Michael McGuire: Adelaide skyline suffers from ugly new buildings
It’s a hotel, but the only reason I could think of to stay there would be the joy of not having to look at it from the outside.
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There’s been a victory this week in the battle against the influx of ugly buildings into the centre of the city. Albeit, it might just be a temporary win.
But, as the Crows may not find out for quite some time, a win’s a win.
This win is something of a surprise, though, given all the other blights on the landscape that have been allowed to flourish in recent times.
It seems unlikely the State Commission Assessment Panel has suddenly developed a discerning eye for beauty. But I guess if you throw enough darts, you are bound to hit the board eventually.
The building in question is the proposed new Hyatt Regency hotel in Pirie Street.
As far as can be told from the artist’s impressions, it’s just another glass and steel monstrosity that you could find in just about any city in the world.
Not that its inherent lack of distinction was enough to have it knocked back. The trouble on this occasion was that it was too “shiny”.
Or, as the panel said, it had a problem with the “reflectivity of the building, in particular the western facade’’.
You would have thought the architects may have taken this into account when building a tower block in a city which increasingly suffers through brilliantly bright, intensely hot summer days that already have the capacity to sear the eyeballs.
What the city probably doesn’t need is a 93.5m tall mirror ball directing all that heat back on to the streets.
Anyway, hasn’t the Hyatt already inflicted enough ugliness on Adelaide?
That was the hotel chain responsible for what is now the Hotel Intercontinental on North Terrace.
It’s not that I am against development.
It would be good if we just tried a little harder to inject a little originality and elegance into the city skyline.
The redevelopment of the Adelaide Oval was a triumph.
The SAHMRI building is just fun to look at.
But it seems, in the city, the bad is going to outweigh the good.
Standing across the Torrens Lake and looking back at the CBD, and taking in whatever it is the Adelaide Casino people have built is fairly depressing.
The PR says it’s a hotel, but the only reason I could think of to stay in it would be the joy of not having to look at it from the outside.
It is a heartbreakingly ugly affair, which may possibly have a spot on the Gold Coast or Las Vegas, but looks totally out of place in Adelaide. Especially when it covers up the old-style grandeur of the railway station.
It’s also one of those buildings that will age badly.
If it looks awful now, imagine what it will be like in 20 or 30 years. It will be regarded in the same way we look at some of the concrete cancers built in the 1970s.
Trying to cheer myself up, I looked around at the Adelaide Oval.
And then discovered that the same people who delivered that wonderful stadium, have clearly decided it was a bit too good looking.
That what it needed was a little bit of the grotesque. So they whacked a hotel on the eastern side.
Which all makes me very nervous about what is going to happen at the Festival Centre Plaza.
In particular, the 27-storey tower that is going to be built there. Outside of plonking one in the middle of Adelaide Oval, it’s hard to imagine a worse place for such high rise in the CBD.
The whole development has been a long-running sore, mismanaged by Labor and Liberal. And, while approval for the public space has been granted, we still don’t know what the tower block will look like.
It’s hard to be positive that it will be anything other than just another unimaginative, cut-and-paste tower block sitting in an area that should be one of the premier public spaces in the state.
Visual amenity is important in any city.
If something beautiful is built, like the Adelaide Oval used to be, we all feel better about our city. If something ugly, boring or dull is built, then we all feel a little worse.