EveryCity Symposium: Square
Co-presented by:
The Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design, UniSA and
The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, UniSA
Friday 22 August 2003
Unedited proceedings transcript
THE CHAIR: Welcome to what they call the Starship Enterprise Room. It
doesn’t do all of that stuff that you would hope the Starship Enterprise
Room would do but it embraces human thought in the university. I think it is
kind of modelled on the sense of the meeting place. Anyway, you will see how
it goes this afternoon.
Just to introduce to you a little bit about what this series is about, the
EveryCity series started some time ago, I must say, and was conceived of as
a series of four discussion pieces looking at the notion of the city,
looking at the universal city, every city, but also focusing on some of the
key points of urban design and architecture and social interface in the
city, so our first one was terrace, which ran some time ago. This one is the
square and we are hoping to do edifice and we were doing river but we now
are starting to do garden in the future. – so this is the second one of
those.
Some of you were at the other one and there are new people in this part as
well. So the way that this afternoon works is we have got the people who are
in the front row are really called the Panel. They are people who we have
been pressured to be here who have some interest or interaction with the
notion of Square in the City and also coming from similar and different
disciplines as well. We see this as very much a cross-disciplinary and
inter-disciplinary type of program that we are talking about.
We welcome different opinion to arise from this seminar or symposium. So the
idea is that our invited guests give us a kind of a presentation and sense
of tradition based on some of the thinking and discussions that we have been
having about the notion of Square and then we open it up to a kind of a
panel comment and discussion session. The audience are involved in this as
well. We are happy for interjections, we are happy that this has become the
discussion, we are happy that agendas are put on the table.
We are hoping that by taking these and then putting these up on the Hawke
website that they will also become the kind of a record of these discussions
and decisions. At the end of it there is a compendium – compendium of things
about every city and a compendium of things about this city. We hope that
there will be agendas set. We hope that there will be points of difference
and points of convergence that come out of it and whatever, basically. So as
the Chair I will try and make this work a bit, but it can be a bit chaotic
as well.
I would like to introduce Peter Davidson who has come over this morning from
Melbourne. He is the Director of Lab Architecture Studio, which is based in
Melbourne and London, and his most recent project in Australia has been
Federation Square. So I might just turn the lights off, which are way over
here, and ask Peter to start.
MR DAVIDSON: Thank you, Jenni. I show you this image of Federation Square,
not because I want to start and use it as a reference in the discussion, but
for a few things: one, it shows that architects have and are prepared to
have photographs taken of their buildings with people in and it shows an
absolutely excessive moment in the life of a city and, in a strange way,
that is it seems to me one of the underlying shadows that runs through is,
it provides, it shows an event that nobody plans for and that nobody
imagines would occur in that way, but is absolutely critical for a culture’s
expression and celebration.
That was the anti-war march in Melbourne that occurred earlier this year and
one of the things that was most amazing, apart from being in the middle of
that, and having first-hand experience of how this kind of event actually
unfolded when you think about it, the way people move, but you don’t think
about the way people move like this, one of the most amazing things is that
every speaker started their speech – and they were rousing anti-war speeches
– each one started with a preface that acknowledged the space and what the
space made possible.
So there was an understanding that something in the city was now happening
in a different way because of the space that had been made to allow it. Now,
the text that Jenni issued and came out of our conversations has been
conceived quite specifically not to be architectural or urban design in its
nature. I mean in terms of writing, I tried to write something to provoke
this discussion, but also is not something rooted in specialist discourse,
and if there are bits of it in there that still are I apologise, but I mean
the reason is, because I think it is really important that architects and
urban designers and landscape architects, in terms of this, there is a
tradition of them developing a language with which to talk to each other
that does not work when talking to the community.
In a sense I see – I have had this experience in a really profound way
during the course of Federation Square where I have actually learned to talk
about all of the complex ideas that I’m looking at in architecture in a
completely different way and I needed to and it has been a valuable
experience. So that is part of why there is both a colloquial and probably
different kind of provocative tone.
The other thing is I am an outsider. I come here as an outsider. I know a
little bit about the history of Victoria Square but I believe in learned
ignorance. I believe that you could have too much information, know too much
history, have too much experience and actually not see the wood for the
trees, so to speak. Actually you can sometimes be too close to something and
actually not see a particular characteristic. So I want to then apportion in
terms of some of my observations play on the fact that I am an ignorant
outsider and so you are not to indulge me for that.
I also thought it was important to be politely provocative, not rudely
provocative. If I step over the line or I have stepped over the line you
tell me, please. I have seen, because I’ve been very fortunate in the course
of the last Festival and also through the School of Architecture to have
been able to be a regular visitor to Adelaide and seeing Victoria Square,
used during the Festival of Arts and hearing some of the debates and
understanding some of the things that occur in relationship to it and that
is why in a way I have raised this issue about is the question really about
a square, per se, or is the question here about the sense or longing for a
civic identity for Adelaide that is expressed in a single space in which a
range of activities can be enacted.
It seems to me more and more I sense this underlying desire for this space
and that because Victoria Square is the centre of the centre of the centre
of the city there is somehow a sense that that is the place where you would
look for it and you look for it and it is not there. It is not there in the
same way as in the sense if you take a city like London that has Trafalgar
Square – that there is somehow a correlation between that space and the
identity of the city. I think it is a reasonable desire for that to happen
and I sense in the city, I sense to some degree, that desire for that kind
of civic space.
I recognise it because in a sense I have been in a privileged situation in
Melbourne of seeing the same desire played out over a much longer period of
time and seeing the way all of the views and attitudes to that space were
coalesced during the construction of Federation Square and what happened
since it opened. It is not a single design; it does not have a single form –
it actually has really contradictory over-layerings in it. Some people think
what Melbourne needed was another grass park, that that’s what an urban
square was. We were of the strong belief that it needed to be an urban
space, not a park space, and they are different things.
That may be part of what the issue is at the moment because in Adelaide the
squares I think are parks, not squares that have a resonance to deal with
civic rights. So they are squares, we recognise them, they are named, they
are shaped – all of those things to do with their identity are there, but
there is something missing. In a strange way geometry does not guarantee
anything. I guess if you have read the text one of the things I am
suggesting is that geometry was a clue that was laid here to put you off the
scent. It sort of gets in the way of understanding the problem.
It is really I think – it is important to address this issue – I think I am
extremely lucky to be able to do this with you today because it is an
industry in the United States – what we are doing today has become an
industry in the United States. There is an organisation that is called
Making Cities Liveable and that is committed to rebuilding the past in order
to domesticate the present. It primarily only ever uses historical models
and reproduces those as the solution to current urban problems and
particularly this is brought into contrast in America where in a sense in
most places all evidence of urban life, even as we know it, has been
transformed into something else.
So in America where one extreme has occurred a most extreme kind of solution
has emerged. For me part of the problem with their approach is that it sees
the city as a patient, it does this diagnostic evaluation and it thinks it
can prescribe a medicine to make it better. I think the metaphor that is
used gets in the way of understanding of the problem. I will probably come
back to this again further because the city is not fabric - it does not need
to be stitched together; it is not a body - it does not need patching or
mending. These metaphors that we use I think partly are part of the problem
in the way that we imagine and think about the city and whether it is in
public forums or in schools of architecture there is a collection and a body
of what I would call perceived ideas and one of them is the city is a fabric
and what the city does is need stitching back together using the original
sort of thread or cloth to make it whole.
I think that is an idea and an approach to thinking about the city that
actually gets in the way of seeing our contemporary position. So that part
of this is inevitably, as it always is, connected with language. I said that
in a way this re-emerging and constant sort of desire for the city is also a
profound effect of globalisation and in Melbourne and in Adelaide I think
they are very similar – they did not have these spaces. They weren’t there
historically for whatever circumstances to deal with the mercantile and
political histories of those cities – those spaces weren’t there as we would
like them to have been.
Now, in Melbourne that evidence itself was like a pathological wake and they
had two goes at it before Federation Square was commissioned. So I think it
is really important to acknowledge that it is not – there is something about
our global experience of what cities can be that we project on to our
existing cities. There is something here that is not about recovering
something that was always there – for whatever reason it wasn’t there – yet
there is something that we won’t learn from elsewhere, that we bring in
order to fulfil another kind of destiny to our city which is not about its
specificity. It is about something that we identify in urban life in other
places around the world and want to bring home with us directly.
Now, in one way a square desire is a desire for a space where the identity
of the city can be absolutely connected with a space in the city in which
certain activities are enacted. This issue about city identity is more
significant and more important now than probably it has ever been. The
reason for that is because cities are in competition with each other. The
sophistication of what happened in Melbourne was I think a very early
acknowledgement - and this is not just an Australian competition; this is a
global competition – and that cities through all kinds of events and
attracting conferences and festivals are actually positioning themselves
globally and that these things in terms of arts and culture also have
profound economic impacts and they are tied together as an
ecology – these particular issues are tied together.
It is important that that potential of that identity I think be played out.
Now, what I think is interesting is the degree to which we find a balance or
a certain point to create an absolutely contemporary image for that identity
rather than an image that comes from and relates to the past. I think what
cities overseas have shown is that you can combine the two. What I think, we
have been absolutely shocked in Melbourne to see the degree to which
Federation Square has become an image for Melbourne, it is used
internationally now in their tourist advertising. It is used as a backdrop
in a whole series of documentaries, in television interviews – all kinds of
things where it is being formed as an image of the city and an absolutely
contemporary image, rather than necessarily relying upon an element of the
past or tradition.
Now, irrespective of where the desire comes from, what do those spaces do? I
think, and again 18 months ago I would have been speaking primarily from
speculation, now I can speak with the authority of short experience, is that
they provided places for the possibility of all kinds of events that are
both programmed, spontaneous, whether it is to do with sport, celebration,
concerts, demonstrations – a whole series of things, particularly the things
I showed you, the anti-war march – and that all of these things become
critical for the enacting of a civil society, of a culture. So part of that
square desire is often, I think, a collective desire for that kind of
enactment and activity and what can occur.
As I said, this linking of identity and also I remember when someone
described – I think it was William Deane, the previous Governor General,
described his job was to represent us to ourselves. I thought that was the
most profound understanding of what his role could be and in a way the city
square, civic spaces in the city, provide the same role. There is not just
an issue about it being an image for representation of a postcard or in
television, they are also places I think where the city represents itself to
its citizens and I find it both reassuring and also strangely paradoxical
that in the digital age, in the age of digital communication, that this
keeps coming back and as a profound desire and something that is thought of
as being important in our culture.
This scaling, this beautiful fractural scaling from a tourist map, for me in
relation to Victoria Square highlights this problem about at the very centre
of the city is something that does not look like the centre of the city in
terms of all of those projective desires that you would want to be able to
enact in that space so part of the question I guess as I raised it is how
much of this is to do with Victoria Square, which has become the object on
which these things have been projected and how much is it about the desire
for that space, and perhaps that space should be elsewhere, perhaps – I use
the word that Victoria Square might be pathological, and by that I might
mean it might be something that simply cannot be reactivated in the way that
is desired.
It is important in urban design terms to recognise that at particular
moments parts of cities do become pathological. They actually lose their
ability to be reinvented. They lose their ability to be extended and be part
of dynamic growth. Another example of this is the Royal Mile at Edinburgh.
It cannot be other than what it is. It does not allow itself to positively
contribute to the transformation of the city. There is a question for me
about whether Victoria Square, as such, is pathological. In a way the one
way that you make it not is by embracing the most radical transformation of
it and that in a way is a challenge, and I know that this is an issue that
is on the table, because for me it is not an issue of spatial decoration; it
is an issue of radically transforming that space if you want the image and
desire to match the place. It would be undoubtedly the most difficult
proposal or way of approaching it to sell to the public, to convince to the
public, but I think it would be the one that would create the connection of
desire and place underdeveloped.
