HOMO (Hotel Mona)
A not-so-fictional critique/pitch/story by George Smiley
When you go into the MONA
portal and click 'architecture' it's all there in the discussion –
preserving the sense of place, use of unifying natural surfaces and
materials. It's a residence and a vineyard on a peninsula on the
beautiful Derwent. And now it is a museum and other things and it is
awesome and monumental precisely because it isn't. Powerful
structural details are featured instead of bare minimums hidden
behind the usual plasterboard. And most of all it isn't tall or
pretentious with acres of glass or coloured flammable styrofoam
sandwich panels or crenellated with the obligatory dozens of
identical concrete, glass and stainless steel balconies.
The floated HOMO idea (to be found 'in the works') uses similar language but it must have been conceived by someone
else. At first glance the architect's Mark 1 concept especially looks like an old
'Fantasy and Science Fiction' cover and probably won't even stand up.
Automatically the mind's eye sees bits of glass, concrete,
handrails, and tiny tumbling bodies of silvertails hiving off from
beneath. The name is unfortunate enough as to hint at hoaxer
etiquette, which is always to give a clue to the in-crowd so they can
share the joke; normally signing off their missiles with names like
Terra Nullius or Mike H***. And this one is a hip statement that
tries too hard; not even pretending to be good business like the
'Fragrance Tower'; which might resonate in close and bustling
multibillion armpit Asia but here suggests industrial strength
organic volatiles and little green cardboard Christmas trees,
dangling from rear-view mirrors, probably exuding formaldehyde
and sick-making for 15% of the population.
Initial reaction aside,
HOMO is actually a very possible build. The powerful structural
details are there for all to see. It's an inverted Sydney Harbour
Bridge turned upside down on a pedestal, tied together across the top
with all else nestled within or suspended from the arch. But as a
revolutionary design it comes weighed down with technical
difficulties. We build things like we do because it works and all the
standard glitches are history. Beyond the horrendous cost overruns
that are so much a part of statement- making, new designs are a
nightmare for the people that have to build them. As well as
mathematical difficulties fabricating curved design (remember the Opera House),
revolutionary stuff is generally difficult to seal against weather without and corrosion within (remember the Russian revolution). But
so much time and money and thought has obviously gone into it that it
has to be more serious than a spoof for enticing sycophants, boosters
or investors to pile aboard before it sinks like the name portends.
Who will want to tell the kids, friends or neighbours they stayed
there? Maybe they'll change the name but for 300 mil you still have to clear AFTER operating expenses....the back of the envelope says close to 100 thou per day BFITDA (before Interest,Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization, which is paying the principle back along with the Interest). And really good business isn't making a statement, it's
selling one for consumers to make – THEY are supposed to be the
bunnies ponying up cash for the privilege.
Whether you are selling
apartments or renting hotel suites it's a competitive game which
begins with capital outlay and its usual baggage of interest rates.
They are still pushing zero or below at central bank level over much
of the globe after an unprecedented long and lame 10 year recovery
from the last major disaster and recession that motivated central
banks to provide working capital essentially free when corrected for
inflation. That's fine for borrowers in theory but in practice it
is a driver for over-investment in every field and the easy money is
a leverage trap should rates normalize. At the same time no-one on a
national level has any interest rate ammunition left to cut and
so stimulate economies and thereby bail too-big-to- fail financial
institutions. After having to bail them directly in 2008 it became
obvious to a number of national governments that they too might be
faced with failure next time. The ex- governor of the Bank of Canada
later admitted that ALL the major Canadian banks had been technically
insolvent. So Canada, the EU, and the USA have since legislated
'bail-in' provisions where bank depositors aka 'creditors' may well
be shouldering much of the burden in some future replay of 2008 in
return for shares in insolvent institutions.
Wherever we are in the
business cycle, principles are the same. First a developer needs
connections in local government where others with similar interests
are sure to be found. They take turns recusing themselves from votes
pertaining to their own financial interests which are then seamlessly
passed in their absence. Contrary to popular belief these are not
men of taste and vision; and the POTUS himself is proof positive. The first step
is to latch on to a property 'steal' and the easiest way is by tying up what you want in
a conditional contract subject to zoning changes. When your superior
connections and the architect's sales pitch wangles the impossible that priced your bargain-basement acquisition of
Boardwalk, the project is a guaranteed winner regardless of cost
blow-outs, local rage and fruitless opposition as the owners of
lovely homes in quiet suburbs find themselves viewless, sunless, and
pressed over rates, traffic and parking. So your average developer
doesn't hire an architect for his design skills, rather his ability
to hype and get some piece of crap through the hurdles. Aside from
the rationale about jobs, development and prestige, projects are
designed specifically to maximize the return per $ invested. And
the best way to do that is stack cheap and nasty little rabbit
hutches on top of each other as high as you can go; hype them with
the architect's name in lights, and build to maximum size on minimal
space to minimal standards.
