Design and Crime / by Tom Rivard

Architects and the irresistible carcass of opportunity

Pontius Pilate did it (with clean hands)

Albert Speer did it (with relatively cleansed hands)

Kim Beazley does it over and over again (state of big Kim's nails unknown)

Naturally, we're talkin' about jus' doin' your job, following orders, the old pay for play, the coin for the boing, the ageless currency of slap for tickle, tit for tat, thank you sir may I have another?

And these days, it seems, beyond politicians and groupies, no one excels at this activity in the professional realm like architects. Architects have always been caught between the hard rock of commerce and the soft squishy place of artistic endeavour. They command neither the means of their product (the money) nor the ends (the eventual use of it). Thus, when work beckons, in whatever form, the show dogs of the architecture world, big and small, will line up to jump through all manner of hoops and crawl up all manner of cavities, unquestioningly and obediently.

This is quite the opposite of an architecture of engagement and action, where the oft-neglected mantra might be: It's not what it looks like, stupid, it's what it does.

However, in the lip, sniff and suck world of commercial architecture, mantras, ethics, morals, standards and even lowly ambitions such as artistic integrity quickly succumb to a rising tide of agreeable behavior that, impinging as it does on all our lives, might be considered criminal. And so to indictments:

Redfern Police Station: when you walk through the streets of Redfern what immediately strikes you, in contrast to most Sydney suburbs, is the vibrancy of community there. Whatever its faults (and Commissar Sartor will insist, at the behest of his masters in real estate and development, that these problems are both legion and intractable) , there is a community, or better, a group of communities. Walk by the new "station" of the NSW police in Redfern and you might be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into Northern Ireland dead in the middle of the "troubles." Go on, have a walk, if you dare. On one side of Redfern Station, Eveleigh Street , long a site of governmental departmental salivation (both in appetite and in frustration) and home to Sydney 's longest running corroboree. Stop in, have a yarn; you'll be welcome so long as you bring along more than your prejudices. On the other side of the station, the former TNT towers, a pair of unambitious mini-behemoths, one now occupied by the remnants of South Sydney Council (victim to another earlier putsch by the oh so putschy aforementioned frankenschartor). Go on, have a walk around, and look right through the full height, full width plate glass windows of the Civic Centre, at the council foyer, at the one-stop shop, wander into the meeting spaces, marvel at the birdtree, wonder at the vast panoply of civic and community activity taking place before you.

Then, walk around to the other tower which, until its less than civic renovations, had a ground floor as glazed and open as that of tower 2. Now though, at the command of the NSW police, the entire ground floor of the building, directly opposite Redfern Station and Eveleigh Street , consists of solid concrete block and metal sheet lined walls, with high level windows redundantly covered inside by blinds. Various cameras pepper the walls above the bricked in windows. At the entry (yes, there is one) stacked sets of reflective glass doors force you to come face to face with your exclusion. The design, no doubt just what the clients wanted, is nothing so much as a great fuck you to the community.

No one would doubt that there are some severe problems in Redfern; however, even dim politicos and their unctuous servants might realize that a strategy to alleviate social problems is hardly ever best served by outright antagonism and aggression towards the victims (unless, of course, you serve in or worship the Bush administration but that's, as they say a whole 'nother story).

What does this have to do with architecture, you patiently ask at this stage? Consider a process whereby the designers of the Redfern Police station actually deign to ask a question: what is the station trying to do? If the answer was to arrogantly ignore the local community and set up a climate of hostile confrontation, then the solution is just about ideal. If the answer was to foster some kind of nascent dialogue between parties that till now treat each other with nothing more than suspicion, then why not look at a solution that addresses existing conditions, rather than blindly reinforcing them? One that comes to mind all too easily is the notion of the "cop box," the small scale, highly visible presence of police on the streets, not in a militarily hostile manner, but as a public resource. Police can then begin to be seen as an integral part of the neighbourhood, and not as an occupying force, an approach whose limitations we are reminded of every day.