Now, there is a strange thing I think as well that comes through this
reiteration, is that whatever might be said to us by some contemporary
architectural theorists, shopping is not enough. The mall is not enough. I a
sense when you travel, not just in Australian cities, but see – we are quite
privileged now to actually see the second generation that rule these places,
the way that they have actually had incredibly short lives in terms of the
quality of their architecture and the way that they spatially work and in
also places where they are now being taken down.
When there is this transformation that previously occurred in a way it was
to pedestrianise. In a sense, the history of what the pedestrian occupation
of the city has become in the last 20 years, has its own life and the mall,
and I dare say it is the same here with Rundle Mall, is not the kind of
space that can accommodate all of those civic desires that would be
projected on to it. Now, I have heard here that there is a sort of strange –
there is this strange pathology in Adelaide that says all of the cultural
buildings are grafted on to the edge of it, they are not something that are
within it, that are in the body – the living organs of the city. They are
not. They are grafted on to the edge of it and in a strange way this
complicates the problem because those buildings strung out along North
Terrace are in a configuration that makes it more difficult because they are
part of the cultural amenity that could underwrite this civic life in a
space and there are enough examples overseas for us to see and identify.
In terms of Federation Square the day that we won the competition was the
day that they added the gallery, the Museum of Australian Art – the NGV –
that was added on exactly the same day. It wasn’t in our competition entry
and I was pleased that they changed it because I think it brought an
enormous benefit to our project. It has been open for nine months –
Federation Square – and the gallery in nine months has had 1.7 million
people through it. It broke the Australian annual attendance record for a
museum or a gallery after five months – it broke the annual record. So there
is some incredible dynamic that has been unleashed here that has exceeded
any of the criterion that was used in the planning and design of our
building.
For cost cutting reasons a set of down escalators got taken out of our
building because there was only going to be 700,000 people a year moving
through it. The number of people that will go through the building in the
first year is likely to be three times that and that has an amazing impact
on all of the activities in that area. That is about – the responsibility
that we had in the designing of the things that were in our scope is to try
to understand the impact that we were having in that precinct. It is not
something that you can control but it is something you have to be
responsible for because the city is like an ecology – putting something like
that there is like hopefully putting a positive new species into a habitat.
It has a positive effect rather than the cane toad effect that you might
get.
Now there is this sort of strange – I think there is no shortage of these
civic spaces in Adelaide and in cultural facilities. It is their specific
urban configuration that dissolves their collective potential. I think that
is a condition. The question is rather than pretend it was like something
else it almost requires a new urban example about the way that they might be
enacted and have a new – the way that the fantasy might be able to combine
with the conditions. I suspect the reason why there has not been able to
have been this space today is because some rubber stamps from the urban
design play kit have continually attempted to be used to describe what the
space might be and they just grab, they don’t fit, they don’t take hold
because they are not part of the specific organic, dynamic character of the
city.
I am not about implying in models but I am about inventing models that
actually connect with the specific urban DNA of this place and what would be
involved in doing that? That is really the point I make about learning from
the complex self regulating orders of the city. It is to understand the city
in a much more dynamic way. I think the discipline of urban planning as it
has been played out in the last 30 to 40 years is just insufficient to
understand the complexity of the city.
That is why when certain characteristics and descriptions have been made
about our Federation Square project we have connected it and always tried to
describe it in relationship to chaos theories, in relationship to complexity
theories, because these provide us with new models of understanding and I
think urban planning needs to be provoked to take on board these qualities
because the city is – clearly the discipline has continually failed to
really enact with what the dynamics are that occur in the city and cities
can be like ecologies – you put a very small, make a minor change to an
ecology and it can have a big effect. In a strange way what urban designers
always try to do is to create big effects with big introductions rather than
understand the subtleties and the complete interrelation of all of the
disciplines of economics, of the cultural, of the social together.
Now in the end I think the desire, wherever it might come from, is important
and needs to be given expression to. The reason for that is so the future
can be enacted. I am somebody who firmly believes that the complexity of the
contemporary world is something that cannot be addressed, understood and
re-enacted using historical models. When it comes to architecture I give a
really answer in relationship to this – why don’t we relate to something
that was done in the 18th Century? The 18th Century was a culture that did
not think that women should have the right to vote, but thought it was okay
for 10 year olds to work down coal mines.
I passionately believe that there is a relationship between a culture, its
principles and its architecture. It is a complex dynamic connection but in a
strange way we tend to love the old things as somehow being artefacts and
forget the culture and all of the values of the culture that generate those
things. That is why I am firmly committed to the contemporary because I
think our condition is so complex and so unique that existing examples
simply fail to respond to the complexity of the situation that we find
ourselves in. We need sometimes a longer sense of duration and I think when
we look back and look at the way that over the last 20 years certain
responses to relationships, to history, have been enacted we see the way
that we have fallen out of love with our really simplistic relationships to
history because they don’t work.
We make something that looks like it was built 100 years ago and two years
later it looks like it was built two years ago. It has much more complex
qualities than just the image. This possibility for a culture to re-enact
itself, to redescribe itself, to redescribe its relations, is the most
important thing I think involved in urban design and architecture. We are
making spaces in which things can be enacted. We are not making spaces in
which we are prescribing what would happen. We are making spaces and
buildings that I think are open and are open to possibility, because it is
not for us to decipher those things. Thank you very much.
THE CHAIR: So, those are the intent of the conversation starters and I guess
I encourage my panel to think about is maybe some first comments or to bring
up some of the points, some of the things that you might have been drawn to,
as such. Who would like to start? Anybody who speaks, because we are taping
this thing, could you say who you are first?
MR CURTIN: I am ..... Curtin from Planning SA and I am a former inhabitant
of Melbourne. Peter, thank you for a passionate presentation that certainly
stimulated some interest for me - I won’t go through all my comments now but
one question and one comment – firstly, you talked about the value of being
an ignorant outsider to Adelaide. I was wondering if you were an ignorant
outsider to Melbourne when you created Federation Square.
MR DAVIDSON: I think we were and the observation that we were was made by
one of the judges in the competition – Peter Clemenger from the advertising
agency – we were the only people that had known something about these urban
city problems and made that profound sort of observation, that sometimes you
have to be an outsider to reveal something so close hand and get to
recognise it. I hope that we were in
Melbourne – I wished that I had registered the expression “Arcades and
laneways” when we first used it given the number of times that it is now
used in Melbourne to describe the structure of the city. We have been able
to replace the grid as the sort of icon of Melbourne with that network of
arcades and lanes on the grids.
MR CURTIN: If I may just talk very briefly about some of the history of
Melbourne, that relates back to your last comment, because arcades and lanes
..... in Melbourne as well as Federation Square. .....prior to the ‘70s. My
understanding, and I don’t quite know the depth of the history but Melbourne
in fact had several squares, probably coming from the English tradition of
covered markets, for example, the best one – the clearest example is the
Eastern Market, which was a in a three-storey arcaded building around a
central open space, .....up until its demolition, what became the Southern
Cross Hotel, so I think there was a tradition in fact of a central gathering
space.
MR DAVIDSON: I am not denying that at all. The fact that it disappeared is a
recognition that at a certain point, either a mercantile condition or a
cultural condition meant that it wasn’t necessary and I absolutely agree,
those spaces have been there. I am sure they also existed in Adelaide, in
terms of some of those spaces, but at a certain point it was let go and it
is significant when a city does that.
THE CHAIR: This is like a Q&A thing, so anybody can leap in on anybody
else’s conversation.
MR KENDALL: Bob Kendall, I would like to take up your last point to
paraphrase history and move on to the contemporary - just a little anecdote,
I had a period in Paris running a program on educational building and I ran
six conferences. One I ran in Bologna, in Florence, and we had a one day
seminar at the end of it and we had about 30 people. About 15 of those were
French speakers from Brussels and Spain and Italy and France and this
presentation by the two American architects about a new way of dividing the
school. They started off by saying basically they were saying forget history
and reinvent schools.
At the morning tea break the French people there went off into a huddle and
basically agreed to walk out. They didn’t negotiate. They just said “We’re
not interested in this” and they walked straight out. I guess the point I am
making is, and I guess you look at France as a model, but you also look at
some pretty nice fine-grained sort of intervention in their history,
contemporary intervention in their history. I just wonder whether there is a
balance to be struck here of the past and future and actually getting a
dynamic and saying look, move forward.
MR DAVIDSON: I haven’t used the word yet – all I suggested was that the
contemporary world is so complex that I do not believe that historical
models combine into sufficient complexity of form and organisation for the
contemporary world. Never would I say forget history but I just - - -
MR KENDALL: I was being a bit provocative, I’m sorry.
MR RUSSELL: Andrew Russell, I was project liaison officer for the Stamp
project – recent incarnation..... going to be involved in that as well. I am
currently working on an open square, which is a square on the coast, and
efforts to marry the difference between the two. Just a couple of
observations – firstly, I would like to come back to this notion of a robust
framework and square-like grid. I think in Victoria Square the thing that
came out of that for me over the whole process was that in some ways it was
competition between the street and the square, and the images you have put
up, that one behind you at the moment, the UBD view of what Victoria Square
is, is very much considering the square as a street in terms of focusing on
the roads and the movement pattens through it, not even embracing what it
might be ….. so there is certainly is a psychology there, a sort of
mentality about all our streets, but Victoria Square in particular, in terms
of the notion of street versus square and when should various parts of what
a square should be predominant and when should parts of what a street are be
predominant as well. That is a comment, more than anything else.
I think for me, I really like your view about the pathological view of the
square. It seems to me that hits the hub and that’s the nub of the problem
and the nub of where it might go from here and the notion that a radical
transformation of some sort in some way is the sort of root of its future. I
think in some ways Kevin and I and the team thought about it in that way at
the beginning and tried to hence clear our minds of what was there at the
moment and think about it in serious terms. I do think a radical
transformation is at the heart of its future and I suspect that is going to
be a political process as much as it is going to be a design process. Others
in the room may want to comment on that as well.
I just want to return finally to this notion of historical precedents and
historical models, it seems to me there is something about the notion of
what a square is, what the minimum qualifiers are about what a square might
be, and that is going to be something to do with its shape and enclosure,
and I suppose all those basic urban design things, but it is also going to
be about activity and critical mass and different purpose and scales, so I
think it would be useful conversation to have maybe in questions further
about what those minimum qualifiers are and what the notion of a robust
framework is in terms of the square, because it does totally different
things, and in that case I think there are historical models that acted in
some way to help us frame what this broad base robust framework might be.
They may not be exactly what Geoffrey is speaking about today but there are
hints in the past about what this robust framework may be like.
MR DAVIDSON: One of the things in our experience of Federation Square –
Federation Square was the one part of our project – there was no brief for
it. In some ways it reflects the fact that there were too many expectations,
there were too many voices, and they couldn’t actually form into a single
coherent description of what it was to be. When we have had to describe the
precedent, because people presume that everything you do – there must be a
precedent, and Federation Square is not the only not flat, not square
square, but people – it was shocking how many people did not know about
..... that was entirely shocking to them, that it was medieval, so it was
like it was before the world of order.
It is when you look at the competition for Federation Square 95 per cent of
the competition entries – that is about 155 – all made the square
rectangular in front of the cathedral – every one. It was like that was in
the master plan for the competition and that was the gesture. That was
insufficient – it was insufficient because it did not acknowledge what the
life of that space would need to be. It didn’t acknowledge the activity that
would need to take place in it and, paradoxically, those activities preclude
trees, as shocking and offensive as it is to a number of people, there is
only very few trees in the square and because most of the activity that we
looked and investigated the need to take place there would preclude there
being trees and it would just interrupt those events.
