Originally Posted by
Lokasenna
I agree with the general gist of what most people are saying - it often comes down to personal taste, though I think (and I'm not the only one!) that some of them are trying to be ugly.
I'd heard of Dublin's giant needle-thing, but never actually seen a picture of it till now. It looks massively out of place - I don't know if Dublin has many tall buildings, but you can't see any in the picture, which must mean you can see the thing for miles..?
I do think the Angel of the North ugly, but like I said, opinion is divided. One of my friends has the Angel as the view from his living room, and he thinks it looks dramatic and wonderful (and you must like something if you buy a house that looks over the thing).
I do fear, like the examples given in Montreal, that a lot of these things will become obsolete once the event they were constructed for is forgotten, and they will just be left to rust and rot.
It's not the cost I object to - I'm all for building great monuments, and I certainly don't think we should measure our public endeavours in terms of baby incubators and such. It would be nice if the public was allowed a bit more of a say on them though, rather than a few select art critcs - if the people of Kent want a damn great horse (why!?!), then at least it's their choice, and the critics can be ignored.
We should celebrate the Olympics, but I think a nice park with a glorious baroque fountain would be infinitely more pleasent, and you'd only notice it if you actually went to see it - it wouldn't poision the skyline, like the Orbit.
...oh, and I HATE wind-farms. They've just built a load of the wretched things in the bay; this is a tourist town! Is destroying the view really going to help our flagging economy? They also continue to plant endless numbers of them on the Durham dales, which I have to look at every time I go walking. Anyway, that's a rant for another day.
