Rae Hicks

Monday, 8 March 2010

The Park Plaza

The island itself was an accommodating complex of pastoral vistas arranged in a mall of levels. Paths and walkways guided lovers, amblers, daydreamers, and admirers through meadows and valleys, all about one third of their natural size, although from the carefully manufactured perspective available from the location of the viewers, it wasn’t always possible to tell. By the side of the neat concrete discourses litter bins like squat sentinels functioned as miniature blockhouses monitoring the spatial behaviour of the strollers. Ashtray, litter bin, canine excrement receptacle, surveillance device.

From week to week the routes and derives changed, divided and disappeared, diverting between new gardens and new canopies of lush trees. Developments such as enormous cool English Oaks, dense hallways of Pine, sweeping gentle bright green hills and distant blue mountains. Room-like enclosures, some small and private, some as grand as royal halls appeared and disappeared. The newly redundant areas quarantined behind bold fluorescent temporary barriers or taped off between two trees, razor cones blocking the way. Sometimes, the angular spines of unclothed hills were visible in the darkened construction yards of disabled sunlight behind the vegetation walls.

In the distance, one of the control towers was visible, located at the centre of a hazy thatch of forest. They were tasteful buildings of polished glass and dulled steel, curvilinear in shape and clad in part with stone coloured panels with the Park Plaza logo clear in the sky, mounted on the buildings upper floor exterior at intervals facing different directions.