We had to sort of set up and establish a group and look at all of the kinds
of events that would occur, understand what kind of infrastructure that they
need, understand how they would be arranged, and test it but in the end, and
if you like where precedent does show us is that if you want that activated
civic life it has to work for everyday life and special events. It has got
to work whether there are two people in it late at night and when there are
50,000 people in it and, take the example of Victoria Square, one café can’t
move out here, one café cannot carry the whole of that space and so it is
really that notion of an activated edge of a space that provides that
everyday bounding that seems to me to be really important.
MR SMITH: Of Carrick Hill and the old Community Theatre, two comments – your
comments crystallise thoughts I have had about Adelaide for some time,
especially as a former Melburnian I am just astounded that the two previous
incarnations of the city square that manifestly did not work. People would
actually walk around the edges rather than walk through them.
That civic space has moved one city block and it has been embraced,
absolutely embraced – every time that I have visited Federation Square it
has been jam packed in all sorts of different ways – the way people
gravitated to it for the New Year’s Eve celebration leaving the traditional
spot outside the GPO, I just found that transformation extraordinary and I
have been trying to think what are the elements that make it that, is it the
combination, is it the major public transport hub, with Flinders Street
Station. It seems to me to get to your point of the quality of the square,
that we have all been
trying – many people have been trying to make Victoria Square be everything
that they want for civic life, but it seems to me in Adelaide people have
already embraced and adopted different parts of the city and go there for
different things and think that what happens in Elder Park with the concerts
and picnics and the way people go down to the river there works really well.
If there seems to be some sort of sporting victory people gather outside the
balcony of the Town Hall in King William Street. Certain things happen
within Rundle Mall. Certain things happen within Rymill Park. Certain things
happen in Rundle Street East. Almost nothing happens in Victoria Square
unless it is artificially created as it was for the previous Festival. It
seems to me perhaps we need to be looking at what things are already
beginning to work well in different parts of the city and look at what we
can do to enhance those rather than to try and have this absolutely
artificial concept in something which may well be the geographic centre of
the city but it seems to me is actually not central to any of the ways in
which the city is lived in.
THE CHAIR: Kevin, do you want to answer that point?
MR DAVIS: Kevin Davis, it occurred to me quite strongly during the talk,
that I really enjoyed, that particularly in the context of Adelaide square
is a word we can use – just think about the whole longitude of spaces that
do this thing that you referred to, and that is to say reflect ourselves
back to ourselves and particularly in Adelaide, as was just described, we
have a whole range of vacant squares where that might occur and then we also
have this other language problem that you referred to where we have all
these things called squares that actually do not fit – what the word square
now evokes – and you said they are more like gardens and parks. I tend to
agree.
So I think in Adelaide that is a real issue about are the squares actually
where the
square-type activity is going to occur and somehow we need to think very
carefully about the word and what it actually evokes. But the other thing I
was really interested in is this thing about pathology and it seems to me
that you are inferring when you referred to the pathology of a place,
particularly in Edinburgh, that perhaps it was the strong identity of that
place that was the cause of the pathology. I think in Adelaide with our
squares that is not the case at all.
There is no identity. But the pathology is more like chronic fatigue
syndrome or complete atrophy of never meeting the challenge and the great
Light’s Vision, that everybody talks about, which was amazing – the plans he
came up with – but the thing about Light’s Plan I think was it was such an
incredible challenge. He left the pockets of open space all around the city
and the challenge was for succeeding generations to do something that
reflected themselves back to themselves, so I agree wholeheartedly about a
contemporary response, partly because for me whilst the plan has fantastic
heritage value in itself, really what those squares have achieved is simply
through having remained in the distance and I don’t see any vision at any
time in last 155 years about what those squares could be, including Victoria
Square.
QUESTIONER: But there is one thing, I think, and this is the challenge to do
with Light’s Plan, that there is such an incredible resource in that – in
this place - that is not being currently utilised and if you want to protect
it, the city, it will be like turning off the things that give it life
because it has this urban structure. It has already become urban rather than
suburban. There is a whole potential there for enormous densification, for
city life to be enacted and not do it damage. It is robust enough to hold
that. One of the problems to do with this is planning – it is a two-fold
thing I think – it is the processes of planning and it is the quality of the
buildings and the designs. I belong to a discipline that has betrayed what
was expected of it, I think.
MS HO: Liz Ho, Hawke Centre, I just wanted to remind people of, I guess, the
historical pathology of Victoria Square, and that is that although it was
conceived as the heart of Adelaide that was quickly turned over by the fact
that horses had to be watered by the Torrens, which is why Rundle Street
became the business centre that it was, so it was a practical issue that in
fact led that area to become a prominent lively area in the city. I think we
shouldn’t forget that. I have got a sort of heritage interest, I guess,
which I declare, but I think when you design and plan something as Light did
not everything worked, not in the way that perhaps was intended, and I think
to some extent we continue to live with that reality, with Victoria Square.
I wanted to probe a bit further and perhaps get you to, as an outsider, to
say what would you do with it? If you were faced with having to deal with it
at the moment what would your firm recommendation be?
MR DAVIDSON: If you asked as an architect what would you do in this
particular situation when someone has worked on it for a long time, and I
don’t have a straight forward answer. I don’t work like that. For heaven’s
sake it takes time for the things that we work on to emerge.
MS HO: Fair enough.
MR DAVIDSON: If I am going to practise being committed to a way of working
with dynamic systems it does involve setting something up and not deciding
at day 1 what it is going to be, but actually just letting it evolve and
emerge. What I tried to hint at is that it needs to be absolutely radical
and it needs to be absolutely contemporary. I know to date a lot of the
debate has been about the east-west traffic movement – for me the
north-south is the most significant in terms of affecting what can happen in
that space, by far.
If you have the east-west – nothing much has changed. If you turn off
north-south there is a whole lot of possibility there – either that it is
given over or it is space that you build on in the most radical way and that
way you provide a way of keeping the heritage – because I am not sure that
the heritage buildings around there can be activated in a way that would
allow some new dynamic street life to occur there, but you could put it
through in another way.
I have got some images of Victoria Square – a little experiment trying to
identify Trafalgar Square, Red Square, Tiananmen Square, Victoria Square,
Piazza St Marco and Piazza del Campo in Siena – the first two pages came up
in the search.
END OF TAPE 1
START OF TAPE 2
I tried to give a broad representation of the kinds of images that it puts
forward.
MS HO: So, these are off the website?
MR DAVIDSON: Yes, this is a sort of trawl across the websites, it is what
chance puts up when you type in Victoria Square.
MR HO: You haven’t stood in front of our square and said “This is a good
shot.”
MR DAVIDSON: No. That is Tiananmen Square. This is Red Square. This is quite
amazing because all but empty, as parts of its representation. This is an
interesting one. This is Trafalgar Square. For me Trafalgar Square is the
one that has a sort of connection in terms of its complication, because
Trafalgar Square is a roundabout. I lived in London for 16 years – it is a
traffic roundabout. Its civic significance in the city was as a traffic
roundabout. It was a place that hasn’t been used – New Year’s Eve it was
enacted as a space – but it was one of those places where tourists went to
but nobody from London ever went to.
Now what is happening, it has been completely transformed. The northern
section in front of the National Gallery, the road is there being closed,
and a whole new forecourt that is extending a third of the way across into
Trafalgar Square is being constructed. Part of what is happening is the
space that existed in front of the Gallery cannot cope with the number of
people, so the city is reinventing itself and doing it I think in a radical
way, so all of this huge set of steps across here and a forecourt in front
of that building, and in a strange way it will look more ….. probably than
it ever was, as a space.
MS HO: Any comments?
MS BRINE: Judith Brine – Whitehall is absolutely nothing like Victoria
Square. My comment is going to be an academic one. I just wanted to say to
me Victoria Square appeared its most full, most occupied and in some sense
most ..... on the days that it was occupied by the Pink Ladies, which is the
women’s breast cancer group – and there were Pink Ladies spread out all over
it. That is the only time I have seen it full. I think that also qualifies
for pathological.
You began your talk with a slide full of people and I thought that that
would be linked to some idea of what a square did for people in the city not
just what people did for the thrill. I am not at all sure that you have not
convincingly explained to me what your notion would be of the social
function and cultural function of a square, other than just to be there. I
thought you might like to explain.
MR DAVIDSON: That is a point. I didn’t go into that kind of detail. Part of
the thing that is happening is it allows certain kinds of gatherings that
didn’t take place before, in terms of kinds of events, and part of it is
actually though I think quite ordinary, in that it has become the meeting
place – the meeting under the clock at Flinders Street Railway Station has
been replaced by meeting – and there are certain places in Federation Square
that have been idiosyncratically named – a few by us and many by other
people – they have become places to meet. One is the prom, which is the
steps that run out next to what was the western shire. I think it is the
possibility of a collective – I mean both in events and in terms of every
day life.
For me it has become so self evident that it does something now. I didn’t
propose – because I thought your comment about – there are all of these
places around the city where these events and activities do take place, and
the city is rich with those, yet still the desire continues and for me that
is part of the question, is that there is a desire for something that is not
been touched.
MS BRINE: It is a desire that has been satisfied for a relatively narrow -
except for exceptional circumstances like the war march, it is a relatively
narrow part here – many people in Melbourne don’t go to the city centre and
in Adelaide there are many many people from the north and south who never
visit the centre. I think it is very much concerning perceptions - I wonder
if one isn’t in some sense kidding oneself that this is the city centre, but
it only is for a relatively small proportion.
MR DAVIDSON: The commercial and retail consultants showed us the demographic
material on which they were basing their original advice to our client and
to us about how the commercial elements of Federation Square would be
developed and you argue exactly right – 10 per cent of the population is
what in commercial terms it was aimed at in terms of what kind of tenancies,
what kind of food and beverages and services they could offer and it was 10
per cent of the population. I am really proud that that projective democrat
– demographic material has been blown out of the water by studies of the
people that are coming to Federation Square.
MS BRINE: But as a percentage of the population?
MR DAVIDSON: Tell me the means by which you can accurately calculate it. The
demographic – the people that come there do not correspond to their
demographic. They were aiming at 10 per cent and probably it is like far
gone outside that demographic. I have no idea how you measure the percentage
of it.
MS BRINE: No, I don’t. There were studies in Adelaide in certain aspects. At
the very most the people – people who were very poor – in the north and
south.
MR DAVIDSON: If I take – it is estimated that I think in the first year of
Federation Square 60 per cent of all school children in Melbourne will visit
it.
MS BRINE: It will be interesting to see the longer term.
QUESTIONER: - - - 100 per cent of school children will visit Victoria Square
this year.
MS BRINE: That is not so. Out of a class from Salisbury High that I spoke to
a year ago, a class of 45, only two of them had ever been to the city square
before and they had been to a skate park, so it is a myth.
QUESTIONER: It is an accident if they have been there.
MR DAVIDSON: The Gilkins latest marketing stuff, they are marketing in outer
suburban areas – they are marking inner city bus stops. It is much more
complicated than just those simple things because there is a certain quality
of life that is recognised as doing something else that suburban culture
doesn’t do. When I was an architecture student I wrote my thesis on an issue
about nationality and part of what I did was to go back and look at
particularly things where questions of urban form were connected to
questions of identity.
