Why I am a Whinger

Architecture | Urban Design

laide, moche, laide moche moche laide (belle). Photo © 2011 Alan Miller.

Why I am a Whinger

October 6, 2012Alan Miller

My reaction to the release of what Infrastructure NSW calls a 20 Year State Infrastructure Strategy was what I am going to call an epiphany. It was almost nothing, certainly born as much out of laziness as principle, more the morbid blue glow of the florescent lights in Sydney’s new made in China train carriages than an incandescent halo centered over the head. To decide ‘I shall have a cheese sandwich for lunch’ would be both more useful and more profound than my realization that I can’t, or won’t, or don’t want to write about Sydney’s boring and intransigent problems anymore.

Architecture | Urban Design

Why I am a NiMBY*

October 21, 2011Alan Miller

Three times in the past month, The Sydney Morning Herald, the city’s broadsheet of record by default, has published a particularly irritating kind of article on urban density. To paraphrase Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), this is not just a matter of chance. These articles, by the paper’s two resident economists and sole architecture critic, represent a disturbing and powerful tendency to treat cities as economic entities, blobs on a map rather than physical spaces. They don’t realize that you can’t extrude spreadsheets into skyscrapers. Help! The Borg economists are eating Sydney.

Architecture | Urban Design

Métro insolite by Clive Lamming (English translation)

June 10, 2011Alan Miller

There is a type of city, familiar but seductive, which resists writers even as its charms produce no shortage of readers. Paris, of course, is the number one suspect in the line-up. Overwhelmed by the city and its stories, writers run the perilous risk of being reduced to that style which is simultaneously vague and soppy (The American Society for the Promotion of Bad Writing About Venice was founded to celebrate such writing). Paris is too much, always too much, an excess which perhaps demands a microscope rather than an Imax camera. This was George Perec's approach in his famous Tentative d’Epuisement d’un lieu Parisien, a book as list of all that happens in one little corner of the city. Métro insolite is much more practical, but it too is an attempt to exhaust the inexhaustible.

Architecture | Urban Design

Métro insolite de Clive Lamming

June 10, 2011Alan Miller

Il y a une espèce de ville, familière mais séduisante, qui résiste aux écrivains lorsque ses charmes ne produisent aucun manque des lecteurs. Paris, bien sûr, est suspect numéro un dans cette parade d’identification. La risque pour les écrivains, périlleux, est d'être bouleversé par la ville et ses histoires, réduit à un discours à la fois vague et, souvent, gnangnan(La Société Américaine de la Mauvaise Ecriture de Venise existe à célébrer ce vaste genre de littérature). Paris est trop, toujours trop, et c’est peut-être cet excès qui exige un microscope au lieu d’un appareil Imax. C’était l’idée de Georges Perec dans son fameux Tentative d’Epuisement d’un lieu Parisien, un livre comme liste de tous ce qui se passait dans un petit coin de la ville. Métro insolite est beaucoup plus pratique, mais c’est aussi une espèce d'épuisement de l'inépuisable.

Architecture | Urban Design

Towards Bikeopolis, Part 1

May 4, 2011Alan Miller

One recent morning I witnessed a rare sight; two children, almost certainly brother and sister, were riding their bikes to school. They wobbled along the sidewalk of a busy road. The boy pedaled ahead on his BMX while the girl’s bike was too big for her, its chain rusted to the point where, rather than shift gears, she walked the slightest rise. Commuters alone in their cars sped by on the way to work, their kids’ schools, gym or supermarket. This being outer Sydney, the street made not the slightest accommodation for the two kids and their healthy, intrepid mode of transportation.