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I remember when Melbourne wanted to build a new 'city square' sort of area, which required knocking down an existing building. The building was the Gas & Fuel C

by vacri 11y ago

I remember when Melbourne wanted to build a new 'city square' sort of area, which required knocking down an existing building. The building was the Gas & Fuel Corporation Towers, which was a pretty boring orange-brick high-rise[1]. A Melburnian all my life, I'd never heard anyone posit an opinion on the building, good or bad, in person or in media. It was boring. It wasn't pretty, but it was just there. But then they wanted to knock it down, and out came a media campaign where all the newspapers were talking about how ugly it was and what a blight, and suddenly people were ferociously hateful towards it. "Don't you just hate that building?" Well, no. And neither did you until you read about it in the paper. The weird thing was that the campaign was unnecessary (IMO) because people didn't care one way or another. It's not like people treasured the aesthetics or it had some historical tie... They replaced it with a building that looks like a pile of glass at the recyclers [2]. Admittedly it's not boring, but neither is it attractive. [1]http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building465_gas-and-fuel-corporation-towers.html http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building465_gas-and-fuel-cor... [2]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Federation_Square_%28SBS_Building%29.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Federatio... [2a]http://www.loftoncollins.com.au/images/gallery/800px-Federation-Square-Melbourne.jpg http://www.loftoncollins.com.au/images/gallery/800px-Federat...

cgio 11y ago
As a non-Melbournian, I felt like this was one of the most unwelcoming parts of the city, especially for someone pushing a stroller with all the different levels and a pub closing the passage way with bouncers even for passers by. Apparently there are some events happening there, but it feels very esoteric and not compelling.
- vacri 11y ago
  I think the plaza is an awful public space, building aesthetics aside. Rough cobbles on a sloped surface? I was wondering if it was perhaps intended to keep skateboarders out, however the cost is that infirm people have less access. If the development wasn't right outside the central train station, I reckon it would be a wasteland that wouldn't attract (enough) people.
tjradcliffe 11y ago
Likely a pre-emptive strike. You'd be amazed what people will find they love when given an opportunity to be against something. People are lazy and stupid, and opposition rarely gets called to account, so it's a magnet for the cowardly self-righteous. I've lived in places where old houses were moved to get around opposition to their being demolished. On their new locations they were allowed to rot, and no one cared. Preventing building anything new is interesting and fun for the kind of Puritan mind that lives in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, is building something new. Once you take away the locus of prevention--in this case the "love" of the old building that activists would have discovered had it not been preempted--they get bored and move on to something else.
- vacri 11y ago
  It's hard to think that the people would have loved those buildings (two local iconic landmarks were less than 100m away), but you raise a good point in that perhaps it was about drumming up support for the replacement, as in "anything but that!". Also, I wonder if there wasn't a high-level political interest in keeping the buildings around, and drumming up public discord over them might have helped seal the backroom deals?

by vacri 11y ago

cgio 11y ago

As a non-Melbournian, I felt like this was one of the most unwelcoming parts of the city, especially for someone pushing a stroller with all the different levels and a pub closing the passage way with bouncers even for passers by. Apparently there are some events happening there, but it feels very esoteric and not compelling.

vacri 11y ago
I think the plaza is an awful public space, building aesthetics aside. Rough cobbles on a sloped surface? I was wondering if it was perhaps intended to keep skateboarders out, however the cost is that infirm people have less access. If the development wasn't right outside the central train station, I reckon it would be a wasteland that wouldn't attract (enough) people.

tjradcliffe 11y ago

Likely a pre-emptive strike. You'd be amazed what people will find they love when given an opportunity to be against something. People are lazy and stupid, and opposition rarely gets called to account, so it's a magnet for the cowardly self-righteous. I've lived in places where old houses were moved to get around opposition to their being demolished. On their new locations they were allowed to rot, and no one cared. Preventing building anything new is interesting and fun for the kind of Puritan mind that lives in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, is building something new. Once you take away the locus of prevention--in this case the "love" of the old building that activists would have discovered had it not been preempted--they get bored and move on to something else.

vacri 11y ago
It's hard to think that the people would have loved those buildings (two local iconic landmarks were less than 100m away), but you raise a good point in that perhaps it was about drumming up support for the replacement, as in "anything but that!". Also, I wonder if there wasn't a high-level political interest in keeping the buildings around, and drumming up public discord over them might have helped seal the backroom deals?