How do I
know all this? Unlike other critics such as Prince Charles and Paul
Keating I am eminently qualified, having built a lot of it over my life; most recently scuttling around with the other dumb-dumbs
hanging doors and installing joinery all over the city during
Sydney's great Olympic building boom, starting with the Raffles Tower
above Grace Bros. Believe this. None of those boys will ever stay
there but expect to be back in ten years ripping out and replacing
all the fittings in major renovations. And in relative terms they
weren't that cheap, just that they aren't good enough to maintain
grace and ambience with age or be worth repairing. Nor were we
hourly employees as dumb as we looked. Every subcontractor I worked
for was LOSING money even at the height of the boom. General
contractors are also subject to the laws of competition and they get
several quotes from each trade for every stage of every project. It is inevitable that
amongst the queue of estimators, some wild optimist will make a
mistake and his employer is stuck with the job. Some try to recover their losses by pushing the limits
of legality; on one of my jobs a subcontractor beat
the system by packing imported Korean stonemasons like sardines into
low-cost rented accommodation. They were ill-fed and underpaid; kept
in the dark on wage entitlements and slated to be sent home before
they wised up, thanks to our enlightened foreign worker legislation.
Although they would never or could never speak to you, the CFMEU found out anyway
and they got their wages in the end.
It happened to
everyone. My boss on the same project tried to stiff us on our
hourly wage by putting us on ridiculously low contract rates. I and
two Irish guys had a word on the legality of this with the union
steward while the biggest of our supervisor's three English drinking
buddies who he called his 'Main Men', stood behind the shop steward. He must have been especially assigned to follow the steward around and he stared fiercely and meaningfully at us, making throat-cutting gestures. Within
minutes our phones rang and we found ourselves carpeted in the
basement. We were exiled out to the far-western suburbs for the duration, fixing up a
gutted pub with no beer, floors or doors. Out there people couldn't
keep their mouths shut either, and the publican's man, a newly-wed,
besotted young Lebanese or Greek insisted on sharing his wonderful revelation about giving oral sex. The normally loquacious Irishmen and
myself, who had spent days rehashing the entire history of English
perfidy from the Battle of the Boyne to Pyrmont Cove
were dumbstruck and embarrassed. Union intervention is only frowned upon by management and while rough language is everywhere on
site, the topic of love is strictly forbidden.
After our re-education we
were brought back for the end of the next phase, a lower-rise
Italianate wonder almost beneath the bridge. Under might have
been better as all the ornate exterior cornices and general gingerbread were
made of yellow plastic foam and slated to be destroyed by UV in the
long term or the next major hailstorm. We were almost immediately
carpeted (again) when our Judas went crying to the boss that we
wouldn't speak to him. We were split up and I spent a day gluing
incongruous white melamine craftwood shoe stands in the vast walk-in wardrobes of
Renzo Piano's Macquarie St. masterpiece. At quitting
time I walked out through the endless, ugly yellow timber-
panelled lobby and passed Renzo's uniquely contemptuous snook at local
authorities, customers and poseurs; a pair of giant, perfect white marble
testicles, each the size of an ambulance. I had damaged my own a few weeks earlier during an
awkward lift, while my offsider broke his wrist simultaneously by
falling into an empty swimming pool; in separate incidents it should
be noted. The union got us both patched up satisfactorily, he with a cast and I was stitched up internally with something like an onion bag and went
to work elsewhere.
My new employer was
Sydney's most venerable joinery company. As I was installing their
custom factory -made units at a small bar/club casino redevelopment
there were waiting times and to avoid censure the lead hand and I were always seen hard
at work – with the help of occasional 'foreigners' (piecework jobs
for others) I had sourced which means you double your money AND appear to be
keeping busy; so much better than the pokies that were yet to be
installed. We finished the Concordia Club job about the time the
last races were run. Sydney died then and I was let go. Several years
later the joinery firm was itself wound up after a century
in business. The Concordia in Stanmore was abandoned too, after surviving numerous ups and downs since its inception during WW1 by local Germans hoping to
be seen as Aussie patriots and general good guys. Then came more
marvels, like raising the roof on the Leichardt Cathedral, right on busy
Norton Street to fit new soundproofing at government expense for the
change in Sydney Airport flight paths. The century -old
centimetre thick black dust layer in the attic had been analyzed and
remarkably pronounced free of asbestos and lead. Sound proofing was
done for everyone along the flight path along with double glazing too,
and the Tasmanian government should take note, it will be relatively
cheap to do this for the folks at Sorell.
So that's construction,
the second rate, down and dirty underbelly of agent and architectural
hype and it ultimately may not be the driver of general economic
growth and good fortune it's cracked up to be. Will or can HOMO be
the salvation of Berriedale and Glenorchy? Of course the boosters
will climb on board – any growth feels like a plus for local
business. For a few months the young apprentices on the project buy
their meals of Red Bull and Dagwood Dogs at the local milkbar but
everyone else packs a lunch. There is no actual reason to stay there
other than going to Mona, which is always worth a day but Hobart is
where everything else is and a better place to spend a night. If the
misspent part of my youth hadn't flown just as surely as the
responsible and meritorious bits and I were once again eighteen years old and the
proud owner of a worn but hot twin carby Datsun 180b I wouldn't
even stoop to doing blockies in Berriedale. Not even on warm summer nights when you hang your arm out the window and
absent-mindedly thump the door panel with your thumb when passing a
pretty girl so she might notice your tattoo and how the motor will
rev. But any time of the day or night it would be hard to resist a
look in the lobby of a new hotel if there was something fabulous to
see; like a beautiful rotary stainless steel on white nylon machine
that cuts the heads off chickens; sequenced after they have been killed and auto-plucked which is unfortunate for art but it simplifies the project considerably.