Some of the material I came across was just frightening about the way that
Government policy after the First World War was so directed at anti-urban
development and in close suburban and the Institute of Architects own
journal – and there is one, I can never forget this – that architects are
the generals in the fight against Bolshevism. Urbanism was absolutely
equated to Communism and Bolshevism – the fear of the international workers
of the world and the absolute necessity to eliminate urbanity wherever you
could find it. This was part of the Institute of Architects – it was like in
every monthly issue of the magazine.
I think what I find interesting now is the desire for an urbanity in an
urbanism that was primarily in our cities suburban and it is not – that
suburban model isn’t sustainable I think for all kinds of reasons.
MS BRINE: One more, the last thing, if I can make one last - very strong,
the feeling for control but there was some idea that it was controlled
society – I would say that the present mode is that there is not a society.
I think it is a myth. In most cases it is individual visitation rather than
an affirmation of the collective.
MR DAVIDSON: I think there is a difference between the affirmation of a
collective and the affirmation of community – I think that is true. I have
no desire to try to weld our society into a single community. There are many
communities. I belong to two or three different ones and it is that multiple
notion of community and a contemporary notion of community rather than a
nostalgic one that I think is really important. The day before that march I
stood in Federation Square at 6.00 o’clock in the morning with
three-and-a-half thousand people from the soccer community. We watched the
England v Australia game on the big screen. The next day it was something
else.
MS BRINE: When I was there there was practically nobody.
MR DAVIDSON: But it can also – emptiness belongs to spaces as well.
MS ……….: Linda ….. very contemporary art and very contemporary writing and a
theory - but I am very interested in notions to help the community ….. of
the unknown and how we think through processes and art, and how we can
actually work with a kind of speaking, I suppose, a kind of conversation
that moves us out of what we already know to kind of try and speak about
what we don’t know. I know that is really difficult but I think it is really
really necessary, because it has to challenge the identification of identity
personalities, and it has to challenge ideas of what community is because
we, especially in terms of electronic community – electronic and digital
thinking – so I am just interested in your comments about that because you
alluded to it before about this - - -
MR DAVIDSON: It is very important to me and I have to pay a debt – I think
some of the most significant writings on energy from my point of view – two
French writers, one Juan Joi Bataille, who has written about it in the most
radical way and the most significant way, and another writer, Maurice
Blanchot, who has forever changed the way that you work with energy and for
many – let us bring it back to some things that are real in the way that we
make decisions in our culture and that is the impoverishment of the way that
we deploy what is called community consultation. The processes that I
experienced in the course of Federation Square filled me with horror in
terms of community consultation. I need not remind you that the toaster at
East Circular Quay went through a process of community consultation.
The destruction of the finger wharves in Walsh Bay went through processes of
community consultation – the process of community consultation for
Federation Square suggested that Federation Square would be a fabulous
contribution to the city and that 90 per cent of the people thought it
should be in classical style rather than modern style. Honestly, I was
always embarrassed the way that these things were framed. I am someone who
thinks that there are multiple communities. If we listened to every voice
and suggestion that was made to us we could never synthesise a coherent
approach from those, yet there is an assumption by people who are opinion
makers and particularly in the newspapers in terms of this, that there is
one single clear coherent voice, and there isn’t. There is a multitude of
voices that are contradictory.
In a strange way I have always proud of the fact that in all of the sort of
initial things that were done in terms of votes about Federation square,
that only 10 per cent of the people were ever in favour of us at the
beginning. I thought that was astounding that so many people would support
contemporary architecture. It is completely different now. I mean the degree
to which the project is actually embraced by people to me is actually a
really important lesson, that something that is contemporary need not be
stilted, because the normal reaction is if it is unknown we don’t want it.
If it is unknown be against it. Strangely enough now, my experience is that
the general public are much more generous in their response to me than the
majority of my own profession.
QUESTIONER: I am quite interested in the stranger in my midst or one of your
comments, stranger, but I am also quite interested in the idea of being able
to welcome other sorts of thinking – that is the strangeness of other sort
of thinking and being able to have a welcoming attitude to those other
people’s ideas – that is the thinking or rapport that comes from say people
like Georgio …..
MR DAVIDSON: I have been in a lot of political trouble in Federation Square
over one particular issue so I had a tendency – I actually tended to wind
back some of the things – it really shamed me coming back to Australia after
a long period away and Kyoto was one. It perplexes me that we can’t sign up
to the Kyoto Protocol. I know why. One of the things that has primarily
driven it is two aluminium smelters in New South Wales and two aluminium
smelters in Victoria that consume 25 per cent of each of those State’s
electricity, so that we have got to do the sustainable work with only 75 per
cent of what is available to do it with.
QUESTIONER: There is a lot involved in the aluminium industry.
MR DAVIDSON: Yes, but I still think it is possible. When I show the glass
atrium at Federation Square that is completely passively cooled and it uses
10 per cent of the energy that electricity – sorry, that conventional air
conditioning would use. You can’t believe how hard we had to fight for that.
It has a pay-back period of four years. That would be considered like
wondrous in the commercial world but in a situation where its lowest capital
cost – lowest capital cost – we were never allowed to do ….. we funded it
all out of our own pocket on the course of our project so that we could
actually understand the context for these things.
I was amazed by it and the other is what happened with the boat people –
just horrified me – I felt ashamed. Now it does have an impact in what we
do. I am not a politician, so I shouldn’t – I’ve expressed a deeply and
heartfelt personal opinion – but what does that mean for what I do? We have
always described Federation Square and its relationship to Federation,
because we have been continually criticised for not making a project that
was either celebratory or representational of the event. We have always
described it in these terms: that Federation is a condition, and it is a
collective condition, where it allows for difference between each of the
components. It shows the way that they can make a coherence together. Now
our facades are exactly that – they are completely differentiated right
around their circumference. No one section is the same as any other one.
I never normally talk about this. It is one of those things that I don’t
think is an architect issue being in a public forum telling people what the
significance of your project was for the made it and the way that you would
hope that it would provide a projective image, an image on which to imagine
something in the future. I would hope that – and I will say what we tried to
provide – was something that showed that you could make coherence out of
difference. It was something that celebrated difference in a really simple
way, both in terms of the facades of the buildings and also of the supply
services.
QUESTIONER: Steve ….. Flinders University. It is just I think three
observations really because Judith suggested if you take that aerial
photograph of Victoria Square at the time of the war march it looked rather
splendid – what was interesting about Victoria Square – because that’s where
the march started , not finished – it finished on North Terrace – Victoria
Square formed the role of a sort of marshalling yard which it is very good
for funnelling people around to orderly processions, I think on that last
discussion of how you achieve coherence and difference at the same time, I
would be interested in hearing from others here more about Victoria Square,
that idea in particular about the issues there of dealing with the
indigenous people who tend to use the square and the dry zone issues and so
on, how those can be – what we have accomplished so far in taking those into
account and trying to redesign Victoria Square.
One more point, again in light of your earlier comment, in terms of Adelaide
I think many people have acknowledged before this variety of places that are
provided, have been planned or spontaneously developed in recent years and
different types of activity in the east end and the west end, the riverside,
parks and so on, and generally also commented that intensity and the reality
that we struggle to support urban life in many of these existing spaces just
because there are not enough people who are around to used them, not enough
people to make more of them vibrant at the same time. It is rather tiring
running around from Gouger Street to Rundle Street trying to keep all these
balls in the air at the same time.
Clearly there is no possibility of doing that in Victoria Square as well at
the moment. We are beginning to see slowly the legible intensification
around Hindmarsh Square and perhaps Hurtle Square – the beginnings of some
modest intensification, but that I would suggest is going to be a slow
process.
QUESTIONER: Perhaps just to talk a little bit about Victoria Square. One of
the I think biggest losses – current demise as a project – demise of a
community project is at the heart of what we were doing – and I should say
that we had Carl Telfer – both as an urban designer and a person actively
involved in the arts and the programs in Victoria linked to that was very
important but also had a very important role in terms of the whole Kuarna
community and the Kuarna community aspects of what we were doing, but the
broader Aboriginal aspects of what we were doing. There were some wonderful
themes that came through that process and at the heart of them was the
notion of welcoming Kuarna people as custodians of Victoria Square as a sort
of an epicentre of that custodianship and the notion of others coming to
Victoria Square and welcoming and that broadcast through other cultures as
well.
It was quite a strong cultural program that rolled through that and it goes
to the heart, in terms of the broad structure of what we were doing. One of
those was that the notion of welcoming to a place and defining a new place
in the centre of the square and bordering that in a green space – so the
notion of green is actually very important – green in a broader cultural
sense but also green in terms of plant material. A whole series of cultural
themes have rolled through that – both from a structuring of the space and
the notion of journey lines that are involved through the design as well,
which were metaphors for all the journeys that we go on in our lives – at a
cultural level and an individual level as well.
That structure invaded our approach to the design, but in a sense that
opportunity to carry that through has been lost for the moment and so the
other thing I would say about the scale of Victoria Square is its own issue
– not only does it have buildings around the edges which are hard to
activate because of their nature, but the actual scale of the square has a
series of activated edges which would be very difficult to activate, so part
of the notion of having a square within a square was to think about
activating the inner square as the square and having a second one around
that as well, which was a border, urban space that it was, and it is linked.
So there are some wonderful cultural things that drive the structure and
they are waiting to take it up again.
QUESTIONER: Peter, I found it interesting – as we went around the table
there seemed to be a lot of “c” words coming out and I find that exciting
only because they are all about consultation, community, culture,
contemporary – but I think the two that you used most and the two that I
think are the most provocative are the ones of contradictory and conflict. I
think it was interesting listening to you talk when you spoke about the city
not being a body which you can fix up or a piece of fabric. You used words
like pathology and DNA – so you were in fact using contradictory statements
to make the point. I am just wondering whether that is not the real issue
about a major space in a city that will always be full of conflict and
contradiction and maybe it is for a designers, which most of us tend to be –
thinking in most likely in terms of what a square, whether it is Victoria
Square or another square should be, is that we start to get a bit too
precious about it and this notion of conflict, contradiction – which is very
much about contemporary life and you mentioned fracturals and the way things
happen in a random fashion which don’t appear systematic but in fact they
are very systematic, is the way cities work today.
We have the notion that different things happen in cities – very well in
different places. So why not simply identify a need for Adelaide that
Victoria Square can in fact fulfil and just try and develop it for that and
not for these myriad of other reasons.
QUESTIONER: ….. from the Botanical Gardens ….. I know I can think of the
squares that are pretty well without trees and all this talk about activated
city life and trees being mutually exclusive.
MR DAVIDSON: I didn’t say that. I meant for certain kinds of events - - -
QUESTIONER: I appreciate that – the squares you showed as your exemplars
were often treeless and Federation Square – I guess that is just an issue
when you see that reconciliation with the environment through plans as being
part of a progressive future or whether you see that in terms of a flexible
space. In relation to cultural institutions, I actually think the physical
cultural blockade up along North Terrace is really important to Adelaide’s
cultural identity and I think that is a good thing.
Where you have been able to integrate the gallery with the square I can see
the benefit, but proximity doesn’t seem to help. ….. Park and the Australian
Museum seem to contribute nothing to each other. There are just two things I
would like to use and one is plants, because I like them and I think there
is an issue about a reconciliation with the environment and the other - - -
MR DAVIDSON: I could be rude interrupting, but not plants in vases. There is
a more profound issue though in terms of the use of the word green and I
think that there is a problem because I think ecology is brown, not green.
QUESTIONER: Absolutely, I agree. It is not green.
MR DAVIDSON: I think they have been inevitably caught up together in terms
of the way that they have been used. Originally in Federation Square the
winter garden was supposed to be a big greenhouse. It wasn’t an urban space.
