Modern Dressed as Lamb

Most people don't regularly wander through the 'Business' end of the CBD (the area west of Elizabeth Street) unless they (a), work in the arcane worlds of finance or law, or (b), view the macabre activity of smashing a beer glass into someone's face in King Street as the perfect end to a night out.

Unfortunately, those of you who belong to neither category are missing out on some of the city's finest architectural gems. To remedy this, I recommend you catch a tram to the DFO building on Spencer Street (itself not a gem, but rather one of the city's - if not the world's - most dispiriting buildings) and find your way back on foot, snaking back and forth mainly between Bourke and Collins.

I'll leave you to find the gems on your own. Today I want to point out a strange phenomenon that I keep noticing - one that might not immediately catch your attention.

The western end of the city has a good supply of brown office buildings from the '60s and '70s, and I have recently become interested in the way these buildings are appreciated and treated by their contemporary occupants.

Although modernism is very much back in fashion these days, the fashion tends to be limited to slightly earlier incarnations of the modernist spirit - a spirit which, in architecture, tends to be associated with smooth surfaces like glass and steel, plastic and perhaps a bit of timber veneer (think Mad Men).

The subsequent era - when architects rediscovered their feelings for solid walls and course textures, seems to be a little harder to love. I don't believe that these buildings are inherently unlovable, but rather that the cycles of taste will require a few more revolutions before the city's first intrepid souls will begin seeking to understand the very real, very human thoughts and feelings that went into creating these buildings.

But we're not there yet. As far as I can tell, these brown beauties are still troubled by the close, sweaty discomfort of the recent past, and the expectation that someone is about step out the front door wearing a brown suit will take some shaking yet.

Source

The buildings' contemporary users have found a simple solution to this: at street level you add something new and sleek, in metal and glass, to the front of the building. An awning will do, but if you have the space, a whole sleek, glassy antechamber-thing is the way to go. And you're done! People coming and going will hopefully be unburdened of any sense that the building they are entering or exiting belongs to the era that inspired the delicious offering above.

There are many examples of this to be found, but I wanted to show you just a small sample. I was particularly excited to find that the three examples photographed below have all found EXACTLY the same solution to their brown problem - green glass add-on things!

I have no idea why.

I titled this post with a play on the expression, 'mutton dressed as lamb' - used colloquially to describe a person who tries to look or seem younger than they are. The implication of course is that perhaps these buildings would do better, and seem more dignified, if they dressed in a manner appropriate to their age, instead of adorning themselves with the latest glassy fashions.

This next one I actually don't mind. The wavy awning is a bit whatever, but the bay windows are sort of fun and cheeky. If you're going to give a building like this a makeover, having a sense of humour about it is a good start, I think:

I am getting into purely speculative territory here, but I like to imagine that these buildings - instead of playing dress-ups, or even simply being laid bare in all their muttony glory - could be properly rejuvenated - restored to the vigour of their youth. Now it seems likely that even in their day, many of these buildings lacked the kind of vigour you would bother restoring. But if these buildings fell short
of the highest aspirations of the era that created them, could we not improve them in such a way as to imbue them with some of these missing qualities?

We would of course have to try and identify what these aspirations might have been, before we go adding new street awnings and other sympathetic appendages.

I like to imagine that in 'going brown', the architects of these buildings were trying to combine the nature-defying progressiveness of steel and glass modernism with something else - a sense of the weight and permanence of solid masonry. But truthfully, the association that comes to mind when I look at these buildings is something less cerebral. I think of James Bond - which is perhaps just a more colourful way of thinking about the Cold War. The idea of a building that feels more solid and enclosed than a glass tower seems to me to be about security. These are walls that you can hide behind. Today, we live in an age that feels strongly about 'transparency', an age when design magazines use the words 'flooded with light' as though windows had just been invented. Is there any wonder these buildings lack appeal? To imagine what appeal such a world might have had, I think we need to complete the picture, and I think that the glamour of James' world might be the key. I'm thinking a mixture of brass or gold, some stained timber, a tasteful portion of exposed concrete and red carpet - everywhere carpet.

This last one is the most spectacular, and most recent example of the glass add-on thing phenomenon. It isn't green:

The awning - for want of the right word - is, in and of itself, quite a beautiful thing, but the combination of awning and building is just a little jarring.

This skyscraper, from 1978, actually quite appeals to me. The enormous column at each corner of the building forms part of a super-sized exoskeleton that is essentially a magnificent exercise in structural heroics. What you can't see - as it is now hidden beyond the new glass addition - is the enormous 3 metre (I'm estimating) deep concrete beam that spans the entire width of the building. You can, however, still peer under the awning to appreciate the wide column-free space this structure creates at the front of the building.

Lastly, I would mention that you don't need to wander into the wild west to see examples of dressed up late-modernism. Here, for you to ponder, is RMIT's characteristically quirky treatment of this Brutalist behemoth on Swanston Street: