Sunday, January 23, 2005
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.