Parallax Projections: Decay, Entropy and Obsolescence at Wangi Power Station

Opened in the early 1950s in post-war Australia, Wangi Power Station is a decaying, post-industrial relic that sits on the edge of Lake Macquarie, north of Sydney, and at its height provided one-third of the state of New South Wales’s (NSW) electricity. The building embodies an era of architectural ambition for industrial infrastructural development and was the first power station built on the site of a coal seam (as opposed to the site where the electricity was required). It is also the last power station constructed in Australia to follow the English model of industrial architecture, employing intricate brick massing as opposed to the more skeletal steel structures that followed. From the time of its conception, the generation technology utilised in the power station was already mostly redundant and when it closed in the mid-1980s, it fell into disuse and decay. It has sat dormant ever since, laced with graffiti, slowly ravaged by vandalism and overgrown with vegetation like an ancient jungle temple. The precarious state of the building opens questions of the preservation and archiving of industrial heritage and the role drawing plays in documenting both the architecture of these highly complex buildings and their state of imminent collapse.