than the marble formed by heat, pressure and time in Carrara. But factory-made marble would not do here because it does not conjure a romanticised landscape. The labour precarity and exploitative supply chains of the Quanzhou stone are begrudgingly legible to the non-specific buyer. Whereas any comparable negative conditions are not expected from the premium “Carrara Marble.” We are not in the mine, but we are surrounded by rock from there: a reconstruction occurs. 

The marble is 16,494km from its origin. Crown Resorts Limited have moved delicate pieces of earth from Northern Italy and adhered them 265 metres off the ground atop a tower in Sydney. Maryl B. Gensheimer's surveys of the Frigidarium at the Roman Baths of Caracalla (Figure 7) draw the conclusion that the range of the stones in the room, brought from far away, intentionally evoke the breadth of the empire.¹⁴ Similar to the Roman Empire before them, Crown Resorts Limited are able to imply the breadth of their agency whilst only revealing a fragmented narrative. The imagined mine is very far away. 

The marble is slightly grey. The marble benchtop differs from that of the renowned Roman sculptors who used Statuario-grade marble, which metamorphosed from limestone richer in calcium carbonate. The whiter Statuario-grade rock was located closer to the surface of the earth, making it easier to mine; it was largely exhausted in the early 20th century. The present desire for legible purity is decided by ancient geology and historical human demand. Today this legacy, incorrectly perceived as ancestral preference alone, has resulted in a celebration of whiter rocks and an expectation of a perfectly white landscape origin. 

The impurities in the generic rock are what make the surface look like marble. If the stone were pure calcium carbonate, it would be “perfectly” white (Figure 8). In analysing animal-based luxury fashion, Ricarda Bigolin suggests a fur coat asserts its wearer as “more animal” because the material’s before-state is more apparent in a fur coat than, say, a leather handbag.¹⁵ Similarly, the non-specific buyer could line up the marble striations perfectly with the hole in the earth it came from, repatriating the benchtop with something not only non-human, but sublime.¹⁶ Sianne Ngai’s critique of the romantic aesthetic categories as asserting “extra-aesthetic power” is helpful in understanding Crown’s motives here: a romantic view attributing moral meaning to nature is essential to the stone’s value.¹⁷ The impurities allow the fantasy of being able to precisely locate the hole where the marble came from in the earth.

The need for Roman provenance resists this desire to reference a location in the earth. Carrara stone is chosen over the more expensive Calacatta stone. The latter, with its more pronounced veining, presents with too many impurities: it is too abstract from the pristine white of the ancients. The generic rock must be from a perfectly impure landscape to precisely contaminate the penthouse interior. 

The final sanding is precise. Any human or non-human labour on the long chain of earthworks is invisible. David Harvey suggests the exclusion of labour from nature“ is an exorcism of social activity from universal nature in order to attenuate the contradiction between external and universal nature.”¹⁸ The absence of perceivable labour aids the myth-making of a non-human landscape, an idealised provenance absent any human work or suffering: a sanitised extraction.¹⁹ It is by fragmentally referencing extraction that the marble surface does its work: a contextless extraction. 

The generic rock refers only to other generic rocks. The before-state is highly edited. Contextless extraction allows for allusion to a landscape of powerful human agency, provenance and moving of earth but without any violence or mess. The kitchen benchtop is both from the earth and completely sanitised. The fantasy landscape is a wilderness which produces perfect benchtop-shaped rocks with no human input.

Four strip holes in the ceiling of each room. A panoramic glazed facade indicates these grilles are supplying mechanically conditioned air to the hermetic interior. 

A 5km low-lying region of particularly abundant plant life is slowly buried under water and soil (Figure 9). No workers (trichonympha organisms) can yet digest the lignin and cellulose in the plants, so the carbon-rich matter builds up over the next 299 million years to become solid rock.

Now “thermal coal,”²⁰ the rock will be sold in the form of energy in a free market; its origin can be almost anywhere in Australia. The specific location depends on the lowest price at the moment of exchange. The energy has no discernable origin.

A worker at any thermal coal site in Australia sits in the cabin of a bucket wheel excavator. Four more workers are on the ground in support. The excavator rips black or brown coal and overlooked other-things from the earth. The free resource (formerly known as “nature”) is worked and now owned by humans. The workers attempt to remove more value from the earth than they are paid. This worker is a “perpetual temp” whose work is increasingly precarious as coal mining declines. ²¹

Tailings of discarded coal and presently unwanted other-things are placed next to the hole being dug. These artificial hills become valued landscapes when they are soon mined again—this time by companies in search of previously undervalued rare earth minerals. 

At a nearby power station, the (very) old organic matter is burned to boil water and release carbon. The unwanted carbon byproduct is used to design the atmosphere.²² The steam produced turns a turbine, powering a generator. 

