Greyness

Greyness is everywhere. Greyness is both vernacular and pedigreed.

Much of architectural criticism and history draws on the exemplars of architecture. Narratives are constructed by comparing and contrasting the Le Corbusiers, Koolhaus’s and Hadids. Those who have defined the image of Architecture through each age. However, this approach to capital “A” Architecture excludes that everyday architecture, the realistic, mundane, and vulgar architecture that you encounter everyday as you walk the city. This kind of architecture is difficult to historicise and analyse through the interplay of specific figures and the influence of specific buildings. Realistic architecture does not occur in this manner, it arises around us from much less grand arrangements between developers, individuals, banks, engineers, and construction companies. In this piece I aim to explore a hunch, a phenomenon that I have noticed occurring around me as I walk the streets of my city. I want to talk about what I would call Greyness.

Greyness is a pervasive phenomenon in contemporary Sydney buildings. I’m sure you have noticed it too. The monolithic towers in Green Square and Alexandria, suburban developments on the edge of the city in Bella Vista and Norwest, or a new complying development in Willoughby or Chatswood. Greyness is everywhere. Greyness is both vernacular and pedigreed. While there are many material and economic reasons for the greyness, this phenomenon calls for a deeper exploration into the lack of spirit and life that the grey represents.

By greyness I do not just mean the colour, but a total desaturation phenomenon. Here I am focusing on buildings but think of the fact that cars are all grey, footpaths grey, roads grey, the sky greys over, public space full of grey. I am also thinking about the iconoclasm of this style, how it is a rejection of ornamentation for “pure forms”, abstract rubbish, arbitrary arrangements that jut and cut into the space around them. I think here it is important to comment on the minimalism of the modern period, how few of these buildings are intellectually beautiful but this is to do with specific and precise balancing of elements, forms, and culture. The greyness is a degraded version of this.

The world, the real parts that we interact with are simplifying, emptying out of detail. 

The grey is sleek, slickening the space it adorns. The facades of buildings are undoubtedly the “walls” of outside space and the grey lubricates the outdoors, smoothens it for you to move through it and not linger. The grey subject is one that never rests outdoors. The “grey-gime” is one of anti-sociality, it wishes to make the outside devoid of life. This is another kind of hostile architecture that now seeks to not just push the disadvantaged out of the city but also normal city dwellers as well. Where does it seek to push them? By making the outside a non-space, we are forced into the interior of our grey boxes. While our exteriors are monochrome, our interiors, our digital worlds are psychedelically vibrant and full of colour. Content is rich and vibrant to draw your gaze, grab your attention, and keep you focused into the world of advertising and consumption. 

On City Road, the bus stops have recently been replaced by the greyness. These new bus stops perfectly exemplify this desaturation of outer space for the saturation of abstract space. The bus stops are severe simple steel structures with anti homeless sectioned benches. There is little detail or anything life affirming in the structure of the bus stops themselves. Rather the design of the bus stop is secondary to the vibrant and contrasty media display. The bus stop is designed and produced not by an architect or designer, but by QMS media, an advertising company!

The grey is the fog of war, an obscuring tone, muddy but smooth. Grey warships are hiding in the distance. It is possible to obscure any construction method behind the smooth grey finish that is often used in contemporary buildings. Housing estates on the edge of Sydney and megamansions in its richest suburbs blend together into one grey middle; true luxury in this city is the heritage homes, the classy, vibrant, rich, beautiful ones where nothing new can be built.

Grey as decay, tooth and hair. Why are we adorning so many surfaces with this degree of neutrality, a degree of temporariness, stillborn buildings that are born aged so that they may avoid looking so. 

Grey is cheap, grey is temporary. The buildings of Greyness are a kind of totally rationalised architecture, informed more by the price of building systems available to subcontractors than any sense of aesthetic beauty. Most new homes are built by developers for the open market. Greyness is the commodification of buildings into sellable assets that are designed not for anything but the maximisation of profit from land. Grey is a concealer, cheap bricks poorly laid with shitty mortar work, timber frames that are barely held together. Watching the youtube channel Site Inspections gives a small glimpse into the Australian building industry, walking you through many buildings that epitomise the Greyness, pointing out parts of construction that do not comply with the National Construction Code. It seems from watching these videos (obviously, they are a small sample) that the greyness is cheap, decaying, and completely temporary. These buildings are the inversion of gentrification, buildings that are so cheap, yet expensive, they can only lose value. These buildings are more asset than structure, signifiers for a mortgage value that is to be traded up for the next best thing. When a building becomes something else, it ceases to be a space for dwelling in the most romantic sense.

