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February 22, 2009
A common judgement is that Adelaide architecture is boring. By that is meant modern--contemporary-- architecture in Adelaide, not the heritage of colonial architecture which is well loved as heritage that must be preserved. The implication is that Adelaide is caught up in a cultural time warp or is an architectural blackhole, despite the recent boom. That boom has just ended, judging by all the holes in the ground that carrying the lost promise of the new.
It is true that design and architecture are not a fundamental part of the economic equation nor a central cultural export in South Australia. The creative industries are treated with indifference as the future of the state is deemed to depend on the mining of uranium at Olympic Dam
Francesco Bonato argues in The Adelaide Review that there is a quaint desire to hold onto all those symbols of a bygone era as embodied in those old Victorian homes in all those quaint old turn of a previous Century suburbs.
Who can argue against that? Especially when that architecture is dark inside and very energy inefficient.
These inner city townhouses are cheapily built and have nothing to do with sustainable design--they are very poor in terms of being a green building. But they are colourful and the slabs of colour is something different.
Bonato, who has made much of the notion of regionalism and the importance of our identity and by inference, Adelaide's relevance as a place, adds in relation to the inherent uturally conservate taste for the pre-modern that:
Maybe part of the problem is we are pretending to be a capital city, when we really are a regional centre. A case in point is the massively successful slow food movement. How is it that the two South Australian conviviums are known as the Adelaide Hills and Barossa Valley - what happened to the role of our City? Anecdotally, the Barossa Valley is better known internationally than our capital city! The other defence is that Sydney and Melbourne simply have more money. Well, that simply doesn’t cut it either with Tasmania seemingly more successful than South Australia over the years in the awards at national level - maybe ‘convict’ and ‘culture’ is interchangeable?
The whole convict stuff needs to be dumped as a furphy. The starting point is that Adelaide is a both a capital and regional city, just like Darwin or Hobart. It is regional because it has been bypassed by the flows of global capital. So it exists on the margins of the global economy.
The modernist buildings in the CBD --eg., the Telstra and the old State Bank building---- are brutalist in style and are seen as bad. So they should be, So let's just jump into the postmodern.
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Adelaide can skip late modernist architecture and pick up on postmodernism and link it back to the past rather than reject it.