The resultant energy is purchased from a retailer and is used to cool and pump extracted harbour water in the basement of a nearby tower at Barangaroo. This final process is largely autonomous. Glass, high-density polyethylene, stainless steel, titanium, concrete and other materials combine to transport coal-cooled water to the penthouse apartment, where fan coil units push air over the cooled pipes to create a thermally-comfortable hermetic interior. 

The air is unbundled but its origin is reluctantly relevant to the non-specific buyer. 

The luxury interior must be consistently and perfectly thermally comfortable.²³ Comfort feels normal, expected, obvious—deserved.”] A full-height glazed facade sealed tightly with silicone means mechanical ventilation must be used to create the interior. 

The four strip holes in the ceiling (Figure 10) near the expansive window wall are expected. If noticed at all, they are a minor techno-eyesore to achieve an unbroken view from a comfortable interior (Figure 11). 

The conditioned air can never be returned to its before-state as rock. Landscape-powered thermal comfort can be read as a highly developed iteration of Enclosure (the process of redefinition and demarcation of land, beginning in 12th century England, by which land came to be privately owned rather than being held in a convoluted common). The irreversible conditioned air opposes William Blackstone’s 1753 vision for England’s commonly held natural resources: “[once] the elements of light, air, and water...escape from his custody, or he voluntarily abandons the use of them, they return to the common stock, and any man else has an equal right to seize and enjoy them Afterwards.”²⁴ The coal burnt to create the conditioned air can not be “voluntarily abandoned” to the commons. Kate Galloway suggests that “perceiving land as an ecological system would avoid its compartmentalisation in terms of different resources.”²⁵ The air is not perceivable within its before-state ecology, and therefore new narratives in its current context are not only permitted, but asserted. 

The steel-clad column near the facade is cold despite the northern sun seemingly scorching it. The thermal properties of steel suggest the column should be quite warm. One Barangaroo’s facade works well: the conditioned air dislocates the apartment interior from its present context. This disconnection and atmosphere-creation via glass, silicone and energy functions just as Biosphere 2’s original atmosphere-cooling system (Figure 12, Figure 13): a collection of fantasies in the desert. This dislocation primes narratives of the periphery: an othering of the outside. 

Outside, the climate warms. In the 1950s conditioned air was considered a luxury (Figure 14). By the end of the century conditioned air was a bare minimum (Figure 15). Today, Crown’s non-specific buyer, who plans to occupy a large hermetic volume in the sky, is unavoidably aware of the environmental cost of such a pursuit (Figure 16). The air is once again luxurious: a scarce resource is burned, causing damage to the outside which the non-specific buyer seeks refuge from. The longer the penthouse apartment is thermally comfortable, the more environmental harm occurs outside of it. This relationship cannot exist forever and so the comfort is fleeting—making it all the more luxurious. The expected landscape is one of environmental violence for the benefit of the non-specific buyer’s present location.

Due to the electricity exchange market, the conditioned air’s landscape has no continuous single location, however an essentialistic need for an “origin” persists. The Galilee Basin which houses Bravus’ (subsidiary of Adani) Carmichael coal mine is an expected (due to negative media saturation) “bad” landscape of the conditioned interior. Though highly visible by virtue of its infamy, it is a fossil fuel landscape that will never be experienced by the non-specific buyer, making it ideal for speculation. 

One Barangaroo’s facade functions adequately; conditioned air is not “wasted,” rarely escaping the efficient enclosure. “Highest use”—a broadly accepted neoclassical rationale of modern land finance—states that land must be used for its highest net financial return.²⁶ This is the expected trade-off of the violence of energy production: profit. The power generation of Adani’s Carmichael coal mine does not follow highest use. During a Land Court QLD hearing in 2015, the State was explicitly only concerned with whether the mine was an “appropriate land use.” ²⁷ The State was not concerned with maximising profit from the land they deem theirs. The Mineral Resources Act used by the Land Court aims to encourage industrial land use as an end in itself, rather than stipulate any profit from the landscape-making.²⁸ The fantasy landscape is divorced from the expected relationship between financial gain and environmental harm. From the state's point of view, the big hole in the ground at Bravus’ Carmichael coal mine can be dug for the sake of digging (Figure 17). 

