May 29, 2006
By Neil Fraser
BEFORE finishing off what I started last week, I must say that this has been an eventful week for the city. The City budget presented by the executive mayor, the announcement by the Premier of the Gauteng Global City Region initiative, the announcement by the minister of housing of the conclusion of a R42-billion deal with the banks providing access for low-income families to purchase houses, and down at street level - where things actually happen - the completion of the erection of the mining headgear as part of the Main Street upgrading and theming.
All of them need comment and deserve at least a Citichat each, but here are some quick thoughts:
Budget
Following a cursory look, which is all I have had time for this week - I like it! It looks like a positive attempt to provide the wherewithal to address our problem areas. A couple of issues popped into my mind.
I would have liked to have seen the Johannesburg Metro Police Department allocation not so much being spent on increasing the force numerically, but a big whack being spent on high-level training - we need our city policing to be more effective!
There is not enough being spent on library services and public places - although its great to see that Soweto is getting R7.6-million for greening their area - our public places in the inner city desperately need some TLC.
I've previously quoted Enrique Penalosa, the president and founder of an organisation by the interesting name of the Foundation for the Country We Wish and Want and a former mayor of Bogota, who stresses the great need in developing countries and cities for the democratisation of the public realm: "We all need to see other people. We need to see green. Wealthy people can do that at clubs and private facilities. But most people can only do it in public squares, parks, libraries, sidewalks, greenways, public transit …"
Finally, there is not nearly enough for 2010 - we are never going to get the city ready in time for the Soccer World Cup if we don't start spending serious money now. If it isn't in this budget then next year will be way too late!
Gauteng Global City Region
When this was first mooted a couple of years back I was sceptical, but as I've researched and learned more about city regions I've become convinced that it is the only way to go. More later.
Low-income housing deal
Great, we need more.
Mining headgear
I saw it on Tuesday when I took a group from Wayne State University around the city and it is most impressive, although one of the Americans muttered that he didn't think it was exactly street art.
The headgear was built by a Johannesburg Company in 1950 for JCI, later Anglo Platinum. It was a dual-purpose headgear built to hoist both people and materials, which is evidently quite unusual. It weighs 48 tons and stands some 25 metres in height and is valued at R800 000. It was made available to the Main Street Mall, the private sector property consortium, by Anglo Platinum.
World Class Cities and Iconic Architecture (2)
An architect whose name seems to have become synonymous with iconic design, Frank Gehry (the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Disney Hall, Los Angeles and others), was asked when the tradition of recent iconic buildings started and around which building. His answer was surprising: he suggested that it was Philip Johnson's 1978 AT&T building in Manhattan. He tried to justify this by saying that it was the first building to get the kind of media attention that iconic buildings attract - the front cover of Time magazine, the front pages of the New York Times and a number of other international newspapers.
I certainly always thought that the Sydney Opera House was the forerunner of the modern trend, but Gehry says the building was so immersed in economic and political problems that "it cast a pall on the project".
Be that as it may, the Sydney Opera House, which was in fact completed before AT&T was built, certainly made a greater impact on Sydney than the AT&T had on New York.
Paul Goldberger, the New York Times architectural critic, christened the AT&T building "The Chippendale High Boy". Charles Jencks, to whom I referred last week, the author of The Iconic Building - The Power of Enigma reflects on the fact that the architect of the Sydney Opera House was fired before the project was completed but that the Australians had to apologise to him in 2000 when they re-engaged him to work on rebuilding the inside of the building. "The country had to apologise to an architect," says Jencks. "That's iconic."
Interesting that when Gehry was asked to submit his design for the Bilbao building, part of his brief was to produce a "hit" building "equivalent to the Sydney Opera House" that would "do for Bilbao what the Sydney Opera House did for Australia." My feeling is that the Sydney Opera House initially attracted millions who wanted to see the building, but today people go to Sydney because they want to visit Sydney and the Sydney Opera House is just one of the interesting places to visit.
Bilbao, on the other hand, irrespective of the Guggenheim, has not seen as much urban revitalisation as one would have thought so you do tend to go to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim (and the Calatrava bridge); Bilbao is secondary.
