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November 01, 2006
In a speech to his Local Government Association Paul Keating criticised the shoddiness of NSW planning, the shadiness of ALP politicians, the rapaciousness of its developers, the shabbiness of its architecture and, underpinning it all, the mediocrity of modernism. This argument resonates. Sydney from a plane window coming into land acros the harbour is beautiful. On the ground, looking through the window of the taxi on the way to a hotel Sydney is ugly.
Keating's question is essentially the same as Alain de Botton's, namely: why is the modern world so ugly? Keating asks: why is modernism so inept when it comes to making streets, buildings, precincts and cities in which people feel good?
Elizabeth Farrelly in the Sydney Morning Herald gives an answer. She says:
The answers, of course, are complex. At root, they're about how an essentially humanistic and socialistic movement like modernism was talent-spotted by capitalism and captured as a means of getting the cheap and nasty through the front door..... primary difference between Keating's beloved old-world cities, and our new, soulless ones "like Tokyo", is our lost willingness to spend unnecessary time and money making buildings beautiful. Time and money appear in buildings as extra space, real materials, craftsmanship, detail and decoration. What modernism calls waste, tradition knew as comfort and delight.
Cheap and nasty captures the egg crate apartment buildings doesn't it. But not the wasteland that are the streets upon which the buildings sit.
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What is 'aesthetically' pleasing? Can we go back to building our CBD's out of stone? I wish!