That is a serious offer.
I acquired it on a whim; it was gorgeous, an absolute bargain but far
too big and heavy for my living room. With a simple 'sixties
industrial' fabricated stainless steel support structure and safety
grill, stretchy silicone rubber chicken corpses and drive mechanisms there would
hardly be room for the sofa. And even 'as is' my wife thinks it has some
unsuitable 'je ne sais quoi' which means she hates it but doesn't
want to hurt my feelings. But there is room overhead for a matching
chandelier of detritus from the same process line, with cast lead
crystal birds suspended by their legs.
There is something wrong with humanity. This stuff not only
passes for art but is sought after, at least to look at. For a
practitioner the process is a gas - there are endless technical and aesthetic decisions to make, and at the end it has to work every way in 3 dimensions.
But weeks or months of hard labour are consumed by voyeurs in an
instant. Ho hum and we move on to the next cheap thrill, our chicken-
killing virginity assaulted, erased and neither better nor worse for it. The average
middle-class urbanite was clueless about the industrial life and
mechanized death of their $8 piping hot barbecue paprika chickens and
now is not. In
offering a passing frisson from some banal revelation, the idea of modern art
acquires a significance in our lives not matched by the work itself, competing as it does with endless soundbites
and magic toys.
Squirrel monkeys in captivity have been observed making arrangements of sticks. When a lively intelligence is deprived of the immediacy of danger and competition it has to do something for stimulation and it needn't be significant. And for plodding, domesticated homo sap. everything is temporal now, today's I-phone is tomorrow's fishing weight. But we aren't yet devoid of our inborn, ageless intuitions: frivolity, amusement, and diversion have always been the only
reasonable pursuits in plague years. Flying share markets via free
money and even digital money madness proliferates while garbage kills
the seas and continent wide land-clearing kills the koalas, which are
sort of cute and interesting but not especially likeable. Nor would
it help them if they were. They are the vanguard in the planetary
march to oblivion, being followed, not so obviously as yet by us, who
can be similarly described.
As the seas rise and the
Derwent Estuary grows to a broad and stormy harbour, the Tasman
Bridge will submerge for much of its length, and perhaps drowned
Sandy Bays will re-establish higher on the slopes of Berriedale and
Glenorchy. Rising ever higher, storm waves smash long- abandoned
remnants of walls and windows while salt water strips the rebar from
rotting concrete foundations. And on some stormy night the HOMO palace itself will tip from its ruined pedestal into the sea and float - an ark,
devoid of guidance, hubris, self-indulgence or sexed pairs of wannabe survivors. If it
doesn't founder on the rocky bluffs of the Botanic Gardens it will
float out to sea with the tide, past the crumbling sea- stack of the
Fragrance Tower where the little handfish grope in the deep
dark below. These will survive further upstream, breathing the
oxygenated river water. Having backbones too, they are way ahead of bivalves or lobsters in the race to slither up from the ooze one day and begin their long journey to take our place. Out to sea in
slower, deeper waters the shales begin to be laid down from silt and
topsoil scoured from the blistering land by swollen
rivers, augmented by algal hydrocarbons drifting down like snow, unconsumed
through the suffocating murk.
It happened before in the
truly great extinction 150 million years before the asteroid. Much
of the Tarkine forest grows on those greasy black pyrite-rich shales and after
the trees have been stripped off or died we may yet turn it to our
advantage by strip mining the stones themselves, grinding and cooking
it in giant retorts to win the precious hydrocarbons. If the usual millions of dollars of public money are forthcoming to make it viable it will be the a jobs bonanza, twenty maybe which will be enough to carry Circular Head electorally.
And one day under the red
sun a crawler with a hydraulic breaker will be mining the shale
slopes of the Derwent Uplift. Sunlight glints in the operator's eyes
from the quiet and distant sea and the smoking retorts stand behind
him. It's boring repetitious work that makes a complex mind wander and he
almost misses something nearby, poking out from the uniquely poisonous bottom layer that defines the orebody. He pulls it gingerly
out with the big arm, rattles it gently with his breaker and the
stone falls away in layers. Whatever it is, it is vaguely
cylindrical and shines in the sun and for a moment he is transported
by its mystery and complexity, but his mind is swiftly reclaimed by
the practical demands of the moment.
“Cripes, that'll be
worth a quid or two. But the boss will bloody want it.”
Flummoxed, he scratches
thoughtfully around his vestigial caudal fin, and then his opposite
index finger pokes the air triumphantly. He climbs back in the
machine with a clear plan and with the long arm he scrapes dirt over whatever it was for future retrieval; surreptitiously, maybe on the weekend.