An architect who considered the issues and challenged the brief might have come up with a simple missing ingredient to offer to the boys in blue combat gear stomping the streets of Redfern these days: transparency.

East Darling Harbour - "where?" you say, and rightly so. The competition (international, highly touted and, oh yeah, anonymous) for this highly valued slice of harbourfront, running from Walsh Bay to King Street wharf, is half over, with 5 finalists being selected from 137 entries. Though touted as an "ideas" competition, entrants were mandated to adhere to some hundreds of competition requirements or risk disqualification. Shepherded by the ubiquitous Chris Johnson, public servant par excellence, former "government architect" and now head of "urban renewal," the assessment committee of 10 acquitted themselves in a most "transparent" manner. Strangely, and akin to the planets aligning or Russell Crowe acting sensitively [insert telecommunications sponsorship here] or the Labour party having a policy, two of the selected entries were sponsored or authored by the largest property developer and contractor in the area, Lend Lease, who also, coincidentally, have their headquarters across the street from the competition site. Sir lord grand duchy Richard Rogers and his gal pal Martha Schwartz, yesterdays highly published don and doyen, respectively of high-tech (meaning hand crafted stuff that looks machine made) architecture and candy coloured landscapes cemented their place among the finalists by plastering their entry with a highly recognizable (even to the dimmest architecture student) portfolio of their built work. Do watch this space, or the trades, for the next stage in Mr. Johnson's career, which will surely involve many chatty dinners with Sir lord grand duchy Rogers and a lovely corner office and corresponding position with his pals in the Bond to see out a relatively agreeable career.

The reaction of the architecture community has been the predictable disenchantment; that of their august representative body, the Royal AIA, less so, and disappointingly so. In their official statement on the results to date, the Royal AIA commends the government, the competition organizers and public service in general. Like the fat girl coming too late to the party wearing much too much make up, the Royal AIA puts up their hand with a bagful of well meaning and meaningless suggestions, such as the need to couch the competition brief in platitudes such as "What does Sydney need/aspire to?" And like the dog that's been kicked too much but is unable to resist begging still at its master's table, the second part of the Royal's submission, about stage 2 of the competition, adds a litany of well meaning pleas to the now accepted presence of the previously mentioned fabulous five, such as accepting the "need" for acres of car parking, and timidly offering mind-numbingly mundane platitudes such as "options need to be explored.as the above ground option will mute street activity." Questioning even the presence of cars would be too, well, impolitic, in these days of go-go commercialism, where even the Opera House is for sale, if you, like the recently visiting Worldwide CEO Federation (sister organization to the WWF), are willing to offer enough money and boot licking opportunities to the bureaucrats who oversee our public property. The Royal AIA's further pleas all pivot around the salivacious prospect of its minor members collecting scraps from the big boys' feast, while parroting the underlying mantra of their patrons: "more development could be incorporated into the site," and finally, and not so subtly, what it's really been all about: "the site should allow for and encourage contributions from a large number of developers and architects," and "an array of developers and their designers to be involved," and, in case you weren't listening, "participation from a number of architects."

Never one to disagree, the Royal AIA has deftly elbowed all other commentary out of the fray and shivered and slimed up to the fore to lap up whatever rinds and crusts might be salvaged from the remains of this great white developer hunt. Certainly not on a par with the hunter nor his patron, and neither gun bearer nor even native scout in this ritual, the Royal and its members can only be reduced to scavenging at the carcass, jolly genteel jackals in bowties and designer glasses.

