Relics of Modern Folly

SYDNEY. Competition won in 1957. Estimated at £3.5 million, to open on 26 January 1963.

Opened 20 October 1973, ten years late, at $102 million, by one reckoning 1,357 percent over budget in real terms. Its architect resigned in 1966 and never returned to see it finished.

Perspex clouds were hung in the concert hall just before opening to correct the sound. The opera theatre is considered too small for large-scale opera.

The most famous opera house in the world. The large operas go elsewhere. Monk finds this very peaceful.

Noted.

LONDON. Opened 10 June 2000, a month late. Some 90,000 people crossed on the first day. The bridge swayed. The walkers, feeling it sway, fell into step with it, and it swayed more.

Closed two days later. Reopened in February 2002, after £5 million of dampers on an £18.2 million bridge.

Engineers call it synchronous lateral excitation. Monk calls it a crowd.

The Way, it is written, moves in step with all things. The bridge did exactly that, and was closed for it.

Noted.

SAN FRANCISCO. Raised $120 million. Launched in 2016 at $699, cut to $399 the next year. It pressed proprietary bags of chopped produce, and scanned each bag’s code before it would agree to.

Then reporters squeezed the bags by hand. The juice was nearly indistinguishable.

Sales stopped in September 2017.

The ancients prized the uncarved block, the thing in its plain state before cleverness arrives. The bag of fruit was already the uncarved block. Someone carved a $699 machine around it.

Noted.

BRASÍLIA. Built in 41 months. Inaugurated 21 April 1960. Laid out in the shape of a bird, or an aeroplane, or a cross, depending on whom one asks.

The plan was for about 500,000 people. The planned core never reached it and today holds about 215,000. By 2000, two satellite towns outside the plan together held more people than the plan itself. The metropolitan area now holds about 3.5 million.

Traffic lights were later added to the great Monumental Axis, which the plan had imagined without them.

A city drawn for the car. The people walked around it.

Noted.

PYONGYANG. Begun 1987. 105 floors. 330 metres. Work stopped in 1992, with the building at full height and nothing inside.

Work resumed in 2008. The glass went on in 2011. A hotel group announced in 2012 that it would run the place, and suspended the plan the following year.

By 2018 one face had become an LED screen showing animations.

The sage, it is written, acts without acting. The Ryugyong has not received a single guest in nearly forty years and is still the most famous hotel in the country. Few have practised non-action so completely.

Noted.

MONTREAL. Begun 1973. Opened, unfinished, for the 1976 Olympics. The 1970 projection was CA$134 million. The bill at opening was CA$1.1 billion.

The retractable roof arrived in 1987, eleven years late. It could not be moved in winds above 40 km/h. In its whole life it was opened and closed 88 times. It came down in 1998.

The fixed roof that replaced it had 7,453 tears by 2017. The debt was paid off in 2006, largely by a special tax on tobacco.

For thirty years a province smoked to pay for a roof that would not open.

Noted.

BERLIN. Due October 2011. Then June 2012. Then not at all, for some time. The fire protection system had been built contrary to its permit and failed its acceptance test. Smoke, it emerged, would not go where smoke must go.

The doors stayed shut for eight more years.

Opened 31 October 2020. Nine years late. More than three times the budget. During a pandemic. Nobody was flying.

Patience is a virtue. Berlin has made it infrastructure.

Noted.

LONDON. Tall. Glass. Concave to the south.

Summer 2013. The sun arrived, as forecast. The facade collected it and delivered it, carefully focused, to one spot on Eastcheap below. A parked car’s bodywork melted. The developers paid the owner £946.

Temporary screens went up that September. A permanent awning followed in 2014.

The sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. The building did nothing. The car was done.

Noted.