In an increasingly fossil-fuel-hesitant Australia, the non-specific buyer can expect a “less harmful” and more productive origin for their comfort (Figure 18). Just 500km north of Carmichael, a wind farm on Djirbalngan Country at Chalumbin is set to produce clean energy and capital for Australian consumption. The farm is a “more” appropriate use of land, projected to extract energy more financially productively than would new coal. Despite its approval by Native Title holders (Wabubadda Aboriginal Corporation),²⁹ local Jirrbal People are lobbying against the energy farm alongside Rainforest Reserves Australia, rejecting categorisation of their Country as a “wasteland” and opposing the erection of structures on their sacred sites.³⁰ For the purpose of luxury myth-making, the coal mine and the wind farm are similar: an objectified distant physical landscape used to power the city (Figure 19).³¹ long before [its productive use].” Quotation found via Samia Henni.] There is a collective apathy towards the material reality of the “sustainable” landscape—similar to the early 19th century belief that coal mining was unable to have any effect on Nature.³²

The “less-harmful” landscape is still messy:³³ the luxurious air’s origin may be “sustainable,” but it is still one where vegetation is redefined, land dispossessed and altered, and giant structures built (Figure 20). The “sustainable” landscape cannot be perceived as sinisterly as the coal mine if the interior’s thermal comfort does not create landscapes which warm the outside. However, if the apathy toward the material violence of the “sustainable” landscape (to be reductive, this landscape is a technofix)³⁴ were lesser, then the same material relationship to landscape could be recreated. 

Conditioned air’s fantasy landscape is one of macro-landscape-play, speculated from the thermally comfortable penthouse. The energy exchange market’s constantly shifting origin means the before-state of the air can never be precisely known; much must be imagined. The fantasy is of economic excess: energy is extracted without regard for the highest economic use of the land. Destruction is not only tolerated, it is essential to the myth. Crown provides the non-specific buyer with an enjoyed reality of affect to the periphery—however, a constantly moving origin renders any need to abate the pleasurable effect as impossible.

A chrome cylinder partially blocks the view of the harbour; a distorted view of the apartment is reflected. Seams in the cladding reveal this is not a solid block but a 2mm metal sheet wrapping a reinforced concrete column (Figure 21). The steel sheet is thin so as to not waste floor space.

Simple photosynthesising workers (cyanobacteria) oxidise the atmosphere, causing iron to become iron ore. The ore remains in this state for 1.8 billion years before being disturbed by a worker in a machine, ripping the metallic blue rock from the red earth in what is presently Mount Whaleback Mine in the Pilbara, Western Australia. The rock is deposited onto a truck which ascends for 40 minutes to the top of a big hole. The ore is transported by rail to Port Kembla where it joins similar ore from Liaoning, China. 

Some 50 years earlier in nearby town Newman, the mining company planted 60,000 trees and shrubs (meaning-making props), used to dislocate workers from their present desert landscape and implement a domestic aesthetic for their comfort. In 2012, 37 years after the land-claiming trees were first planted, BHP reached a land use contract with Nyiyaparli Traditional Owners.³⁵ The domestication of the landscape to imply ownership of the ore and the surrounding land was used by the State to dislocate Nyiyaparli People in 2019, when it closed the Parnpajinya Community (6km from Mount Whaleback) and forcefully moved residents into Newman. 

At Dendrobium Coal Mine, one to two workers in helmets, high-vis, and eye-protection (Figure 22) use shearing machines to rip metallurgical coal from underground tunnels. The product is shot out of the hill by a conveyor belt onto a stockpile. Water is put to work to clean the coal.³⁶ The used-up water and the dirt will form “coal sludge”—a less conventionally beautiful landscape than marble pollution (Figure 23)—in nearby creeks.³⁷ Before pollution occurs, the cleaned coal is loaded by one worker and a machine into a train and delivered to nearby Port Kembla.

In a warm warehouse, human and machine workers heat the metallurgical coal to remove oxygen from the iron ore, reverting it to its 1.8 billion-year-old state of iron. At this point, carbon is released into the atmosphere. Around 30% of the hematite iron ore will be wasted during production. The steel is rolled by machines, controlled by one worker in a helmet, high-vis clothing, and ear-protection, until the luxury apartment-grade thickness of less than 2mm is achieved. The sheet is cut to size and small metal shavings are disposed of. 

Shininess is constructed by a single worker and a large bath of chromic acid, sulfuric acid and electricity. The luxury apartment-grade steel is submerged in the charged solution, releasing toxic fumes. If inhaled regularly, breathing problems, nerve disorders and cancer may result.³⁸ Finally, the chrome-plated steel is chemically cleaned. 

The Steel is unbundled and now too abstract for any before-state landscape to be discerned. 

The shiny cover (Figure 24) appears completely new in the apartment. Any before-state is indiscernible. The surface is a tabula rasa; it performs newness. As with all tabulae rasae, the shiny cover is a surface of misbehaviour: it is the antithesis of its own material origin, but of course this is not apparent. The shiny surface offers complete erasure of its own before-state. The column cover is a simplified and enlarged copy of those in Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion. Described by Gevork Hartoonian, Van Der Rohe and Reich’s column “neither refers to nature and the human body, nor recalls any stylistic metaphor. Instead, it has been pulled into a self-indulgent process of abstraction”.³⁹ By designing a performing-new material, Crown references no landscape. 

