Elizabeth Farrelly, and why we need Frank Gehry building dams ...

(Above: Advice for Sydney siders who might make the mistake of contracting a flashy architect).

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes. (Walt Whitman)

The anonymous editorialist of The Australian on Tuesday in Managing the force of water:

Tony Abbott was criticised last week when he announced the Coalition would look at how dams could be integrated into the nation's water management plans -- not just for water storage but for flood mitigation. The Opposition Leader was quickly reminded that big floods are generally followed by big droughts and that different sorts of dams are needed for storage and mitigation. And that was before Greens leader Bob Brown weighed in in favour of the fish that are often threatened by interventionist engineering. These are valid arguments, but there is a case for examining whether dams should play a larger role in water management.

After a detailed, extensive examination of water management over two days, the anonymous editorialist today concludes in The power and the pitfalls:

So strong is our belief in the power of technology that some will find it hard to come to terms with the random nature of these events. We have become used to controlling our environment but it is not always possible to find a reason for tragedy or allocate blame. That does not remove the need to look at where processes have failed. Doubtless there have been mistakes; certainly we will find better ways to manage the landscape and protect householders. Ms Bligh said yesterday that when the worst was over, her government would look at whether the Wivenhoe dam can be upgraded to offer better flood mitigation. But she also pointed out that "dams do not stop floods" -- a reminder of the limits of technology.

The anonymous editorialist goes existentialist Roman stoic, and joins Ms Bligh's team as a dam denialist.

At least Tim Blair remains a true dam believer here:

What a hero. Maybe he (Al Gore) could come to Queensland and use his arse to build a new dam.

No need for detailed thinking about water management in Mr Blair's world. Wiverhoe has done such a great job, we need a dozen more ...

Meanwhile, moving right along, Germaine Greer has scribbled in The Guardian on Frank Gehry's proposed building for UTS under the header Frank Gehry's new building looks like five scrunched-up brown bags.

Actually it turns out not to look like five scrunched-up brown bags:

He calls the building a tree house apparently because it has a core of public spaces from which more secluded spaces branch off. It looks more like an abandoned termites' nest.

Or perhaps it is:

Imagine five brown paper bags with 15 windows cut in each side, scrunched up and then unscrunched and stacked together, and you've pretty much got it.

Uh huh. Somebody actually had that very same thought back in December:

LOL. The model posted in this thread really does look frighteningly like he took an actual brown paper bag and cut out little squares of alfoil and stuck them on with little loops of sticky tape. (here)

Well it's certainly no Sydney Opera House, but perhaps that's just as well. Greer again:

The Sydney Opera House may be one of the best known structures in the world, but it is also a worse building than anything Gehry would want to put his name to.

Oops. What about the space Gehry is working in?

This inner suburban area is one of narrow streets and mean houses interspersed with utilitarian structures of overbearing dreariness.

Oh dear, and now they're wasting more money trying to generate a little excitement. Why didn't they just put up another pebblecrete monstrosity?

UTS is already responsible for the most brutal buildings in Ultimo ...

Is there any ray of sunshine or hope, or is everything lost?

... it might now be making a mistake of a different kind.

Well I guess we can cling to the slight hope of "might be making". Plenty of wriggle room for later ...

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Farrelly spends an entire column - Gehry has designed a building that is more about him than us - finding fancy "little miss echo" ways to say "I don't like it" and "I'm agin it".

Well sort of. You see:

My view is this. Gehry is certainly more interesting than most architects, and his UTS proposal is vastly more engaging - cleverer, wackier, more inventive - than Sydney's (or any) norm. This is why he, and it, are even worth the comment.

But once you've praised Caesar, it's only right to bury him, since the evil architecture that men do lives after them, while the good is oft interred with their bones.

Could it be that Sydney gets the buildings it deserves on the basis of the critics it cultivates?

Well in the matter of Farrelly v Gehry, a minor suit in the greater chancery case of Greer v Gehry, that's certainly the case.

Farrelly shows an unnerving capacity to say nothing in the most mealy mouthed way. Firstly she decries any case of tall poppy syndrome, and celebrates criticism:

We are all critics. We all use, pay for, live in, walk around, drive past, smell and feel the buildings that comprise our city. Add thinking, and you have criticism.

So what's a fine example of considered thinking, devoid of cheap name calling?

Well you see Gehry isn't an architect, he's a "starchitect". Yes, if you've got a name, you immediately become a contentious thing. In the way Shakespeare is a "starwright" and van Gogh is a "startist".

Think Michael Jackson doing a Sydney building and that's Gehry all over.

But wouldn't it be enough to have an interesting, amusing, diverting building, instead of what currently makes up UTS's profile in Ultimo?

No, no, no, it must be a great building, a compelling masterpiece. That's all we allow, all we we expect in Sydney. Which explains why no one bothers to write any plays anymore, not after Shakespeare finished the job, and why no one attempts a painting, not after van Gogh showed daubers how it's done.

If it isn't a Palladio, why there's simply no point in getting out of bed ...

UTS is a Volvo driver looking to get itself a Saab.

Yep, when you've got nothing meaningful to say about the building (might even exhibit sneaking signs of liking bits of it), go on about the architect is a star and do a little star fucking, and if brown paper bag is already taken as a metaphor, why use a Saab. (And never mind that in Europe, it's actually Volvo which promotes itself as being a kind of safe brown cardboard box, capable of being crunched up like a brown paper bag).

And then, since rhetoric is everything, how about wrapping everything up with a completely mysterious, inexplicable and meaningless par?

If movement is his thing, he could at least move us forward to greener cultural pasture, rather than pretend Sydney needs more faux-habitable sculpture. It's not a choice between the dull box and the exuberant PR-driven sculpture. There is a third option: architecture. We deserve it.

The third option? The third way? Is that a bit like the fourth man who walked alongside Shackleton, Crean and Worsley on their walk across South Georgian Island?

...Sir Ernest and I, comparing notes, found that we each had a strange feeling there had been a fourth in our party, and Crean afterwards confessed the same thing.

T. S. Eliot disremembered the number when he wrote The Waste Land:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?

Well I know wandering down that path probably doesn't have much to do with anything, but that's as close as we can get to a third way or a third option walking beside us, unless it means embracing Tony Blair and his third way ... code for a completely incoherent political philosophy and war mongering ...

Whatever, I think we can safely say that if Germaine Greer and Elizabeth Farrelly are the best commentators on architecture in Sydney going around, then Sydney doesn't deserve anything.

It doesn't deserve a third way, a third option, architecture, or even an attempt at a playful building in a dull part of town ... instead it deserves all the buildings going up around town right this minute, a form of urban blight roughly equivalent to a plague of locusts in a field of wheat ...

Should we tackle them? Deary me, of course not, how utterly tedious:

Critiquing the regular urban dross would take forever and bore us all (especially me) to death. About a building with no content there is nothing at all to say, certainly nothing interesting. If this is tall poppy syndrome, so be it.

Yeah, on with the star fucking and the tall poppy harvest.

But fear not. We have the perfect solution for everyone.

Why waste time getting Gehry to put up a building that gets up the nose of Elizabeth Farrelly and Germaine Greer?

Get the man designing dams.

What this country needs is more dams, and Gehry just might make them a heap of fun to look at ...

But will brown paper bags and termites' nests contain vast amounts of water, you ask? Well we'll cross that bridge or dam when we come to it ...

(Below: more Gehry. Will someone give the starchitect a ruler!)