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GOVERNMENT IS PRETTY
The Age’s Guy Rundle slams ugly Melbourne architecture, and asks:
How, in what was once one of the greatest of all 19th century cities, did we get to this point? The short answer, of course, is capitalism ...
That’s Rundle’s answer to every question that asks why something is bad. He’s particularly angered by a new building that he says is “the ugliest, most featureless pile” constructed in Melbourne since the 1830s:
A dozen storeys high, windowless on three sides and painted a nasty mustard colour - to hide the nasty grey underneath - it is an anti-triumph, a construction so devoid of feature and style as to make the average Holiday Inn look like the Bilbao Guggenheim.
It still sounds better than the Age building (small image here), which is easily one of the ugliest objects in Australia. Talk about a featureless pile; it’s even built in the form of a pile. That thing could depress an East German. A Minsk tractor factory worker would die from deja vu. So, what’s Rundle’s big solution to all the unattractiveness?
Governments rather than the market setting standards about what is built in this city, so that development adds to our heritage rather than subtracting from it.
Rundle doesn’t mention the last major architectural advance achieved by a Victorian government: gigantic, uniform, revolting housing commission flats that scar several inner-city suburbs and effectively function as low-security prisons. As for market standards ... many houses once scheduled for demolition to allow construction of yet more commission flats now sell for amounts that only Age writers can afford. Go live in a housing commission flat, Rundle. Celebrate the beauty.
UPDATE. Terry Lane, another anti-capitalist (in 2005!) Age columnist:
This year could be the one in which Australia becomes more like Soeharto’s Indonesia, or George W. Bush’s America, and less like the civilised nations of Europe, where capital and labour have a more sophisticated and subtle understanding of the tension between the two that is necessary for civilisation to flourish.
France is really flourishing. If it flourished any more it’d be dead.
As someone who lives in Manchester in England, I can assure you that all the ugly buildings in this city come from University-life, rather than from the market. Two offenders are particularly bad - a 1960s Maths Tower which is so bad that there is a theory that on the first day of construction, the lead architect was ill, and it was built back-to-front by mistake. The story is, of course, bollocks, but that it is taken seriously by many should suggest how foul it is.
The worst offender, however, is this, to the right of Morrissey’s ugly mug:
http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/ewm/001ewm/049_mancunianway/24.html
So academia can be even worse than the market if it tries.
Socialism is so amazing - is there any problem it CAN’T fix?
Posted by Jim Geones on 2005 01 24 at 03:25 AM • permalinkSteve — If it tries? How about if it just gets out of bed in the morning?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 01 24 at 04:23 AM • permalinkI attended a US university with buildings so ugly and mismatched that it was hard to believe. One of my professors and I finally cracked the reason. We’re convinced that every year the person who passed the state architect’s licensing exam with the lowest score got to draw a design that was then placed in a barrel. Every time the uni wanted a new building, some administrator put his/her hand in the barrel and pulled one out at random and it got built. Thus, we get the worst possibly combination of high cost at taxpayer expense AND crappy design. (Probably got built by politically connected contractors with shabby product, too.)
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2005 01 24 at 04:23 AM • permalinkSteve,
Did they intend for it to look like a 19th Century mill? An homage to the “smokestack industries” of an age gone by?
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2005 01 24 at 05:55 AM • permalinkSteve
That building is hideous lookng. It looks like the grain elevators located throughout the American and Canadian midwest.
http://www.chem.ucla.edu/~alice/explorations/churchill/HISTORIC/LesPhotos/Grain_Elevator.jpg
And to think some architect probably received a big fat fee for designing that ugly-ass pile of concrete.
Posted by David Crawford on 2005 01 24 at 06:28 AM • permalinkRegarding the Age building: Who knew marsupials could shit that much concrete in one place?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 01 24 at 06:33 AM • permalinkAh yes, subtlety and sophistication. I always knew there was something keeping our American civilization from flourishing, but until now I just couldn’t put a name to it (perhaps it was too subtle or I too unsophisticated). Thanks, Mr. Lane for clearing that up.
And, Mr. Rundle, if I may suggest, take a trip to Chicago sometime and witness for yourself what coarse, provincial capitalism can achieve. (Actually any major US city will do, but Chicago is the jewel in America’s architectural crown.)
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2005 01 24 at 07:11 AM • permalinkThe “subtle”, “sophisticated” relationship between capital and labor that’s used in Europe?
Is that the understanding that when they’ve worked their hours, they’ll abandon an airliner on the runway, or the understanding that when they don’t like their benefits package, electrical workers shut off power to the French Presidental palace?