3A. The War of (sorry, on) Terror was but a glint in Donny Rumsfeld's yellow matter custard eye, the WTC ruins were still blazing, and there was still quite a good deal of powderised human remains wafting in the air over New York City, when the architect's friend, the august Max Protech gallery issued a call to architects to submit their visions for the "reconstruction" of the toppled towers. Not so much an act of defiance as one of opportunism, every dog and his boy (and do see the great 1975 film of the same name by L.Q. Jones featuring a young, unblonded Don Johnson - NB. the term boy is not inappropriate here as, with most matters architectural and public, the players were almost exclusively big boys, with the (always very, very visible) exception of Ms. Zahahaha Hadiditagain, whose work can really be considered neither feminine nor good, save for those acres of unbuilt graphics churned out by her exceptionally talented staff) leapt and leapt and eagerly leapt again at the chance to get their teeth on this very large bone. Some 137 submissions were tabled, all of them, in the best manner of little boys competing to see who can pee the furthest, the most egregious examples of wild west dick swinging skyscraperism seen since the competition for the Chicago Tribune tower in 1937.

One of the biggest swingers of them all, Daniel Liebeskind (whose Jewish museum in Berlin is a highly moving, seemingly once in a lifetime achievement of sublime grace, loss and memory befitting its subject matter) persisted (with the assistance of a rapacious PR machine) through all stages in the subsequent displays of testicularity to emerge the "winner" in the contest to rebuild. That his scheme for a suitably heroic and priapic tower has subsequently been taken over by the grand dame of American shafts, SOM, is of little bother, as Dan the Man will no doubt be able to still tattoo his name somewhere on the length of the mighty tumescence for future generations to read. Yet, amidst all the mass of throbbing and glistening towers competing for attention like so many lonely and desperate swingers on the internet, one of the entries to the Protech feast of jackals stood out, that by the (sadly) late Sam Mockbee, whose submission proposed, instead of a tower, a huge well, an inverted tower, carved into the bedrock of Manhattan: a place of reflection, introspection, mourning and rebirth.

But Mockbee was a rare bird, a southern gentleman who devoted much of the efforts of his Rural Studio (both professional and academic) to addressing the parlous conditions of the rural poor (read: black) in the deep south.

3B. Two days after the hurricane, the floodwaters were still rising, thousands were trapped without food and water, hundreds, if not thousands of bodies were floating around the Big Easy and Bush had yet to cancel his vacation. To some, though, the scope and scale of the devastation was apparent and, with this awareness, another realization: more work! Enter the hero architect, again in the form of Daniel Liebeskind, who, from his New York shabby chic offices seemingly oblivious to the third world misery, squalor and despair revealed by the disaster, does not hesitate to shoulder his way to the front of the queue in the race to get the biggest city planning contract since, well, Canberra (which is not so much a city, though, as an American style shopping mall searching for something to sell besides remaindered government policies - but more on that sometime later). Already licking his genteel chops (and making no effort to disguise his appetite) at the prospect of the feed, Mr. Liebeskind dreams, not about the social reality, that 80 percent of New Orleans that is poor, unhoused, and without a foreseeable future (and coincidentally black), but of the decidedly palatable cultural heritage of New Orleans: "And what could be more creative than Jazz?" he gushes, "It's the right theme. You can build in a rich way with a variety of voices, yet create an overall structure of harmony."

You can already picture the teams of bow-tied aesthetes wandering through the French Quarter, sketchbooks in hand (for Max Protech has taught them the value of the architect's sketch), dreaming of a master plan in which swarming nests of towers constitute the notes in a riff on a musical genre pioneered and developed by the ancestors of those tens of thousands of refugees sleeping on army cots in disused baseball stadia all across Dixieland and beyond for the foreseeable future. After all, water purifying systems, essential infrastructure and public transportation never figure big in any architect's portfolio, while choosing the right glass colour with matching timber screens on a developer's suburban office block will get you published in 13 countries.

However, now that most media outlets have banned the use of the term refugee in relation to the victims of the hurricane, architects can all rest easy that the real problems have been deftly spun into some one else's hands and busy themselves with the much more satisfying task of task of just lining up for the opportunity to do what they're told, but in the personal colours of our choosing.

After all, it's what we do best.