Elizabeth Farrelly

Elizabeth Farrelly

As an Associate Professor (Practice) in the Faculty of Built Environment, UNSW, Australia, I am passionate about the social, psychological and aesthetic implications of urban design and city planning.

Location Sydney, Australia

Activity

  • I agree, Giamila. I think architecture needs to be more than a billboard (and didn't we go through all that in the 70s, Charles Jencks?) And even as billboards go, this one's not great. But (on the other hand) it is interesting to have buildings that people are interested in. Good to shock people into engagement and debate...

  • Hmm. Clearly the more building you have the more material is used and the higher embodied energy etc. But if it is in the interests of persuading more people out of sprawl and into inner city apartments then the net gain in terms of energy is still immense.

  • Indeed.

  • Of course fame doesn't necessarily reflect talent, and talent doesn't necessarily result in better buildings. I agree with the suggestion that we are unhealthily obsessed by fame, which is often a means of avoiding exercising our own judgment as to what is good or bad architecture or design...

  • Yes, although Utzon is revered partly because he refused to capitalise on that reverence...:-)

  • Indeed - capitalising on the architect's global design rep could be characterised as unfair advantage, or as incentivising excellence. (Didn't we say that - or perhaps we only tried to say it - in the vid).

  • The question of community consultation is extraordinarily vexed, and difficult to get right. But this is no excuse for not trying. In Sydney, "consultation" has become - or is at least seen by most people now - a ruse, a pretence at listening while actually putting people's opinions straight into the shredder. This only builds suspicion and mistrust - when in...

  • I've been to District Six. With my kids I spent hours the little museum in the church, which is all that remains, showing hundreds of photos of the people whose lives and houses were wrecked. It's an extraordinarily moving experience and fascinating that so much of city planning seeks to impose order - in this case, the idea that people should live in...

  • Hi everyone! And welcome! It's a hundred years since the birth of Jane Jacobs, and 55 years since the publication of her masterpiece Death and Life, yet still we are so bad at actually doing what she wrote about; creating interesting, explorable cities with some sense of enchantment. Central Park Sydney is not perfect, by a long way, but it is still more than...