It was a greenhouse and actually the more that it was tested in terms of the
kind of events that would take place there it being a large scale greenhouse
those events were mutually exclusive. There are trees in Federation Square.
I am actually very proud of those trees because I had to fight for them to
be a native tree rather than a European deciduous tree.
But they are in their place – I have lived right through this community
consultation, six years ago in Federation Square, should the square be open
and paved or should it be green and the answer was it should be green, it
should be grass. There is nothing wrong with having an urban space that is
predominantly paved. We have a fear – there is a fear of paving. I think
trees and landscaping – I have nothing against those, they just weren’t
important in terms of the development of Federation Square – and I think
that they are seen as somehow being the image of sustainability rather than
being its real enactment.
QUESTIONER: Just the other bit on proximity of cultural institutions and
factors like that.
MR DAVIDSON: I think that grouping them together actually – in the way that
they have in Adelaide – I think is not good for in a sense one kind of
diversity that can exist through the city. Whatever the reasons, and I
understand there are often banal and mercantile reasons for why things
develop as they are, I think it off-tilts things. You look, as you move
across the city, and it is sort of like when you get to the other side – for
me I don’t think the solution is moving them, I don’t think the solution is
a museum of modern art on the other side of the city. In a sense those
institutions have been gathered there.
For me the real question is what kind of vision do you need in order to get
to where Adelaide could develop to next? I had an experience recently with a
man called Ken Dobinson in Sydney. Ken Dobinson used to run the RTA – the
Road Transport Authority. He is a born again sustainability advocate. He is
rethinking the way that transport is understood and planned. He is doing
this independently and he is sort of changing the notion of universal access
or movement into the city into a democratisation of access and understands
the way that the city – and you can set up other kinds of networks within it
– and looking at how far we travel and what kind of means of transport we
get to.
One of the most provocative things he said is you cannot plan or forecast to
get to the future because all you will do is make like what is possible now
come true incrementally. He said what you have got to do is take an almighty
step, get there and work out now what do we need to do in order to make this
change, ie, you have got to put yourself in the future, describe the
conditions that you would want and then back-cast – back-cast the net – try
to understand what are the impediments that stop that occurring.
That to me is one of the most amazing things in that way is to actually see
the resource that the original city here has with its urban potential and
what I don’t know is how many years forward has been made and to understand
what it could be and what you need to do to enact that.
QUESTIONER: Jenni, if I could just go back to some earlier themes that were
coming through that people are uncomfortable with which is the totality I
think of your championing of the contemporary. I certainly agree there needs
to be contemporary solutions to contemporary issues in our contemporary
society. I don’t necessarily agree though that it always ….. as part of that
solution because some of that has actually created some of the very real
problems that we are dealing with now and sometimes it has been the wrong
solution and if we go back - a couple of very quick Melbourne examples, the
site of the first City Square, which manifestly did not work and did not
achieve any of the things it set out to do, was an incredibly successful
Victoria Arcade which thronged with people for nearly a century – a very
successful Cathedral Hotel, which anchored that corner opposite the Town
Hall and which linked into the architecture of St Paul’s Cathedral.
The site that you have got now that does work very well – Federation Square
– the blot on that landscape was the Gas and Fuel Building which was a
contemporary solution to what is seen as the lack of office space in
Melbourne after the War that actually was plonked on a very successful
public space that went down to the river that was used by a lot of people,
but this office building was put in, and that was the contemporary solution
which proved not to be a solution. I think there needs to be some sort of
balance between taking a contemporary focus and look at how can our
contemporary society fully utilise some of the heritage and traditional
structures that we already have?
I mean just last night I sat with 1000 other people in an 1863 building, the
Adelaide Town Hall, for a perfectly good concert with wonderful acoustics in
a building which worked in 1863 and works perfectly well in 2003, but there
can be things put into that building that might make it more ecologically
sustainable and in terms of energy and things like that, but I don’t believe
that there always has to be a total contemporary fix for any of the issues
that we are looking at and that was the message I was getting back from
Omnicon.
MR DAVIDSON: I am not advocating pulling down old buildings but I am
advocating that all we can do is things that are contemporary. I think
building things that pretend to look like they were built 100 years ago
don’t work, they never work. I think they are culturally bereft to do that.
The real issue you raise though is not about the contemporary but is about
our processes of discrimination because one of the things for me is the most
profound problem that exists in my own discipline, is that the culture in
which we put forward and project projects and proposals can’t tell if they
are good or bad.
It just doesn’t know. It doesn’t know how to discuss cultural ideas that
might exist in literature or might exist in painting or art or in music.
When it comes to architecture there is absolutely no way of recognising it.
That to me is sort of like it is a real – it is a hard point because there
is the question of discrimination because I think with the majority of what
the discipline that I produce, or that I belong to produces, is actually not
contemporary. It is built now, it is designed now, but it doesn’t mean it is
contemporary.
It is actually for me – it is impoverished, so I have a problem with my
discipline with regard to this so I am not advocating that everything that
is contemporary – but it is really about having a sense of discrimination –
having like a positive debate about what are the values that things should
have and when it comes to architecture one of the really sad things that his
happened is the bottomest bottom line is good enough. We have to I think,
and what I hope Federation Square shows, is that if you invest in something
that you spend more than the least you can spend you get something that
exceeds all your expectations.
How you answer the question of discrimination is a difficult one but it
seems to me that a forum like this on a one-way part of the way it does go
ahead into the culture but it is important to find a way to recognise issues
that we can find a language for in other areas of culture to talk about in
terms of architecture.
QUESTIONER: I am a visitor here. I have been here nine months in Adelaide,
so I have maybe a different way of looking at the city and I had a
discussion - - -
THE CHAIR: You are - - -
QUESTIONER: John Folique from the Hilton, on the Square, and after nine
months here I think the city has so much to offer. It is quite amazing. It
is close to Wellington’s weather. Where do you have a city with 90 per cent
of the time in a year where you have the sun and what surprises me when I
came here, it is not an outdoor city. People are indoor rather than outdoor.
That is my first impression and while the city is asking for that, asking
for – bringing people outside their walls and have kind of interactions and
atmosphere was missing. When you come first to Adelaide the first thing you
see, you see Victoria Square because that is the route from the airport to
the city.
The first time I came here it was a bit raining, on that date, which was
maybe the only day of the year and I said “Where are the people?” It was a
Saturday afternoon and I saw nobody around. I said where is the centre of
the city? They said you are there, the centre of the city, that is your
hotel. All right, that is interesting. I think after a few months you can
understand better how things work and how people move. Basically, you don’t
have a real centre, as you explained, Peter. You have North Terrace but I
don’t think North Terrace is a centre because it is a street.
You have King William, which for me is a natural link between Victoria
Square and North Terrace and a centre can be much more than just Victoria
Square, much more than North Terrace, but can be a real hub of energy. If
today we don’t have people come into Victoria Square because there is
nothing to see in Victoria Square, so if you create energy into your square
I think it is a natural situation there and that location – to create a
heart in a city.
We have seen the Tour Down Under, the Classics, every time you have those
activities the city comes alive. I think it is a lifestyle we can create
here in the community and to create lifestyle you have to allow people to
mix with people and if Victoria Square was a great contemporary design which
can mix very beautifully with the old design, because they work very well –
so mixing has proven that. If you go to the Louvre in Paris you have the old
and the new together and they work so well together so it doesn’t matter –
contemporary and old works together.
But if you have a nice Victoria Square design we can’t just sit there and
say now it is magic, people will come. It doesn’t stop there. You have to
bring now creativity in terms of being innovative, allowing people to play
music, to sing, or to eat outdoors, to sit on terraces, to create a synergy
around the square – the right restaurants, not just a café, but the right
restaurants – and suddenly you create life and a lifestyle. So I think the
square has a lot to offer as a result of opportunity.
MR DAVIDSON: Recently, wasn’t there a wine centre – it was built on the
outskirts. It is the sort of thing you would assume would be meaningful at
the centre.
QUESTIONER: It is at the corner of the city.
QUESTIONER: You build the Melbourne Museum on the edge of the city and
charge to go in and apparently it is a big flop. Nobody will go there.
Nobody will buy tickets.
MR DAVIDSON: They have now made it free - - -
QUESTIONER: Free for children, they originally charged adults $15 a ticket.
In their business plan they were going to charge $30 an adult for an
institution that was free for 130 years and by its second year – you don’t
count the first year because of the novelty factor – their visitation was
one third of what they had estimated.
QUESTIONER: It is about two kilometres from the centre of the city.
QUESTIONER: The King William Centre is free, isn’t it, the Australian
Gallery?
QUESTIONER: It is not good urbanism.
MR DAVIDSON: In a strange way the Museum, I think, is an example of thinking
that the building is enough to do it by itself and actually it is not.
QUESTIONER: No, it changed from the very moment the decision was made to
move it from Swanston Street.
MR DAVIDSON: I think it is a situation where nothing will happen until it
has been invented and it might require more building, and it sets up a
precedent, in what was the park. My paper in some way was a question because
it is: is there still a desire for a square or is it a desire for this
centre that is missing and is it in Victoria Square or could it be somewhere
else? Because everyone seems - a lot of people have confirmed the
persistence of the designer.
THE CHAIR: Let is open it, I know there are questions, is there a desire –
what is the desire?
QUESTIONER: It wouldn’t be all that high on my current list of priorities. I
think any city needs space for big events, whether it be the Tour Down Under
or the Pink Ladies or whatever else. I am a bit worried about the space, the
way we program these spaces. This could be an indication of the
impoverishment of our culture, I suppose, that everything has to be
programmed like TV and then we will go to them. But I am interested in how a
space like that and people like Kevin have had a go at this and Andrew
already conserved both those ceremonial functions and also be an intimate
space, so those are the questions I wouldn’t mind pursuing.
But in terms of whether Victoria Square – whether we like the centre because
Victoria Square is currently in its current delicate state – I wouldn’t be
too concerned about that. There are other more pressing priorities in
Adelaide I think.
THE CHAIR: Has anybody else got anything?
QUESTIONER: I suppose I am interested in the idea that anybody believes that
they can design anything that would lead to any activity. I would just like
– I was going to ask you if you had envisaged what people might do where
that was part of what you then used in your design but the only stories I
have read of the situations are that people never do what was envisaged and
you are lucky if they do something else that it didn’t envisage but quite
often they do nothing at all and in terms of Victoria Square I suppose I
feel it is more about Victoria Square – it has had some great moments when
it has pulled 50,000 people and everybody – is there a time line these
things should happen – once 100 years or every Anzac Day or should
something, is there some sort of moral need for there to be something
happening there every day? I am not sure about that.
MR DAVIDSON: Your question – there are two things. I take the view that
there is a desire for something. Everything that is there in the city at the
moment is not satisfying. This comes back to your question because it isn’t
just about satisfying something ad hoc, it is actually about satisfying
something that you can’t account for, that we are not responsible. It is
making something that is for the future in the sense it is a responsibility
of today and it may well be that this constant nagging desire is actually a
manifestation of a need for something else but we can’t be really entirely
sure.
Our responsibility is to provide something that in a way would exceed all of
the sort of ways you would account for it now and make decisions about the
thing. I mentioned before this question of intensification. I’m very keen to
see a bigger population for Adelaide and more things happening in Adelaide
and I think some of the consequences of that will clearly be a greater sense
of urbanity, more things happening almost as a consequence.
