Elizabeth Farrelly is one of Sydney’s leading public intellectuals. Currently writer in residence at the University of Sydney’s Henry Halloran Trust, she was for 30 years the Sydney Morning Herald’s weekly principal essayist on urban planning and city-making. Trained in architecture and philosophy, with a PhD in urbanism from the University of Sydney, she is a director of the National Trust NSW, a former City of Sydney councillor and a former associate professor (practice) at UNSW. Author of several published books, she is a Walkley-shortlisted writer, an internationally awarded architecture critic, a former assistant editor of The Architectural Review , London, inaugural chair of The Australian Award for Urban Design, a regular commentator on urban affairs and contributor to Architectural Record NYC. Her most recent book is Killing Sydney: The Fight for a City’s Soul (Picador 2021).
The way we experience biological sex in cities is real and significant. According to Elizabeth Farrelly, our legacy of modernist urban planning has left us with a masculinist myopia: a fixation with towering phallic forms, which ignores the surrounding context that makes a city liveable.
Elizabeth Farrelly takes aim at architecture’s “tendency to grab and debauch whatever idea present[s] itself, however daft,” which she says “stands to make architecture the class clown.”
“So much architecture these days is about nothing,” argues Elizabeth Farrelly. She contends that what the profession needs is a set of beliefs fashioned “into a kind of theory to guide architecture and city-making into the future.”
Elizabeth Farrelly recalls the impact of the British-born architect, academic and artist who “brought urban design in his suitcase” when he arrived in Australia in the late ’80s.
We’re accustomed to the idea of cars as destroyers of cities. Anyone seeking a model of dense, walkable, lovable neighbourhoods that don’t ban the car should look no further than San Francisco.
Donald Trump wants federal architecture to be beautiful. But whose definition of beauty, and to what end?
The work of Neil Durbach, Camilla Block and David Jaggers has studded Sydney with moments of surprise and intellectual delight that speak to architecture’s true purpose, writes Elizabeth Farrelly.
Behind many of architecture’s greatest works lies a familiar pattern of ambition and ego, prompting a central question: is personality an essential ingredient of great architecture?
Australia once sold itself a dream of homeownership as the foundation of a fair society, but that dream has been steadily supplanted by something far more corrosive – a national addiction to property that is reshaping our cities in its image.
A tram network holds a city together, conferring a conceptual cohesion that is itself welcoming, which makes the mid-century rush to rip them out across cities worldwide all the more baffling.
