HOMO

                                               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.