Hotel EastLink, the fake hotel on Melbourne’s Eastlink freeway

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4 weeks ago Robin

Located alongside a motorway outside of Melbourne, in Australia’s Victoria state, lies a high-rise hote, Hotel EastLink.
At least what looks like a hotel, because, actually, it’s just an unusual sculpture.
Designed by Canadian artist Callum Morton, it was unveiled in 2007, and it has been confusing motorists ever since.
It’s not as large as a regular high-rise hotel with its 20 meters tall, 12m wide, and 5m thick, lending it an impossible cardboard box configuration but, driving past it at high speed for the first time, it’s really hard to understand it, so it’s no wonder that people actually look it up online and call in for reservations.
Cherry on the top, at night, some of the windows are lit up, which makes it seem like some of the rooms are really occupied.
But actually there are no rooms, and the building itself can’t be entered, because the whole thing is just a sculpture designed purely for ornamental purposes.

“Motorists will view it from the car as an actual hotel and perhaps over time as a strangely de-scaled prop that has escaped a theme park or film set,” said the artist describing the concept of his project in the early 2000s.
And now, almost two decades later, his creation still plays with people’s minds when they pass it on the EastLink toll road in Melbourne’s Dandenong neighborhood.

“I think it’s kind of interesting how putting something in a space that is slightly beguiling or is a little bit strange, how that maybe changes the way people think about art or practice,” he added.

Either way, the hotel comes out of the monotonous and hypnotic freeway landscape like a surreal apparition. It could be a real building, but then on a second glance, you see the dimensions and bleak nothingness of the field surrounding it and the perfect rectangular symmetry, and thehotel suddenly becomes improbable, abandoned and somehow post-apocalyptic.