Bad news if you were super attached to the unintelligible jumble of street lights located smack bang in the middle of the M1 near the big BP in Yatala: the Gold Coast City council is making steps towards taking the whole thing down.
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As the ABC is reporting, a vote today from the council’s Transport and Infrastructure committee saw a recommendation made that the sculpture be removed and stored at an estimated cost of $255,000.
The sculpture, consisting of a number of street lights arranged to spell out ‘GOLD COAST’ if you viewed them from the side, was almost impossible to make out while driving past it on the motorway, which is how it was encountered by most people.
Titled HI-LIGHTS, It was conceived by designers Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano from architectural design firm LO-TEK, whose website describes the piece as thus:
HI-LIGHTS is a large public art work commissioned by the city of Gold Coast in Australia as its new gateway. It is centered on the radically adaptive reuse of a seemingly familiar infrastructure. Rethinking the highway light poles as dots that form letters and words, and altering their equally-spaced rhythm into a sudden, dense concentration, HI-LIGHTS puts the Gold Coast’s name in lights through two unique works at the city’s busiest entry points. Featuring nearly 100 highway light poles, closely spaced at different heights, the lights spell out the city’s name in the northern installation along 100 meters of the Pacific Highway, and the city initials at the southern site near the airport.
Acting mayor Donna Gates, who was a vocal critic of the piece since it was commissioned in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games, told the ABC that she’d never heard anyone say a good word about it: “There is no doubt it is unreadable where it is — I don’t think any of us anticipated it would be as difficult to read as it is.”
The council will vote on the issue next Wednesday.
