Someone must have designed the roads near the Erindale Centre very carefully. Every time I go there I get lost. At the weekend, someone else was driving. He assumed the semi-automaton state of a driver who can’t find something. I was developing a small architectural and landscaping thesis about Canberra which began with Erindale Centre, but it was totally lost on him, so I thought it should go to a wider audience. Erindale does not have an entrance.
Nor does it have a decent sign to say what it is. And there are precious few signs pointing the way to it. Buildings throughout Canberra suffer from lack of entrance and good signage. Take the National Gallery of Australia, for example. The sign outside is pitiful. You wouldn’t know you were there unless you had a map. The gallery doesn’t seem to know whether it’s address is King Edward Terrace or the lake shore. So it tucks its entrance at the side. The National Science and Technology is the same. You drive down King Edward Terrace and you see what looks like the grand front entrance, but it turns out to be fake.
The entrance is tucked around the side. The High Court has a grand entrance, but where is the signage that tells you where you are? Modestly tucked away. The School of Music has neither sign nor significant entrance. It presents a blank wall and a truck-service entry to the road. The worst offender is the National Press Club. True it has a reasonable size sign, but the entrance it presents to the street is an outdoor staircase. People have to walk up it and then once inside down some stairs to the main dining room. Belconnen Mall is surrounded by a labyrinth of car-parking arrangements.
Frustrated newcomers can see their destination, but not get to it. The best entrances are Parliament House, the Australian War Memorial and the National Library. They say: you have arrived and this is the way in. True, security may take you slightly to the side at Parliament House, but the intent of the entrance is obvious. The signs in the Parliamentary Triangle in general as an incoherent mish-mash of confused messages. Crammed on one pole, or on a couple of poles close to each other we see an alarming array of signs: red-white-and-black speed-limit signs; yellow and black traffic advisory signs, brown tourist-drive numbers, green street signs, white street signs and special brown signs.
The whole lot should be given a unifying style to give the Triangle some identity of its own. What is causing this identity shyness in this planned city of monuments and national institutions? Perhaps the 1970s utilitarian architecture. Exposed cement (no painting or maintenance needed) does not lend itself to the grand entrance like stone. Perhaps the bush capital ideal causing the designers of building signs to be subdued _ all bush and no capital. More likely the car. The parking lots around these buildings has helped dilute their impact. In a city of public transport and taxis, the architect would assume most people would not drive their own car _ the vehicle they came in would move away.
The designers of the British Museum, for example, would have assumed the visitor would get out of a hansom cab and walk up the steps _ the cab moving off. In modern Canberra, the visitor is invariably a motorist who has to negotiate a maze of subterranean pillars or weave through rows of other cars on the ugly black field of asphalt that surrounds most of these buildings _ inducing a semi-automaton state that makes drivers ignore the finer points of landscape and architecture.