You don't go to London to see Norman Foster's Swiss Re or his London City Hall ("the icon of a thousand nicknames"), but they are buildings you would look up if you go there.
Nor to Birmingham specifically to see the Amanda Levete and Jan Kaplicky Selfridges, and so on. Certainly the trickle of icons built before the Bilbao Guggenheim became quite a flood after it was finished.
Jencks says: "Now every new corporate headquarters seeks to be an icon, has to have a nickname that sums it up, a one-liner, a bullet point that journalists love to hate, love to spice up their workaday prose - "erotic gherkin" or "shard" or "crystal beacon".
"Tall buildings are no longer content to be concealed phallic symbols, they have to come out of the closet, declare their sex, strut their stuff. Office workers are no longer drones; they are Gordon Geckoes, scoring millions in their high-flying missiles. Norman Foster's Swiss Re headquarters challenges the dome of St Paul's, and every previous symbol in the City of London: the other skyscrapers around, especially the taller ones. It is simply better, more interesting, cooler, more convincingly built, more ecological, more inventive, more optical … and more iconic."
That last sentence is what I would like to see for Joburg.
Oh, that we could say about many of our modern buildings that they are simply better, more interesting, cooler, more convincingly built, more ecological, more inventive, more optical … and more iconic!
Iconic structures can and do have amazing impacts for the cities or places where they are built. But whilst the Sydney Opera House or the Bilbao Museum attracted millions of visitors and helped to put them on the map, does a city need to have one or more to be considered a great city, a world-class city? I don't think so - but what I do think is that an abundance of "good architecture" in a city can help to reflect the five senses that make cities special because they impact positively on quality of life.
"Places have an impact on our sense of self, our sense of safety, the kind of work we get done, the ways we interact with other people, even our ability to function as citizens in a democracy. In short, the places where we spend time affect the people we are and can become."
The five "senses" that have been identified over the past decade as having a considerable and positive impact on place and thus on the economic health of cities are:
- A sense of place - the need to differentiate and express the particularity of one's city.
- A sense of identity - cultural and physical attributes are critical to differentiation.
- A sense of evolution - the physical fabric of a city must reflect its functional, cultural aesthetic and historical evolution.
- A sense of ownership - a good city is one that teaches citizenship in the deepest sense of the word, and such cities are not only teachers but are themselves always learning how to be better places.
- A sense of community - an acknowledgement of the obligations to and interconnectedness with all its residents.
What you don't want said about your city is the following comments I came across on Columbus, Ohio:
"What do outsiders think of when they hear Columbus? Think of it this way: what do you think of when you hear, say, St Louis? The arch or, perhaps, the blues? How about Detroit - cars, inner city problems? Or Cincinnati - riverboats, hills? Well, when I think of Columbus, absolutely nothing comes to mind. Someone once said Columbus was a city of 300 000 people who came to see the state fair and decided to stay."
At the other end of that scale was the quality of place that I experienced in Australian cities - and also in a number of American cities - to a large extent brought about by their great public buildings. There, the public sector clearly takes a pride in their buildings, spaces and structures using them to make a statement about the place in which they are situated. You'll often find an American saying with pride "Oh, have you seen our IM Pei or Daniel Libeskind …?"
Library, art gallery, whatever: somehow the public buildings lift the quality of private sector design as well giving an overall feeling of pleasure rather than no feeling at all, as with Columbus.
What pictures have I carried away in my mind about Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Fremantle even though my visits were very short? The Sydney Opera House; Melbourne's new railway station and its Federation Square; Perth's Barrack Square with its Swan Bells Belltower (and its 140 hectares of parkland); the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle - all public sector stuff and only one acknowledged icon amongst them.
If I look around Joey's inner city, I find little that really excites me about our modern buildings, whether public or private. The Constitutional Court and Apartheid Museum - yes; the Nelson Mandela Bridge - yes/no. What else?
Let's face it, generally our modern public buildings are schlock. So there is no positive example provided to the private sector that will leverage their design to new heights and the overall result (saved to an extent by some wonderful heritage buildings that we are intent to destroy) is an environment that doesn't relate to the "five senses".
Next budget, Mr Mayor, let's put some extra cash aside to invest in good architecture for civic buildings and some great public spaces - even if we have to import the designers.
Take care, Neil
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