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Keating on the attack again
At the Urban Development Institute of Australia national congress in Sydney this week, a Mr Paul Keating spoke with gumption, apparently shocking delegates.
News Ltd reports him as saying that, “Sydney’s “gormless” apartment blocks [which had] facades that look more like “ice cube trays” were depressing the city’s residents.. He said city units were a “mess on a pavement”.
“The community does not need instruction in architecture or design to know what is mediocre or bad, they know it instantly.”
“They are depressed by what they see and are forced to inhabit and buy and they resent it. They know they are living in these ice cube glass shapes with their unused little verandas, their eight-by-six ceilings, their gyprock walls. They say – is that all there is to it?”
Posted by Peter on 11.03.10 in urban design
tags: paul keating
comment
go pk.
by hairdresser on 12/03/10 ·#
Keating for Sydney Style Tsar says Daily Telegraph. I am sure Keating used the same criticism against Sydney apartment towers 10 years ago, maybe no one was listening then.
by peter on 13/03/10 ·#
Here is the earlier version , 2001: “I think it’s important to recognise, and this is I think a very important point: that Sydneysiders do not buy architecture, they’re not really interested in architecture, they buy a commodity, a flat or a house. And by and large, with some important exceptions the development industry appropriately provides them with the junk that they become used to.”
…
“Sydney’s architectural ordinariness will not be solved by restricting design to architects, rather than by interesting owners and developers in the merits and profitability of good design, and pushing them along with better planning laws, and educating the public about what a good building is, and how they’re entitled to demand better. And that 8’6” ceilings and Gyprock walls isn’t good enough. What we’ve got to do is inculcate in the public the fact that they are entitled to better, and that we should go and we should chase it.”
(! Google found that for me via a butterpaper page that is so damn… OLD 10th birthday in a few weeks. I might celebrate by splashing out $5 at Breadtop.)
by peter on 13/03/10 ·#
Why would PK change his tune, the architects and development industry haven’t in 10 years either.
by luke on 14/03/10 ·#
u could just as easily substitute marxico city and boganville in pk’s crit 2.
i’m not detecting taste so much as he’s got a nose for shit and he’s getting sick of the smell of it.
by hairdresser on 14/03/10 ·#
It was all going to change with the patternbook & mandatory architects requirement … But it didn’t change much, though Carr thought it did , at least near his house.
by peter on 14/03/10 ·#
broad church the religion of architects.
from believers 2 non believers and everything in between.
—-being objective —-pk’s educated consumer is a bit of a econo rationalist fairy story from anotha time + anotha place.
in 21C only 15% of buyers of arsetrailyun apartments r citizens who have to look at them. the 30% chinese investors sitting in shaggedhigh couldn’t give a rats arse wot it looks like, only wot colour it is..
by hairdresser on 14/03/10 ·#
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