Adelaide design firm Fusion has created an internationally recognised car park. How very 21st Century. We caught up with Damien Mair – principle and creative director of Fusion to ask him how’d he do that?

When did the idea for the Rundle Lantern “pop” into your head?
The idea for the Rundle Lantern was one of five concepts that Fusion submitted in the first round of the closed design competition that originated from Adelaide City Council’s Urban Design unit. These ideas were the result of a collaborative ideation process involving several designers from Fusion. The Adelaide City Council was especially interested in one of these ideas that was based on a concept of wrapping the Rundle Street car park, so that it could become a surface that not only looked visually interesting, but would play a dual role as a cultural canvas for the delivery of moving imagery. From this scheme, we developed and tightened up the idea into its present state as a sculptural form that clads a proportion of the building made from aluminum panels that mysteriously comes to life at night using reflected light.

How do you get such a big-picture project like this funded?
The process of getting the Rundle Lantern funded was a challenging one. This was due to the fact that we were proposing a scheme that was highly innovative, so there weren’t any firm reference points for decision makers to view past precedents of what was being pitched. From the outset, Fusion had a very firm vision for the project, and we suspect that our passion and confidence in the proposed solution helped the decision makers feel comfortable that although the idea was quite innovative, it could be made real and achieve the objectives of the brief.

What makes the lantern tick?
The Rundle Lantern is brought to life at night using an array of 1428 custom configured LED’s that are controlled by a souped-up PC running customised software. In its final form, The Rundle Lantern is purposefully low resolution matrix that by its nature creates abstract representations of the content that is pushed through the system.

What is la lumiere all about? Is this the logical next evolution for the lantern? Do you see the lantern as a democratic piece of public art?
Lantern La Lumiere is a digital art exhibition where an open call for entries to digital artists and animators was made to create content for delivery on the Rundle Lantern as part of the Adelaide Fringe festival. Most urban design projects are a fixed idea that gets put there and doesn’t DO anything. We don’t see the Rundle Lantern as a completed project by any stretch of the imagination, it’s really just the beginning of what we envisage it becoming in the future. The Lantern La Lumiere is the first of many programs that will allow the public to get involved with contributing content to the Rundle Lantern.