I suppose I am less sure that one can contrive that by a design intervention
at this stage if the other mechanisms which are necessary to produce that
increase in population. I am not sure what the causal relationship is
between the design intervention and then what comes after. Matthew ….. this
is a question from a long time ago. I think the setting up of the framework
of the design was very flexible even though he didn’t know exactly what was
going to happen and how it was going to happen. He thought there was going
to be a new colony and lots of people coming and so on. He couldn’t see
everyone. It sounded like a very flexible structure and there is a whole lot
of potentials that he put into that which – some of them have been utilised
already and some of them have not. It is worth giving an example – he really
never I think found that its function as the whole
city – that is fine, maybe it already is three centuries or four centuries
or something where it was more urbanised.
So I think we can afford to be a bit long-sighted there and say let us leave
it there in the corner for a while and come back to it later on. I suggest
we rename it, call it Victoria Park, do something to make it a better park –
at the moment there is lots that can be done to make it a better park and
maybe we can activate the effort somewhat and so on. Then let us move our
attention somewhere else because there is a lot of the rest of the city that
needs attention and I suggest that there is a lot in the activity centre
that can make it better.
I designed Bourke Street Mall in Melbourne some time ago and people actually
acted as we predicted they would. We put a whole lot more seats in, a whole
lot of them sat in Bourke Street Mall, but Rundle Mall, like Bourke Street
Mall, I think is limited. Really it is a hallway in the urban area. We need
a few more living rooms and so I think the community heart can use a few
more squares – living rooms – but they don’t need to be as big as Victoria
Square. They can be as big as Hindmarsh Square. They can be much much
smaller. But there need to be a few places where people can break away and
get out of the traffic stream.
MS BRINE: I see Light’s Plan not only as a framework but also as a strait
jacket. I think it is deeply inhibiting to smaller dimensions for doing
things.
MR DAVIDSON: It is a strong formal structure.
MS BRINE: It is so strong and so large it is very difficult to do things
with it, but I also see equally that Adelaide is still in the grip of a
malaise I believe about doing anything for itself at all – I don’t mean
Adelaide as a diptych, I mean Adelaide as a society – and it did seem to me
that Victoria Square, or indeed North Terrace, are important projects to
show Adelaide that it is capable of doing anything whatsoever with self
discipline and that is on that basis that our wisdom is about strongly
supporting anything at all.
THE CHAIR: Andrew - - -
QUESTIONER: Just a couple of points: one quick point – we’re hung up on the
word square.
END OF TAPE 2
START OF TAPE 3
….. enough room and a different type and more room for other tectonic type
things that may be successful. To me it is as much about what our larger
successful spaces as opposed to a street successful spaces are about and
they will take many years to form and some will be like Red Square on a
massive scale – because that is right for that particular culture and they
will range enormously in scale and Victoria Square as a space will sit
somewhere in that continuum and have certain roles – more like Nathan’s view
that in 200 years time we might have quite a different view.
I finally come back to Peter’s point, I think what it does mean is it is not
going to happen now, in ….. it will – something ….. as with communities, we
are happy with ATSIC’s role for the time being and let us move on to
something ….. it certainly doesn’t work as anything like a successful public
space and we either accept that and move on or deal with it in some way.
MR DAVIDSON: One further connection between Melbourne and Adelaide with
regard to this is that Federation Square prior to our project that was built
there was - every ten years there was another huge public space projected on
to it. I have seen three or four of those subsequent plans that you could
only call Stalinist in their scale and scope and it is interesting because
in Melbourne this space allowed – it provided the space in which these
things could be projected and it was a space in the city but it wasn’t
normally part of the city.
Sometimes this happens in cities where they have been destroyed in war where
something can get projected in that couldn’t have been possible before. What
I think happens here is there is this space in the centre that it keeps
getting projected on to yet there is something – and I am relieved that
somebody said it and not necessarily me – about the restriction of the plan
that something needs at some point to overcome it. I guess one of the things
that I hope Federation Square does is it shows that you can be brave. It
actually can work.
You have described the principles. They are not like rocket science. We,
like everybody else, have learned something about the things that haven’t
worked and it is about making sure that those edges are activated. It is
about making sure that there is sufficient infrastructure in there to
facilitate events but not too much. You wouldn’t believe the number of
things that we actually plotted as events to take place in there – literally
we would go through all of the enactment in terms of how do you get stuff
in, how do you it out, what kind of infrastructure is required from markets
to concerts – all of those
things – to make sure that you are enabling with regard to those.
But the most moving shocking things are things you don’t put in – walking
through there at midnight and running across a couple making love in one of
the sort of – one of the planters. It happens and it is part of the life of
the space. I am seeing it built with school kids and having the teacher say
to me - we designed these planters that have sections embedded into them and
that means that she can sit an entire class in one place. It is contained in
sort of half the area of this room. She thought we did it deliberately.
THE CHAIR: Ben.
QUESTIONER: I have got a question but I will just practise it – it’s an
observation. I think that whenever five people are interested in urban
design and meet in Adelaide there should be a rule that they devote at least
10 minutes to trying to figure out what this malaise that Judith spoken is
all about, because I think it is multi-dimensional and it is not just about
any one particular thing about Adelaide but I think that it is terribly
important that people think about what it is that prevents Adelaide from
creating these spaces that we call squares – whether that is a square or
whether it is some other shape doesn’t matter – and I think part of it is to
do with Light’s Plan, the enormous challenge in it that just hasn’t been met
and there is almost a fear of taking it up.
I can’t help reflecting on the fact that in the last 10 years in Adelaide
there has almost been a trilogy of failure. Riverbank - ….. Manuel has gone
– the project manager,
ex-project manager of Riverbank, God knows what’s going to happen to that or
whether it will ever get resurrected – Victoria Square bit the dust a few
months ago, and North Terrace – the first stage of which is only a fifth of
the total project – who knows whether the rest of it will ever happen, but
the bit that is being built now only got built by the absolute skin of its
teeth. Thank you very much Judith, because I’m not joking, three months ago
it almost got completely canned. So what do you do about this place? It
means that three great projects can be done and they don’t just get
rethought because maybe they weren’t conceived quite rightly, they just
almost get completely canned.
We will come back to that. We will come back to them in 20 years time. But
my question is what is it about the procurement process, what is it about
the whole structure of Federation Square? I lived in Melbourne from the late
‘70s to the early ‘90s. I was there when the Age started a campaign in the
early ‘80s saying let’s save the Yarra River. So it has got something to do
with the Yarra River because Southbank, the Exhibition Building, Federation
Square, Birrarung Marr, and now I there is the Northbank project going on –
there is something about turning around and facing a river that has really
been fantastic for that city.
Again, I don’t want to create a whole Melbourne-Adelaide thing. That is
boring, but Adelaide needs to learn something about getting these projects
off the ground. We spend too much time designing them, doing master plans,
thinking about them, talking about them.
MR DAVIDSON: I have a friend who is not involved in this discipline. He
described it to me as thus – and he lives in the UK – we spend more and more
time weighing the pig rather than catching it. The process that exists in
our culture about going through the processes of evaluation rather than
actually enriching the things that we do and I have experienced that.
I have laid myself bare in a documentary so you can see some of the
problems. We were incredibly lucky because somebody who was the head of the
office of major projects after a certain point, after we had been appointed,
believed in our project and thought it was worthwhile doing whatever he had
to do to ensure that it had sufficient funding to be able to be realised and
that he wouldn’t make the project fit the budget; he refined the budget to
fit the project. That will probably be the only time that ever happens in my
life but I am extremely grateful to the man for doing that because he
thought it was worthwhile.
QUESTION: It is worth noting that Charles Landry ….. in urban psychology
that it is this very process that we are in that we can’t get out of that
stops us moving ahead and doing things.
QUESTIONER: I’m feeling very hopeful about Moseley Square, though.
QUESTIONER: I would like to dispute the idea that it is an Adelaide problem
though. This is what Peter Sellars talked about with Frank Gehry and him
working on the Groningen in Holland and trying to create this entire
criss-crossing of culture, of activity and design and the whole of Groningen
just throwing up its hands and saying there was no way we would ever have
this sort of stuff going on and spitting them out. I suspect that happens
much much more frequently ….. than anywhere in the world is actually built.
QUESTIONER: The interesting thing about Groningen though is that it has been
documented and the conversations were actually documented and the methods.
You can actually see the series. I just wonder what the documentation of
Adelaide is.
QUESTION: There are some great things in Groningen that have been built.
QUESTION: I think one of the issues for Adelaide is ….. and that is urban
design and public domain. In Melbourne there is obviously a different level
of public debate. I think design professionals in Melbourne get involved in
the media. They engage – this gentleman here has been engaging pretty
solidly for the last few years – whereas here it is sporadic – we had Peter
Sellars came in and Charles Landry will do something and another city 2020
plan and all the consultations. Then we had the City as a Stage event last
year.
We have enormous gaps in between these events but masses of silence and from
my point of view it is partly to do with indulging is secondary in terms of
literacy I think and spatial vocabulary. When you do go into a consultation
what language do people use to describe what it is that they don’t really
understand that a lot of people have written about in theory. But I think
there is a real issue in terms of how perhaps a ….. centre can leverage
these sorts of pawns out in a more sustainable way into the community so
they don’t just get grabs about Victoria Park – it gets beaten up for a
while – and move on to Riverside and that gets beaten up for a while and
then North Terrace. They are all sort of piecemeal – not sustained, not
ordered – that’s just an observation.
MS HO: Perhaps one issue there is that there is a sort of a political side
to it. Charles Landry will say that we are very good at visioning and we are
absolutely hopeless at implementation and in fact the Hawke Centre is
jointly presenting Charles Landry with Adelaide Thinkers in Residence on 5
November. I am going to argue very strongly that Charles should deliver a
report card and that that report card I certainly hope is someone who has
been exposed to Charles’ views I think now for at least 10 years in
Adelaide. I hope that will say something about this hiatus between the
visioning and, if you like, the politics of the situation, and the
realisation of the vision.
I think as a community we really have to confront why is that happening.
Undoubtedly a lot of it has got to do with the tolerance of the budget. That
often ends up becoming the political football and yet it is difficult when
you look at what Melbourne has achieved culturally over the last 10 years
with huge investments but with big returns and, in terms of that competitive
city idea, they really – that was graft. It had some pretty severe impacts
on areas of the community but in the long term it will deliver. I think the
problem in our community seems to be that it becomes a political moment of
visioning and saying: Look at us, we are brilliant, we have got this idea.
We have got the documentation even and then something stops it.
It may be the change in the political sphere or it may be the budget
pressures or whatever but it is something about the courage that is lacking
in the community. It is a courage issue and I would really like to endorse
what you said, Kevin, about that topic. Perhaps that is something that –
without making any promises – the Hawke Centre might try and engage people
in discussions about courage, actually, in a broader sense.
MR DAVIDSON: To answer his question before, we came in under one Premier and
I just did not realise the degree to which one man had the ability to manage
things and affect the way it related to departmental or bureaucratic
structures. It is a slight parallel because relative to – people might
express particular views about what that appeared to be. I can assure you
that from the inside it was completely different to what it was in the way
that it was written about and understood through mythology. Though it
grieves me to say it, there was more accountability under the Kennett
Government. There was more ways that discussion occurred under the Kennett
Government than for the last three-and-a-half years of the project.
It might sound shocking but it just was that way but it was structured in a
way that was effective and productive rather than in terms of us, in terms
of the design profession, enabling us to do our work rather than be
managers. It was very – I had these two sort of constellations of the world.
It has been surprising to see how different they were in terms of
experience. This might shock you. This is the first occasion where I have
ever been able to do that and it shocks me in Melbourne that nobody has said
to us – we want to talk to you, this is not about getting square with events
and making up of things and getting back at things but it is about simply
learning from your experience so that it enables us to not screw up next
time and to do something in a better way. But there is no feedback – there
is no space where that occurs. This is the first time I have actually had
the privilege of being able to do that.
