Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Icons are a big deal for Queensland, a place with an insatiable preoccupation for self-promotion. Much of our market branding is focused on big-bang tourism, like the Ekka, giant steaks and the Big Pineapple. Secretly, we also enjoy claiming rights over having the highest rate of shark attacks or the shame of having borne Pauline Hanson.  

Few would argue against the worthiness of the Queenslander house as an icon of our state, unless you are a certain type of architect, blithely seeking some self-promotion of your own. Sitting cheek-to jowl, Queenslanders in Brisbane are the making of some of the city’s prettiest inner-city suburban streets. Often humble in their beginnings, these timber homes now innocuously house people from every strata of socio-economic background. 

The truth is, not all Queenslanders may follow the Broncos, but every Queenslander wants to do up / rent / raise / landscape / live in a Queenslander house of his own, whether he admits it or not.

Of course, it hasn’t always been the case, as the proliferation throughout the last century of brick, concrete and masonry houses attest. Many even possess charm and character equal to that of the Queenslander. The elegant simplicity of the art deco era and trippy geometry of 1960s are just a couple of examples of desirable historical aesthetics all of which, for the ease of real estate literature, fall under the broad category of ‘vintage’ or ‘retro’.

When there's always the option to build from scratch, I’m curious why some of us can be so drawn to live in a home which reflects the passing trend of a particular era.

First, let’s consider the desire for the unique. The potential home-owner wants a sweet little worker’s cottage in Paddington with personality, because in some sense, it is a rejection of the indignity of sameness in the style of affordable cookie-cutter housing out in the endless suburban boon docks. However, this theory crumbles when one looks at the original intent of the Queenslander worker’s cottage as cheap, functional, undifferentiated suburban home. When first built, their fresh immaturity might have seemed disquietingly not like a home, but a place to subsist. Only in their modern-day context within a landscape of mature trees, piece-meal backyard sheds and generations of familial personality do they acquire an authenticity. I wonder if the future affluent will aspire to a house in North Lakes 50 years hence . . .

Is the reason we are charmed by the old and familiar because of what they inherently are, old and familiar ? Have we become a city drunk on the future promise of recompense from all the years spent detouring around perpetual quarries of construction, driven to cling desperately to the comforting buoys of historicity in a sea of precast concrete and steel ? The truth may lie somewhere in that Queenslander homes, and other such characterful architectural icons, anchor us sentimentally to a period when there was more richness, sincerity and time for consideration, in life, as well as design. 

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Not since the news that Jack Vigden, won Australia’s Got Talent has the announcement of a competition winner so captivated a nation. And so it was, that yesterday, we plebs of BrizVegas found out the winning design of the new City Cat ferry terminals to replace those that famously floated downstream to the fatuous commentary of Karl Stefanovic.

In the end, like all good competitions, it proved a farcical non-competition won by the team producing the most conservative design and having the best networking skills.

While we are blessed not to be subjects voting in the predetermined election of a Middle Eastern dictator, there is more than a little vexation over the fact that the ferry terminal competition, it seemed rigged from the start and failed to address most of the objectives of Anna Bligh’s initial call to design. She told us this was “a once in a lifetime opportunity” to build a series of iconic and unique ferry terminals that would laud BrizVegas’s self-appointed status as custodian of arts and culture. Sure, we believe you Anna.

And so, BrizVegas architectural giants Cox Rayner Architects won our traditionalist leadership over with a floating wedge of mediocrity that is really no different from the existing ferry terminals. Nothing of the design reflects the catastrophe that befell us in January because we are desperate for assurance that we will not be flooded again ! Let’s just forget, build something solid and focus on the worrying trends on the stock exchange.



It’s dismaying that BrizVegas doesn’t have any balls to build bizarre or zany architecture. Though we do love us some big mofo structures that have been engineered up the clacker. Just think the Soleil skyscraper in the CBD or any number of the spaghetti network of tunnels and flyover roads that are metastasising across our city.

Ok, so there’s an element of risk involved in choosing to build public infrastructure which hasn’t been proven before, but had our forefathers relied on that logic the world would not know the brand of the Sydney Opera House or the iconography of the Eiffel Tower or the nod to capitalist freedoms that is the Statue of Liberty. This risky business is not what Anna wants to get involved in with the scent of election in the air and Can-Do Campbell nipping at her sensible shoes. Perhaps she doesn’t want to upset her fanbase by choosing an untested design that might need to be defended for its innovation ? She knows it takes more than an akubra and khaki pants to settle an angry mob.

There’s no doubt that the new ferry terminal design will withstand future flood events, but should that have been the primary outcome of this competition ? I feel in her conservatism, Anna has grossly underestimated the people of BrizVegas. Sadly, in feeding us the design equivalent of meat and three veg, I fear we are witnessing the dissipation of the creative groundswell that seemed so promising in the wake of the flood disaster.