Does art matter to property development?
Investment in public art can boost tourism and jobs, foster community pride and enhance placemaking. But does public art add value to assets?
Mirvac Group has recently unveiled its new public art installation – a 20-tonne mature Blackbutt eucalypt tree – in the laneway behind the EY Centre at 200 George Street in Sydney. Underwood Ark, created by multi-disciplinary local artist Michael McIntyre, is a 35-metre long tree suspended above Underwood Street that celebrates the history of the site and activates the public laneway.
The installation is the result of a unique collaboration between Mirvac and the National School of Art, with McIntyre, a student of the school, awarded the commission.
“Great public art, accessible to people from all walks of life, is an important contribution to our urban landscapes,” says Mirvac’s chief executive officer and managing director, Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz.
The property industry in Australia is a generous patron of the arts. But does public art add value to assets?
Researchers from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom think so. They’ve used metadata of geotagged photographs uploaded to the image-sharing platform Flickr to quantify the presence of art in London, finding that neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of art photographs also posted greater relative gains in property prices.
Public art, once restricted to the occasional statue in a public square and graffitied alleyway, has recently taken off. Hosier Lane in Melbourne, considered the epicentre of the city’s street art scene, attracts more Instagram hashtags than the Melbourne Zoo or Federation Square. The world’s most celebrated street artist, Banksy, has transformed broken curbs and blighted buildings, and with it the value of local real estate. Some properties in the UK have doubled overnight once they boast the Banksy touch.
Nevertheless, public art remains something of an underestimated force. While the value of an artwork itself may appreciate over time, the big benefits are found in the enhanced visibility, brand awareness and foot-traffic in the area, which in turn has been found to increase leasing interest and drive economic uplift throughout the local precinct.
Take Wilshire Vermont Station, a mixed-use, $125 million urban infill development in downtown Los Angeles. The project’s owner, Urban Partners LCC, installed a pair of 20-metre painted murals at a prominent intersection at a cost of $75,000. The Urban Land Institute has called the move a “marketing bonanza”. Press coverage of the mural far outweighed the initial cost outlay, with the front-page coverage in the Los Angeles Times creating “a marketing aura that the developer could not have purchased at any price”.
Meanwhile, the installation of a $200 million art work at New York’s $25 billion Hudson Yards development is currently being craned into place. The centrepiece of the largest private real estate project in the United States, Vessel is a 46-metre tall Escher-inspired sculpture featuring a series of copper-coloured circular staircases. Designed by UK artist Thomas Heatherwick, Vessel will have 2,0 individual steps and 154 interconnecting flights of stairs, and will be able to hold 1,000 visitors at a time.
Of course, Vessel plays both an aesthetic and a commercial role in the development, as it entices both tourists and tenants to Hudson Yards.
Stephen Ross, chairman of developer Related Companies and the brainchild behind the work, says he wanted “something that defines a city like the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Saint Louis Gateway Arch”. Just as the Rockefeller Center’s Christmas tree attracts visitors each December, Ross says “this will be the equivalent of the Christmas tree twelve months a year”.
Other private companies are actively curating their public spaces. Arts Brookfield, the cultural arm of Brookfield Property Partners, presents a global cultural program of pop-up art exhibitions, fashion parades and music festivals. Many of these are off-the-wall ideas designed to inspire and intrigue: from five giant inflatable rabbits that illuminated the night in Denver to a series of giant musical swings that enticed New Yorkers to harmonise in their lunch breaks. Just this week, an art show for dogs gets underway in Brookfield Place in New York’s Battery Park, with outdoor installations mounted at dog-eye level to help canine connoisseurs appreciate the art.
Meanwhile, Lendlease’s multi-million-dollar investment in public art and cultural programming at Barangaroo continues to take shape. The concept for the precinct’s latest piece of public artwork, revealed last month, features Sabine Hornig’s photographic images of indigenous Sydney flora. Layered onto multi-coloured glass walls along the 170-metre walkway that connects the three International Towers, the images will reflect iridescent shadows onto the faces and bodies of passersby.
“Pedestrians will become participants in the art as they will literally walk through the imagery,” Hornig says.
As the business case for investment in public art continues to stack up, developers recognise that investment in public art adds value by sharing stories, building community and creating memories. And in the social media era where everyone is a photographer, those memories can be shared around the world in an instant.