QUESTIONER: What I find intriguing here in Adelaide is that there are some
things we are doing very very well indeed and we seem to be very good at
some of the smaller things. We seem to be very good at some of the streets.
There seems to be this constant approach to try and do incredibly almost
over-planned huge big projects that never quite got up and the little things
work very well – as a resident Hutt Street works perfectly for me - that
transformation of Hutt Street into an incredibly friendly vibrant place –
full of people all the time, day and night – it works incredibly well, works
with the built environment, works with people, traffic flow, all the rest of
it. It is the little things that have been added and then added and then
added that create this wonderful transformation.
Perhaps we need – the approach we are using manifestly doesn’t seem to be
working terribly well - do we perhaps need to be a bit more incremental in
the way we go about changing that much? As you said, we can’t seem to get
the big vision up for Victoria Square because, quite frankly, no one can
really quite agree on what we really do want to have happening in Victoria
Square, so why don’t we just make it a bit better than it is now, because it
is manifestly not working for anyone or for anything, and try and pick maybe
one thing and get it a bit better for that and then there is another bit of
the city that needs something – what needs to be done – there is that
wonderful design for North Terrace and there are, of course, are real fears
….. we will get a little bit done but maybe it needs to be perhaps a more
layered approach in Adelaide rather than the big focus on plonk it down and
that is done and then you work on the next bit. You can keep adding layers
and layers and layers.
MR DAVIDSON: Incrementalism doesn’t succeed. One needs to deal with
contemporary situations – it is not taking one little step but to take a
bigger one – because the real danger is that in 10 years’ time you will try
to take that big step and because you realise that incrementalism actually
won’t be successful - - -
QUESTIONER: Peter, we have a combination though where it is a big leap in
one place. So we do another big leap and another thing in another place,
rather than trying to do a big leap with everything all in one place. That
doesn’t seem to work here in Adelaide for some reason.
QUESTIONER: I have a few thoughts and I tend to agree with Alan. I would
cite the Norwood Parade as a fairly political development but I am also
wondering if it is the way that Adelaide has developed over the years, is
that the city has become so spread out from north to south, and I think you
referred to Adelaide as the CBD, that it has become almost irrelevant to the
majority of South Australia so, therefore, it is very difficult to engage
them in something which is happening in the city and we now see many
regional shopping centres – regional centres – are being developed.
They seem to be quite successful for the local community. Young people
identify much more with them and you always find a great congregation of
young people in these regional centres but it is very difficult for them to
find the city relevant and I think also this issue of talking about a
square, I think that certainly has certain connotations. Having spent much
of my time in Italy there you have the connotation of the piazza, which is
the space, it is a gathering space where people come for all sorts of
activities and they are not homogenous.
For instance in Rome Piazza di Spagna, Piazza Navona, Piazza del Popolo –
they are all very different. There are certain activities – if you go to
Piazza Navona you know that is an artists district. You will find people
with their easels painting selling paintings. Piazza di Spagna is quite
different, but the other thing which John alluded to was the
fact – where are the people? We are such a carcentric city that unless we
get people out of their cars and unless you have that critical base of
people wanting to move around from place to place – and I agree with what
you also said about North Terrace and the concentration of everything on
that cultural boulevard, people will go there, they can go to the Museum,
the Art Gallery, they can then go to Elder Park, walk down to the Festival
Centre, there is going to be a bridge now connecting North Terrace to the
river and we are starting to look towards the river as well, so I think it
is a very complicated argument that we have got here but I think it is going
to be very difficult to engage people because of the fact that we have
spread the city out so much and I think it is the planning that has allowed
this to happen.
We used to once upon a time have a critical mass in the city centre but that
has gone and now, as Judith said, some people have never been to the city or
the CBD and they never will – probably in a lifetime they will never come
into the city of Adelaide because there is no reason for them to do so.
MR DAVIDSON: But I think on that particular point, it has become an issue in
the last month to do with housing affordability and it is going to need a
different kind of solution and I have been shocked at the degree to which it
is just head in the sand stuff in New South Wales and Victoria about what it
really means in terms of the holistic view. Governments cannot keep paying
for the infrastructure and we have invested so much money in infrastructure
in the existing city that is so under utilised yet the 2030 plan for
Melbourne doesn’t really address that and looking at the way that you use
that infrastructure.
This issue about those kids out there – where are you going to go? Where is
their affordability going to be? That is why – it is incredible to see this
same transformation, in the sense of looking at what is happening in London.
Twenty years ago when I went there all of the social housing was sold off.
It was all privatised. Now what is
happening – there is a whole understanding that a city – there is a holistic
system and that people are pushed further and further out and that they
actually can’t get to where they are needed to service this organism in
terms of its servicing and jobs and so there is now, social housing comes
back as affordable housing but anybody that does a development needs to
provide a component for affordable housing so that people can actually
travel to work and make this organism work, because the organism is breaking
down.
For instance, you take the radical step that was made in London to stop – to
re-fence it from the point of view of traffic and everybody argued against
it. One man fought for it which was the mayor. It has reduced traffic in
central London by 30 per cent. It has made the two components of the public
transport system – the buses and taxis – work. It has reduced pollution in
the city centre. Sometimes you just – you can make incredible changes but I
think there is a responsibility to think more than five years into the
future.
Part of the problem that we have is the short-termism of Government and the
expediency that develops through that. Twenty years ago, and I love to make
this comparison because the Parliament House in Canberra or the National
Gallery in Victoria – those projects took more than 15 years to build. There
was a sense that you were starting something but it was clear that you
weren’t going to be around to do it because there was another kind of
responsibility.
Yet Federation Square was conceived to be designed and constructed in three
years and three months in a sort of parliamentary period and it is just not
possible. I think it is one of the things that is unenabling – is the degree
to which the expenditure of public money needs to be seen to give tangible
electoral results and I have witnessed this at first hand. There is a
difference between what I call political decisions and good decisions. We
encountered them all of the time on the project. Maybe – how does a society
unhinge certain things about its cultural infrastructure and its development
in a city from – unhinge it from political decision making? Because I think
one of the things that has happened is that they have got too bound up.
MS HO: How far was this Centenary of Federation a galvanising issue in terms
of the timing and the time line?
MR DAVIDSON: It was for the conception and commencement or initiation of the
project. It was clear one day into the project that it would never make the
Centenary of Federation. It was an impossible task because the model of
building that was used was a shopping centre. All of the programs, all of
the budgets were all produced on entirely the wrong model. In the end – and
I love the fact that for the Centenary of Federation people made a great
joke about how it wasn’t ready – nobody says anything.
Two years later it doesn’t matter that it was late and it doesn’t matter
that it wasn’t built to the original budget. I will give you an example. The
original budget would have barely built the art gallery that was added from
the day the competition was announced. No-one ever mentions that in the
media. It would have barely built that.
QUESTIONER: One point, this notion of Thinker in Residence, I am actually
fascinated by the whole concept. It is a wonderful way of getting ideas –
but sense it is symbolic of an approach to we want to continue to plan, we
want to continue to think, but what I am going to propose is in the next
phase a decision maker in residence.
MS HO: Implementers in residence – and have to have strategic perspectives
unless they make decisions beyond a political framework and they make
decisions and they commit them outside and if we don’t decide in a certain
time they will do it for us.
MR DAVIDSON: For instance, I think one of the things that would profoundly
affect these things in Australia is to lengthen the period that Governments
sit for. It is three years – I am sorry, I think fundamentally in my
experience it is the most relative to some of the aspects we have been
talking about – the most debilitating thing, because the shortness of that
period accentuates the potential of project expediency.
QUESTIONER: The political cycle can work in the opposite way and, for
example, Swanston Street happened – Swanston Street Walk happened – because
the Kennett Government was in its dying days. It knew it was. Joan Kirner
wanted to do something that would have a long lasting effect. She said here
is $10 million for the council – and you have something worthwhile doing
with it, and the Melbourne City Council had been planning for some time for
the Swanston Walk, yes, we have got a great project, we’ll take the money,
thank you.
MS HO: Then it didn’t get stopped though?
QUESTIONER: It almost got stopped several times but in the end it didn’t.
QUESTIONER: You can do – I think you need to have both an incremental
approach and a strategic long term vision and you need to build up a
confidence in the community and the understanding in the community.
THE CHAIR: Kenneth?
QUESTIONER: I was really just introducing yet another dark cloud. I just
wanted to remind people that it is not just the political cycle but what has
happened with the competition policy in Australia over the last decade is
that now almost every CEO in the country and every senior bureaucrat is also
on the same contract – time frame – usually three to five years, so what you
find is that if you are operating, if you are working on a project which is
in the community’s interest in the sense that it is a – a lot of these
projects we are talking about go more than three to five years, as Peter has
just said, so that you can be in a situation where not only the Government
changes but all the CEOs change too and often they then have a corporate
restructure and they bring in new directors, so you can find yourself
dealing not just with new politicians but a whole team of new people.
Of course the new ones want to champion their project because their contract
says it would look better if they deliver something that they ….. rather
than the previous person who was on a three year contract delivered.
MS HO: That must give you a warm feeling of still being there. I wonder
whether this throws up a question – maybe it should be directed to Vinnie –
about bi-partisan charters on major projects. Should we as a community be
saying enough is enough. We planned that. It has been thrown out and now
there is another plan coming up. Why can’t we as a community have some kind
of commitment that lives beyond the political term? I don’t know. It is
probably very unrealistic.
MR DAVIDSON: I have an amazing letter that I received from the Premier of
Victoria, just basically acknowledging that what they didn’t think would
work exceeds anything that they imagined it would do. Publicly to the media
they say it wasn’t evident in the plans when we were in Opposition what it
was to be. It was all there in the plans.
It is only privately that those kind of things are able to be said and I
think it is a shame because it is very difficult as an architect to engender
that bipartisanship and I think that is - - -
QUESTIONER: I suppose that comes out – that CEOs who are trusting the people
who are experts in areas they have been asked to do designs, architecture,
and then trusting them and saying okay, rather than coming halfway and
questioning it or changing it without a knowledge of what we are talking
about. That is probably it has come back to understand what you were doing –
I think in Adelaide I feel like there is a lack of trust – say, in my case
you do these things and he is rather than questioning everything - - -
MS HO: I think you are bringing up the point that it is not just large scale
projects that actually do have a difficulty. I was thinking of the position
of the artist in terms of being able to get work out into the public realm.
It is a similar kind of issue.
QUESTIONER: Even when the work is out there and it may have been conceived
under all the right intentions and with the right kind of consultation it
gets front page press and everyone is down on it and the recent case of
Angela Hart’s work in Hurtle Square and that is something that is an ongoing
dilemma.
QUESTIONER: We were talking before – all of you I think – overlooking the
great enjoyment that everybody gets from getting involved in these things –
whether it is arguing the case over Victoria Square or Federation Square or
Anton’s work or anything else, it is a part of the life of the city is to
feel as though – I can’t say the newspaper does it very well – but to feel
as though you are actually engaging in some sort of debate with the
designers and so on, as the readers of the newspapers and the reports, is
part of that. It is really interesting that there has been this basic thing
going on today about the view of the architect which is trust us, let us set
this thing out, let us have it as an integrated whole and deliver it to you,
and the politicians and the CEOs and the general public all sort of milling
around saying is it going to work or is it going to be a disaster and so, to
me, that is a lovely natural tension that you would hope always is part of
the process. It worked in Federation Square.
