Bad reasons to spend money on JSB replacement
Reason #1?
- “I think the bridge is ugly.”
Ok, I’m not sure that’s Reason #1, but it sure gets a lot of play from some sectors.
However, there are plenty of people who feel differently, otherwise, why would so very, very many photographers spend countless hours photographing the bridge?
Ugliness and beauty are venerable aesthetic tropes – because at least they’re both interesting and not boring. Think about it.
What’s uninteresting is boring blight, which is why youth culture flocks to interesting cities and not to uninteresting suburbs.
So far, City of Victoria Council has no ideas for (or put money towards) an iconic (read: interesting) new design, and, promises notwithstanding, it’s impossible to see how, given the tight timelines, anything approaching a design competition is even plausible, much less likely.
If ugly is interesting, and beautiful is interesting, too, and if some people think the bridge is ugly and other people think it’s beautiful, that means the bridge is interesting.
Interesting, interestingness. If you don’t understand the concept, maybe you shouldn’t be in the business of civic leadership.
Ask yourselves why replacing the bridge with something boring (that is, with something uninteresting) should be considered an improvement of any kind, versus an expansion of blight?
Uninteresting suburbs are today’s blight. Unless we’re trying to suburbanize Victoria, the argument that “the bridge is ugly” carries absolutely no weight.
The bridge is interesting – and in an attention economy, being able to attract eyeballs is valuable (Tourism Victoria, are you listening?).
If Victoria’s civic leaders don’t understand this, we’re in deeper trouble than even the recent Times-Colonist article, Retirees will soon outnumber people joining a shrinking Victoria area workforce, intimates. Creative, youthful individuals don’t want to live in the suburbs.
Please, let’s stop trying to make Victoria uninteresting.
[...] please take a look at my first blog post there, Bad Reason, 1, subtitled “Bad reasons to spend money on JSB replacement.” I worked up some steam [...]
How are you so sure any replacement will be boring? Personally, I think the current bridge is ugly and nothing but a stain on our skyline like the View Towers. I’m in favour of replacing it. But I’m also all for proper disucussion and debate about the merits of refurbishing the current bridge vs replacing it. You seem to agree that the current bridge is ugly but assume any other bridge will be boring? Do you have any details to give merit to those assumptions?
Yes the bridge is an icon of the city, but really, any bridge that gets put there will be. And why can’t a new bridge be both interesting and beautiful? It can’t be very hard to do better than the current bridge. Why are people so bent to “save” the current bridge when it is so ugly? Just because the engineer who designed it is famous for a different bridge he made? It makes no sense to me. Besides, why couldn’t a new design also pay homage to the old blue bridge, but not be ugly? There is lots of room for improvement in my opinion and the only reasons to keep the old bridge seem to be misplaced sentiment, not logic.
Hi Graham, thanks for the comment – and I hope you had a chance to read my response to the comment you left on my personal blog as well.
The reason I have for believing that Victoria won’t build anything interesting is based on prior evidence. Show me one interesting build project the municipality has done. Consider the Save-on-Foods-Memorial-Centre: underbuilt, cheap, nondescript, boring, too small, chintzy …shall I go on?
As I wrote on my personal blog in response to your comment there, it’s also the case that there just won’t be time to come up with a great design, given the tight timelines the city is trying to work under. The Federal grant guidelines decree that the project has to be completed between November and February, an amazingly brief window for a relatively significantly-sized project. It’s already the end of July – where is a great design supposed to come from, and when/ how could it possibly be incorporated?
I’m not alone in thinking that the city’s newly announced contractual obligation (at $3.2 million) to MMM Group is, uh, disappointing. In these times, $3.2m is not chump change, and it’s amazing how quickly the city found the money for this contract, yet can’t find the money to get city crews to paint officially legal sharrows on city streets…
While it’s not yet known whether MMM Group will oversee the design of the new bridge directly, their portfolio of bridge projects leaves little to hope for unless you like major highway construction. None of their projects give any indication of being appropriate to a dense urban environment. Vibrant Victoria forumer and moderator Caramia also commented on this, earlier tonight. As she put it, “…there is nothing here [in MMM Group's portfolio] that shows any poetry at all.” (The link takes you to Mat’s response, where he rightly points out that we don’t know who will actually do the design – but for the reasons I mentioned so far, I have no confidence whatsoever that we’re going to get anything better than a bland bland bland utilitarian bridge. The only thing worse would be a faux “heritage” mock Tudorbethan olde English Tower of London type knock-off, in some sad attempt to appeal to our disneyfied attempts at pleasing tourists.)
