architecture

Architecture and open spaces

| Paul M Clark

Well hello readers. The post today comes from a university in the middle of Sydney. I gather it’s a centre of excellence for design. A pity there is no open space at all. Even the huge open spaces inside modern looking buildings seem closed and airless. One can actually cut the warm, stuffy air with a knife in places. in some of these places it actually smells. Not very welcoming. One can also enjoy fellow human beings sprawled as though unconscious around the few sticks of furniture. Oddly, there seem to be no mobile phone ringtones going off: this in contrast to Saturday night at the opera where some fool’s iphone went off at the start of Violetta’s death scene in Verdi’s La Traviata. I’m not sure why performance spaces are so tolerant of this. They claim not to be tolerant of it, but the warning to patrons about turning the things off is so wet that most of them don’t even notice. It usually can’t be heard above the pre curtain going up chatter, and in any case most of the patrons are more interested in talking about themselves at this point anyway.

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