MR DAVIDSON: It sells newspapers. I have really deep and profound problems
with the way that those things were enacted because we could never give
people briefings. They didn’t want to know. Twelve months before September
11 after the Buddhas in Afghanistan were blown up the tabloid newspaper in
Melbourne and its key feature writer suggested that the Taliban be brought
over and Federation Square be blown up. Not a single bit of irony in that –
not a single bit of irony. The campaign that was run by a series of people
at that newspaper was just amazing.
I think that there is an issue about the debate and it is actually how do
you encourage it because one of the problems with the newspaper – you saw
this even in the end with the ABC documentary – the only story is concrete.
The thing that for me was the most, the saddest thing in that ABC
documentary was that you don’t build a project like Federation Square on
concrete – you build it out of the most incredible alliances and friendships
and connections that work across the divides, if you like, to make it
happen. That is how it happens but it is not a story. For me it is an
incredible memory.
QUESTIONER: It seems to me it is the history of architecture almost – is
that debate and that conflict. There have been enormous fights over 400
years about buildings in Rome – St Paul’s in London – almost any major
project you can name - architects being sacked, committees storming out in
protest, public demonstrations, people being burnt in effigy – there has
been an extraordinary protest over the years. If anything debate in the 21st
Century is not quite as robust as it was in the 19th Century. I am just
saying it is part of the human condition. People – we live in a vigorous
democracy. People have the right to disagree and they have the right to
disagree using any forum that they have available to them and they will do
it and if you feel strongly enough about it you respond to that and it may
not always be on the terms that any of us wish it to be but you have to deal
with the circumstances that are there.
We are not going to have a situation ever where the politicians, who are
elected by the people after all, are going to hand over complete control of
projects to us. It is never going to happen. It is public money being spent.
Of course, there is going to be rigorous debate and a lot of it will be
uninformed. A lot of it will be wrong and there will be lies. There will be
distortion. We are human beings. That is what happens.
It is the reality of any large project and I think we just have to accept
that and deal with it as best we can. But we can’t sit here and say it
shouldn’t be like that because I think that’s not going to happen.
MS BRINE: That’s what we need squares for – precisely for a location for
dissention.
MR DAVIDSON: I referred in the beginning to this movement called Making
Cities Liveable, which is - some of you may know it as an organisation. We
were recently invited to present at one of their conferences, which was held
in Siena, which was about learning from Siena. We weren’t able to attend but
I would like to read you a paragraph that is currently the first paragraph
when you open their website:
Since September 11 the goals of the Making Cities Liveable movement are
shown to be even more essential. Our goal to strengthen community by
creating viable public places for social life in our cities will reduce
anonymity and increase grass roots democracy. Our goal to build a compact
mixed use physical fabric will strengthen neighbourhoods and create cities
of short distances where commuting by foot, bicycle and public
transportation becomes possible, thus reducing oil consumption and
dependence on Middle Eastern oil. We believe that this is the best way we
can use our professional skills to make terrorism less possible in the
future.
Now, we might all cringe in relationship to that but the questions about the
way that, particularly the acknowledgement of the car and oil consumption –
I have been incredibly amused by the contra movement in the US relative to
four wheel drive vehicles where now there are more four wheel drives sold in
America than sedan cars, and they completely lie outside all of the emission
regulations – completely.
So we went through and brought all these things in and then completely
undermined it by allowing this exception to now become the rule. This
organisation is incredibly powerful. Some of its – I mentioned this in the
beginning in terms of – a lot of the paradigms that are currently used to
describe the kinds of qualities of urbanism that are desirable all come from
some ideas that evolved in Europe in the late ‘70s – and it is traceable
back to one or two people. A lot of the language that is in this about
cities of short distances all comes from a man called Leon Krier, who is
incredibly influential as an urbanist. There is an interesting dilemma
because he thinks the only solution lies in reproducing the patterns of the
past.
I believe that there is knowledge – that things can find expression in the
patterns of the present and of the future, but there is an explicit
political description - being a problem with this – and one of the things
that living overseas and coming back here has shown me is how protected
Australia is to the resonance of some of these things, particularly in terms
of energy and energy consumption where energy here is way too cheap and that
we produce it using the most polluting brown coal in Western Victoria that
you could and facing up and addressing these issues – the issues of our
cities being incredibly urbanised but incredibly dispersed, how we make our
cities more sustainable, and for me I think one of the most poignant things
relative to this question of the square is that it, in a positive way, not
in the sort of paranoid ways of this to a degree, but in a positive way,
suggests another possibility for sustainability – another kind of space in
which we gather.
Someone made a reference before about these suburban shopping centres in the
UK – sorry, here. There is now a policy to stop building these in the UK –
to stop this form of commercial development, to actually have the vision
that says they are going to discriminate and consider the kinds of effects
that this kind of development creates and judge them against something as a
positive outcome that we want to achieve.
They are not Utopian – they are just to do with qualities of opportunity and
I think that it is really important. It is about quality of access to
facilities and that is why the existing city in its density does provide an
incredible mall – because there is a diversity there that I think encourages
an openness towards other people that is really important. Australia is the
luckiest country and the way that it conducts some of the public debates – I
understand what you said in terms of a condition of our democracy, but it so
distorts the issues by thinking that we are threatened. We are the least
threatened people in the world.
QUESTIONER: Openness to other people is something you just said, but it was
about what Hoff said about trust that made me think about these patterns of
the way we go about things, whether we call it – we might call it debate or
opposition – but sometimes those patterns actually close down and I am very
interested in the fact that you said that until you came here you hadn’t
actually worked some of the things about the project because there is a lot
to learn through conversation and conversation is where, if it is an
openness to others, is where risks can be taken, if the risk is big, to try
out new ideas. I’m just really interested in that idea of the patterns that
we set down.
MR DAVIDSON: You made the comment about democracy. I think one of the things
is we tend to get complacent about whether the conditions for it to be
re-enacted, for it to be re-imagined.
QUESTIONER: And the importance of the fact that people rally and debate –
dissention.
MR DAVIDSON: I was shocked at even something that was said in the last week
about the defeat of the republican question at the Referendum. The
republican question wasn’t defeated – a particular form of it was defeated.
MS HO: I think you are actually putting an argument – to give you an
example, we poll, we ask a question and normally we – very often we get the
negative out of that process. There is an organisation called Deliberation
Issues – Deliberations Australia – which has recently been involved in the
Constitutional Convention and the principle under which its Director
operates – Pam Ryan – is that in order to poll you need a deliberative
process so that people actually need to be exposed to deliberation about the
issue in quite formal ways, often, in order for the real position to emerge.
I think, with all due respect to Tim and the media, the media doesn’t always
enable that process to happen in a way that is meaningful for people.
I think we don’t have the squares. We are not moving into the squares, so
where do we actually undertake this deliberation? I think it does require an
enormous amount of orchestration to really tease out what people’s positions
are and they only do it – they only reach that position on the basis of
being informed. That is the process that we are really talking about here.
MR DAVIDSON: I don’t think a single outlet of the media is able to do it by
itself or can by itself. I think the real issue is about protecting
diversity wherever we find it because it is the thing that creates
robustness in a city, I think in the media.
QUESTIONER: I just thinking also in terms of congregation, in Birrarung Mar
they have reinstated Speakers Corner, I believe, in that park, which is
where traditionally Speakers Corner was, and in the new development is
Speakers Corner. I was just about to ask does anybody go there and speak?
MR DAVIDSON: I don’t think so.
QUESTIONER: The point is you can reinstate Speakers Corner as a place where
people could go and talk and speak and all of that but we’ve moved on. Our
moments of where we talk and how we talk and the kind of debate are
somewhere else and I suspect that some of what we have been talking about
today in terms of square or public space and the opportunity to converse
while being in public spaces as well as talking about it – here we are
talking public space and we are in the Starship Enterprise, just thinking
about the potential for this – for example for Victoria Square or the notion
of public space – to allow those conversations to happen. Does that happen?
MR DAVIDSON: Not in that idealised way but it may just be that it satisfies
the desire for it to happen. It is like one of those things. It is something
that still is there as a potential for that possibility but for me, getting
to the question that you asked, there is a really important thing as an
architect – as an urban designer, landscape architect – to provide images
because I think buildings and spaces are incredibly important collective
images. The question is: Are the current buildings and spaces we have
sufficient to what we think needs to be imagined upon? I think when all of
the buildings that you have are of the late 19th and early 20th Century I
think they are insufficient because they tend to be ones that don’t allow
difference. They don’t allow space for difference to be imagined on them and
that is why I think contemporary buildings do something that those buildings
can’t and I think it is important and it is actually – in a strange way it
is providing something that sounds more poetic but is really excessive and
important that it provides an image that actually people can imagine the
future with – those people who are different across the diversity of our
culture can identify with. I think contemporary architecture has the
capability and responsibility to do that.
THE CHAIR: I am just interested in whether anybody has got something that
they burningly want to say about what we have been talking about this
afternoon before we finish. Is there something that has not been said?
QUESTIONER: I suppose I have this passion about social literacy and perhaps
that it could be taught in schools and urban design could be taught in
schools as a cross-disciplinary thematic subject and I am doing it in some
schools and it is a project that is going to take centuries to achieve and
again in the arts – and I really do believe that people here have the
vocabulary and the understanding and interest and desire to be able to talk
about it but I tell you 99 per cent of the people don’t. So we end up
talking to ourselves.
QUESTIONER: That is a really good point and as early as possible in that
process. I think we underestimate the ability of a three or four year old to
actually grasp these sorts of concepts. They want to engage – that is their
way of understanding the world.
MR DAVIDSON: It sets up another I think inescapable dilemma – it is about
finding a language with which to communicate but it is like brain surgery is
not like something that everybody needs to know and you have got to be
really careful that you do not allow idiosyncrasies – the language, the
specialisations, the things that only the discipline knows about – to
actually be eliminated from the discipline because those things can’t be
communicated.
QUESTIONER: It is more about the why than the reason to do it.
MR DAVIDSON: Yes, but I think you have to be careful that you don’t teach
urban design as a course – I absolutely agree on the communication.
QUESTIONER: I think to go back to your original metaphor about the pathology
and what the internet has done for people diagnosing themselves on the
internet rightly or wrongly, which has had an enormous impact on the medical
profession. I think there is potential for it to happen. I know what you are
talking about – I guess the deskilling in a sense of designers. In some
respects I am encouraging it so that people can actually understand what it
is that is being put in front of them better. I am not opening up the debate
again, gets back to trust and trust the profession and design group. I guess
I take the opposite position.
MR DAVIDSON: But there is something radically happening in the software
development. It is probably going to take five to ten years to be emerging
but it is more radical than you can imagine – the development of interfaces
that allow people much more intuitive and creative engagement. It is a
challenge to us as a discipline. It exists now in terms of elements of
furniture where people can limit the defined set of parameters – create
something which is their own and get it made.
QUESTIONER: It pinpoints the point of engaging – I think that is about the
language. We have got to move the language forward and we have got to
understand a different way of teaching. You are quite right – it is the way
all the labels about urban design language – in that sense, but I don’t
think that stops, I think Ken’s point is about engaging with people,
particularly at primary level, is really important.
QUESTIONER: We have actually started building models that really clicked.
They knew what the space was going to do for them. They understood it,
rather than talking about it.
QUESTIONER: Why is this sounding to me like a memory of the arts sciences?
QUESTIONER: Yes, it is all about educational - - -
QUESTIONER: I would just like to pick up on Ken’s point. I think it is a
great one.
QUESTIONER: We went to the primary school – I think it is an important level
of communication, graphic communication, and understand what sort of
composition has been put into urban design.
END OF TAPE 3