Taylor Square fountain
A minimal water feature that keeps the spirit - and recycled urine - of Oxford Street alive
******
By Ginny Gordon
Oxford Street's font of wisdom
If you were to get a cake knife, and cut through Taylor Square to get a cross section, you’d get a thick layer of Sydney sandstone penetrated by two three-lane tunnels of traffic formed by the Eastern Distributor, piggybacked one on top of the other. Above that you’d find the pitched roof of the city’s largest sewer, a structure built 100 years earlier. On a quiet day, you can feel the pull of the peristalsis, as millions of litres of turd wend their way down Oxford Street and toward the ocean, and eventually New Zealand. Above the sewer is a narrower tunnel, connecting the undertakers that now houses Kinselas to the austere neo-classical facade of the old Darlinghurst Courthouse.
Connecting this kingdom of worms to the outside world, the world of light and air and stumbling drunks, is the Taylor Square Fountain, the jewel in the crown of the $45 million Oxford Street upgrade.
Decisively minimal, the fountain consists of two distinct types of squirter recessed into the pavement. One shoots water jauntily upwards, while the other spouts at a licentious 45 degrees. The column of water rises and falls, as is the way of things, onto the two-tone bricks of the pavement below, and runs into gullies that are placed in line with the street. Other things that routinely rain upon Taylor Square include cigarette butts, trash, over-proof urine and vomit. To make things worse – much worse – the water is recycled. Those bubbly fountains are a homeopath’s worst nightmare, a diluted reflux of everything you wanted to forget about Mardi Gras night, coming back again and again.
The horrid miasma surrounding the fountain is complemented by the street furnishings. The seating – all black granite and rivets – is designed to look like a sadomasochist’s dog collar and the traffic bollards are shaped like giant screws. Subtle? It’s as subtle as a grope from a drunken uncle. As Travis Bickle says in Taxi Driver, “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets”, but it ain’t gonna come from Taylor Square fountain.
You've read what we think. Now tell us what you think.