Posted by Aaron - Free Will on 2005 01 24 at 07:16 AM • permalinkRundle clearly hasn’t been to Eastern Europe. I swear, the Communist buildings there make more or less anything Victorian look outstanding. And they must constitute 80% of many towns there. Or the EU buildings in Brussels - they’re monumentally hideous as well, and were constructed in a 60’s socialist spirit. Oh, well, since when did facts have anything to do with lefty rhetoric?
To be fair, there is a grain of truth in what Rundle is saying: when you develop a construction technique (tilt-slab), which is quick and ugly, but cheap, most people are going to choose it. Cost rules. This is why a nineteenth century warehouse looks better than a twenty-first century apartment building.
And as for Pastor Lane: would he be wailing about the end of ‘democracy’ if it was the ALP running both houses of parliament?
Melbourne, apart from a few accidental beauty spots, is a sprawling, flat, feautereless low-grade slum.
I used to live there; my heart sinks whenever I have to go there now.
To be more prickly, I say the same applies to Sydney.Posted by Honkie Hammer on 2005 01 24 at 10:30 AM • permalinkIt still sounds better than the Age building, which is easily one of the ugliest objects in Australia. Talk about a featureless pile; it’s even built in the form of a pile. That thing could depress an East German.
Sorry Tim, but not this one at least. :P Actually, that building doesn’t remind me so much of what passed for Communist architecture, but rather what buildings look like in movies and computer games that play in some kind of hyper-capitalistic, corporate future. Perhaps Rundle should watch out…his workplace may devour him any minute now.
Most of the ugly buildings were built by the government itself. Federtation square, Gas and Fuel towers, the old SEC building, the many numerous and ugly housing commission towers scattered around inner city suburbs, the portables at the back of Parliament House, Storey Hall RMIT. I could go on and on.
‘Governments rather than the market setting standards about what is built in this city, so that development adds to our heritage rather than subtracting from it.’
Birmingham is a shining example of this in action.
Posted by Bilious Young Fogey on 2005 01 24 at 11:03 AM • permalinkSo this Rundle maroon thinks government should do the constructing?
A British government agency built a library a few years back. Doors didn’t open. Walls were crooked. Things didn’t fit.
They built it upside down.
Posted by Gary from Jersey on 2005 01 24 at 11:15 AM • permalink...Europe, where capital and labour have a more sophisticated and subtle understanding of the tension between the two that is necessary for civilisation to flourish.
I guess that’s why france has an unemployment rate well over 10% and is experiencing all of the social problems associated with this (poverty, crime, social isolation, racism).
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2005 01 24 at 11:32 AM • permalinkSteve, that’s nuthin. We’ve got a government building here in Geelong that they built upside down:
http://www.abcmaps.com.au/RetailerPages/nregee.jpgGuy woyld love Krakow and East Berlin; at least when commie governments build ugly things you don’t have to worry about them for long, because the standard of concrete used would make a Bali beachfront developer hide his face in shame- the monstrosities are crumbling before they’re officially opened. Shitheads like Rundle deserve to live under communism.
I particularly like the ‘upside down’ building - it may possibly be even worse than UMIST, though there is less of it.
That UMIST building was, of course, built during the 1960s, a decade when British architects looked east at the Soviet Union, and thought, ‘hmmm, we’ll have some of that.’ The results were too much concrete everywhere, high-rise council flats, multi-storey car parks, buildings whose shape referred to the packaging of Corn Flakes or Cream Crackers, the old Bull Ring in Birmingham, and of course that UMIST building. Given how the Soviets loved buildings built just for industry and purpose, with no aesthetic qualities at all, I suppose it was meant to be a referral to the smokestacks of old, yes.
We have spent the last fourty years trying to destroy everything we created then, and restore just a little beauty to our cities. There’s still a long way to go.
“... [M]ore like ... George W. Bush’s America, and less like the civilised nations of Europe..” Oh dear!
I guess the humble Mr. Grumble can’t be bothered to notice that civilization and culture have been flourishing in America for quite some time: Many of the world’s finest museums, some 1,700 symphony orchestras, wonderful architectural monuments, dozens of the world’s best universities and research institutions, most of the Nobel science laureates - you know, stuff like that.
Many American cultural institutions were primarily (if not entirely) funded by the very rich, and so the “capital and labor” reference is inadvertently hilarious. Marxists have never understood - nor been able to explain - the philanthropy of capitalists.
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