The steel covers a concrete column (Figure 25) and conceals the last piece of visible structure. The covered column is clearly still a column, but Crown’s creation of luxury is so concerned with dislocating the penthouse from the reality of its present location that it wraps this piece of “less” abstract structure in a thin piece of shiny metal.

The choice of an acid-created mirror-finish rather than a less abstract and less shiny finish indicates Crown’s intention to create a hyper-domestic material: the metal surface has many material-altering steps of abstraction from its before-state, culminating in a final material striving for complete differentiation. Here, I would add to Hartoonian’s claim of non reference: the surface pushes newness to its maximum to achieve an indulgent luxury. Etymologically, luxury comes from luxus meaning “excess” or “debauchery,” which later shifted to luxuria meaning “rankness” or “offensiveness.” Luxury is therefore delicate and may slip into overindulgence at any moment: the shiny surface is almost rank, almost beyond luxury in its complete dissociation from anything before. To be perceived as new and “offensively” different to that which is undomesticated, Crown relies on the construction of that which it is differentiated from: vague myths of a natural world that is autonomous and external.⁴⁰  

Crown’s reliance on preconstructed ideas of the domestic’s romantic opposite for its meaning is a familiar trope in Australian narratives. Elspeth Tilley suggests “the fearful spaces of nature that exist beyond or outside the reach of domesticity are marked as contrasting absolutely with settled or designed spaces.”⁴¹ The luxury mythology of the aspirational extreme interior (Figure 26) relies on what lies beyond the domesticated; fear is a familiar evocation in the Australian colony. An 1843 Adelaide Examiner opinion asks: “How callous have we grown since we left home?”⁴² The Anglo-settler becomes hardened through their presence on foreign land. The hegemonic White Australian domestic interior identity occupies this edge-state of fear on a perpetual frontier. Charles Harpur’s poem Lost in the Bush anthropomorphises the wilderness: “the trees seemed to stretch out their branches like spectral arms toward him, as if to grasp him in their cruel embrace.” The Australian wilderness is not a passive object, but an actor to be feared. As always, the frontier is an unfixed position, constantly expanding toward land not yet enclosed. Without the untamed region beyond, the city has no edge. Unlike the popular mythology of the Australian desert as “an uninhabitable place”,⁴³ the fictional forest is perceived as alive; its “naturalness” is under threat, and yet it is untamed (Figure 27): all necessary tropes for the opposite of the new. 

The shiny cover acts as a material of complete difference, similar to existing Australian architectures such as the frontier hut (Figure 28). Built to steal land during the frontier wars, the hut was strongly constructed with portholes to shoot from.⁴⁴ The civilian defence building creates the wilderness by positioning itself on someone else’s land and others what lies beyond it.⁴⁵ The shiny cover of the column also creates an imagined wilderness: smooth and foreign, the shiny cover is chosen for the purpose of complete differentiation: compared to the autonomous object, all other things are less removed from nature: everything outside is a wilderness. 

This naughty joy of living forever on the frontier amongst hyper-domestic materials is an oxymoron: the frontier must move outward (Figure 29). The result is the creation of a contradictory edge-state, where the non-specific buyer does not want the frontier to keep expanding and destroy the “wilderness.” The rendered threat to and a reliance upon the wilderness creates fragility: the fantasy landscape is temporary, it is scarce. The control over the imagined wilderness is false and predicated upon the complete invisibility of the before-state of the shiny cover itself. And so all the more debaucherous does the shiny cover become.

Interior luxury requires extracted parts of landscapes to be designated as materials. Crown Resorts Limited, benefiting from abstraction, “organises” materials to design meaning, conjuring myth-landscape and edited-landscape narratives. Materials are abstract versions of their before-state ecology; the before-states are pacified and where reference to the before-state is desirable, the landscape is manipulated. For luxury to occur, the interior must be isolated from the periphery; a binary is required.⁴⁶

The three materials discussed here resist Crown’s definition; they are not Daston and Galison’s “Working Objects” but individual phenomena.⁴⁷ Each designed material refers to its before-state differently, yet each before-state resists aesthetic lenses and exerts demands on Crown’s intentions, convoluting any consensus.⁴⁸ Since Enclosure, our imagined landscapes affect our real landscapes and in turn our real landscapes affect our imagined landscapes. Fantasy is the first act of land demarcation and the creation of hyper-ecologies.  

The result is an interior luxury: when all materials are assembled in the penthouse apartment, an expansive territory must be rendered to make meaning.⁴⁹ This expansive fantasy is a designed collage of myth and reality objects. The imagined territory consists of voids between disparate landscapes which pacify the non-specific buyer with the illusion of complete abstraction: no messiness, no violence and no imperfect peripheries.