Today it seems that people are uncertain of what they truly desire for a home or building. People might choose grey for its ability to hide grime and wear, or for its “modern” look. Both of these reasons seem to be abstract ideas from the world of images rather than the real. Necessarily, all finishes age and wear through time. The nature of ageing is how a material becomes saturated by water, and ground away by wind. Every shade of grey can become a deeper, more aged colour. I ask my parents why they think people pick the grey: they say it is just a trend, a passing fad. I think there is something deeper here in how people choose finishes and materials based on the images they see in home design magazines, or on social media. The act of picking based on an image, how you identify with what is necessarily abstract and disconnected from the true feeling and experience of space, inevitably leads to this streamlining of the home as a product. Greyness is cheapness, and developers are a cynical breed who aim to maximise profit above all else. Building is part of humanity’s essence, but to build well is a process that contradicts the desires of capital, which are for profit and speed. The greyness produces artificial spaces, spaces conceived through image and sold through image. They have nothing to do with the reality of building and that is possibly why they always end up feeling so temporary, cheap, and ultimately lacking any soul.

Many public spaces that have resulted from the greyness lack life because they are predetermined spaces. Shopping centres are grey boxes that repel from the outside, and only serve desire on the inside. In a Westfield, nothing outside of consumption can occur. Any other activities are policed and monitored. In a sense, the space is already full of activity, so self referential in its program and intended activity. Or we consider the contemporary plazas of Green Square and the Chatswood concourse; these are overexposed greyscapes. Spaces that pay lip service to public space while constructing their own publics through hard, lubricated, uncomfortable surfaces and anti-homeless fittings. Real Life requires the possibility of a chance encounter with the other, a shady tree, a comfortable park bench, a public colonnade. In these overexposed greyscapes, the other is forced out, forced into the shadows on the edge. In terms of housing, the hyper-individualised way we treat property means that no-one feels any obligation to contribute to the street as a public space.

This leads me to wonder if the Greyness is ripe for Détournement, that situationist method originally for the rerouting of capitalist culture into expressions of a superior radical one. The notion here is that dominant culture contains the conditions for its own negation. It is certainly true that for most buildings, the materials remain the same: wood, concrete, brick, tile, plaster, insulation etc. In terms of the lifelessness of the grey — and I do mean lifelessness in its most harsh insinuation — this is a result of the total system that produces it. Christopher Alexander describes System A and System B as opposing forces in his book Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth. System A is the method for creating life affirming architecture, architecture that is slowly developed and built according to the needs of the user in a way that results in an organic unfolding of space that is in accordance with feeling. System B may pay lip service to the user, but is more concerned with quantitative means of design, building systems, profits, and  abstractions that have little to do with the real. This is what is most concerning about the greyness, its poverty of life. Just as how many of the world’s agricultural centres face degraded substrates for growing crops, the greyness is leaving our cities impoverished with little space for life to grow. Beautiful buildings do truly grow, they unfold over time as they emerge, with modifications by the builder as she makes. It is not the materials that are at fault but our bankrupt process that is shaping space.

This is not an attack on the colour grey, only the extent to which grey is a poor choice for a house/building in general. Rather, I am trying to interrogate this unrelenting sameness that is imposing itself on my city. As housing prices skyrocket and the only homes that are built are luxury grey ones, there seems to be a poetic connection between the two. Hegel wrote in a preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized…” Here grey in grey refers to grey as the tonality of the conceptual, the abstract, and the unreal. Greyness for me is this abstraction of the real world, the outside world, into a space that is fundamentally unalive. Grey is the street becoming a space only for movement and transportation, not a place where romance and life can occur. This is not about the colour grey but the fact that grey represents cheap, temporary buildings that are harming the environment for shortsighted gains. This is not about the colour grey but the fact that I know not everyone wants to live in a grey lifeless city, and greyness is eliminating the space where the life I want to build can take place.