I just realized I hadn’t addressed some of your other questions/ concerns.
Re. ugly: I’m all for beauty and aesthetics, but there’s more to life than that. Take View Towers, for example. When it was first built, perfectly “respectable” people lived there – I know, because one of my high school friends lived there with her parents. In more recent decades, the building became home to some unsavory characters, but there are a couple of other things to consider before condemning it.
First, the admittedly unfortunate aesthetics of the building shouldn’t be blamed for what happened to the social level of its inhabitants. Otherwise, why did “nice” people live there once – and I’m told there are still nice people living there, for example, lots of foreign language students who come here to study English.
That brings me to the second point: View Towers provides affordable housing. If it were gone, there would be 19 stories times X-number of units wiped off the rental market in Victoria. Ouch, that would really suck.
Back to point 1 for a sec: if ugly buildings produced ugly people, we could send the aesthetics Polizei into quite a few single family home neighborhoods, because god knows there are plenty of ugly houses all over the place, too. View Towers gets blamed for producing socially unacceptable tenants because (a) it’s a rental apartment building (and in our society, we think property owners are morally superior to renters), and (b) it sticks out like a friggin’ sore thumb because it’s 19 stories tall and everything around it is much shorter.
Which brings me to point 3: if View Towers had a couple of high-rise neighbors that were attractive and not examples of Commie-block architecture (as View Towers is), you know what would happen? You’d notice View Towers a whole lot less. Win-win.
Anyway, I just had to put up a defense of View Towers, because it gets a lot of unfair criticism. It used to be a nice building, it provides lots of affordable housing, and there’s no reason why it can’t become a “nice” building again in the future. Admittedly, it will continue to look like a cement block, because that’s what it is, but if several other tall & attractive buildings surrounded it, you wouldn’t notice it as much.
As for the Johnson Street Bridge: call me strange, but I happen to like its looks – and it would look a heck of a lot better if it were properly maintained and painted, something the tax-payers paid for about 10 years ago, but didn’t get delivered.
However, as I suggested with my comments about View Towers, looks or aesthetics shouldn’t be a compelling reason for tearing something down. In the JSB’s case, there are instead very compelling arguments regarding its historical significance. It’s an artifact of the Industrial Age, it’s the only bascule bridge in Canada west of Ontario, it’s the only Joseph-Strauss-patented-bascule bridge in Canada, and it’s a symbol of Victoria’s working harbor.
There’s a kind of gentrification and homogenization at work in Victoria around the Inner Harbour – starting with that abortion of a development known as the Songhees, whose residents complain a lot about the working harbor. They don’t like the float planes; then the city tried to remove the Coho Ferry from its dock in the harbor; then other interests try to get the gravel guys out, others complain about Point Hope Shipyard, and so on. And what do they want? They want a sanitized expansion of cookie-cutter Songhees-style condominiums for all the retirees who come here to enjoy the “scenery,” provided it’s not too loud, too different, too intrusive.
You said, “Yes the bridge is an icon of the city, but really, any bridge that gets put there will be.” Knowing our city’s recent history (past 50 years), I don’t share your sanguine optimism. Think of the Songhees, think of the Save-on-Foods-Memorial-Centre thingamajiggy, think of the Bay Centre, think of the ridiculous attempts to make Centennial Square attractive – heck, think of Centennial Square itself (built in time for 1967). “It can’t be very hard to do better than the current bridge.” You’ll be surprised how easy it will be to f*ck this up.
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[...] present, I’ve got a couple of entries up on the site (start with Bad reason, 1; now there’s also a Bad reason, 2 up), as does Mat, who informs us about Johnson Street [...]
The JSB has been the subject of works of art. One in particular is at the Winchester Galleries on Broad St. in the form of a charcoal drawing by acclaimed BC artist Bruno Bobak.
[...] worked on daily with recent blogs – like Yule Heibel’s series ‘Bad Reasons’ #1, #2, #3 and #4 – and new pages: Bridge Photos and [...]