But the authentic building of Cairo is the small tower block - five or six stories designed in a fashion so functional that the Bauhaus architects were lapdogs of ornamentalism by comparison. Slab floors were supported by reinforced-concrete posts and beams, like the skeletons of timber-framed colonial farmhouses - and, like colonial farmhouses, the tower blocks tend sometimes to the rhomboid. The space between the posts are filled with jumbles of approximately brick-shaped bricks and punctuated, apparently at random, with little windows and balconies. The outside edges of poured-concrete staircases poke through the masonry, their runs and risers making zigzag patterns. Dried oozes of mortar cling to the brickwork. Water pipes and electric wires are tacked onto the outside walls as if in half-hearted, rust-staining homage to the Pompidou Centre.
- P J O'Rourke, in Peace Kills

But our ugliest building, by a long, long way, is the old favourite Blues Point Tower, according to Spotlight readers. The Harry Seidler-designed apartments, rising high above Blues Point, opposite Walsh Bay, has [sic] been contentious since it was built in 1961. Plans to cover the remainder of the headland with similar monoliths were thwarted when it became apparent how unpopular the first one was.
- the Spotlight column in the Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 2004. reporting the results of a reader survey (and see third item below)

Street is to road as room is to corridor. Roads are about getting there, streets are about being there.
- Elizabeth Farrelly writing in the Sydney Morning Herald 11 May 2004

Still, it will sell. Magic futures do. Not because we believe in an entropy-free future, but because the very fact we don't scares us witless. Nothing sells a product like fear. Already it's virtually impossible to get three beds down there for under a million bucks.
But the ad-man's truth-gap applies. The rhetoric may be all about "joining seamlessly" with existing fabric and maintaining diversity of humans - South Sydney being one of the nation's oldest and most diverse cultures.
Truth is, though, this childless Sanitown will fit into daggy old South Sydney about as seamlessly as its sharp-edged 20-storey towers will meld into a rundown neighbourhood of three-storey warehouses and tarted-up workers' cottages. Gwan, pull the uvver one. This is a takeover.
- from Elizabeth Farrelly's unimpressed review of the latest masterplan for Green Square in South Sydney, in the Sydney Morning Herald 22 July 2003.

"Blues Point Tower is actually one of Harry's better buildings, it's just in the wrong place" - Philip Drew (architecture critic, author and historian)
"It isn't Sydney's ugliest building, not by a long shot, it's just completely out of context. A building should respond to what's around it and Blues Point Tower clearly doesn't. As a piece of architecture it's OK, but perhaps a bit mean. It looks like it wouldn't be a very nice place to live in." - Elizabeth Farrelly (architecture critic for the Herald)
"Just as well he didn't build the other 10 of them!" - Peter Kingston (artist and Lavender Bay resident)
"I hate that building, I really do. It's an ugly piece of rubbish." - Les Murray (poet)
"It doesn't worry me that people have criticised the building. What do you expect from illiterate people? They're insensitive and uneducated so why should I take that seriously?" - Harry Seidler (architect of Blues Point Tower)
- Various views on Blues Point Tower, Sydney's "controversial landmark", in "Blues Point Tower", Sydney Morning Herald September 28-29 2002.

...How did it happen? ... Just look at the Merton College Warden's Quarters - which is not by any means the worst building in the city. What a remarkable series of improbabilities were necessary to its construction. First, some architect had to design it, had to wander through a city steeped in 800 years of architectural tradition, and with great care conceive of a structure that looked like a toaster with windows. Then a committee of finely educated minds at Merton had to show the most extraordinary indifference to their responsibilities to posterity and say to themselves,'You know, we've been putting up handsome buildings since 1264; let's have an ugly one for a change.' Then the planning authorities had to say,'Well, why not? Plenty worse in Basildon.' Then the whole of the city - students, dons, shopkeepers, office workers, members of the Oxford Preservation Trust - had to acquiesce and not kick up a fuss. Multiply this by, say, 200 or 300 or 400 and you have modern Oxford. And you tell me that it is one of the most beautiful, well-preserved cities in the world? I'm afraid not...
- Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island

THE KID-ON-A-BIKE TEST
You are going to figure out whether your neighbourhood is a neighbourhood. You will need a street map of your city, some colored pencils, and a fourteen-year-old kid with a bicycle ...
... On the street map, mark with a heavy green line all those streets within a mile of your home that your child could bike continuously and in reasonable safety from heavy traffic. Now mark with a red X all those places your child might want to visit - the homes of school friends, a barbershop, a branch library, a CD or video store, a grocery, a sporting goods store, a dentist, an after-school job, and so on.
If a lot of the places you've marked lie on the network of green lines - if your child can safely and conveniently travel to many social, cultural, recreational, shopping and general maintenance destinations without depending on you to drive - you live in a neighbourhood. If not, you don't.
- William Greenberg, The Poetics of Cities

Good urban design enables people to get around safely, efficiently, and in pleasant surroundings, creating value in a fairly direct and obvious way. But good urban design also creates value indirectly by enabling a city's people to create value and make it available to others through free interchange.
- William Greenberg, The Poetics of Cities

What attracts people most is other people. Many urban spaces are being designed as though the opposite were true and what people like best are places they stay away from.
- William Whyte, City

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