Should we “prettify” our motorways?

An interesting discussion on my post about turning Nelson and Hobson streets into two-way boulevards probably needs a post of its own I think, and that is the issue of whether it’s a good idea or not to try to “prettify” our motorways through various sculptures, patterns in the concrete and so forth.

Here’s what commenter “Vincent” had to say:

And while you’re at it let’s flatten that vile ‘pohutukawa flower’ nightmare, or better blow it up along with the idiot engineer who foisted it on us…. [apologies to all you fine engineers out there who don’t attempt to make artworks but rather strive to make beautiful structures and elegant solutions in your work]…

…Oh it’s bad, worse than bad; it’s illustrational, it’s instead of a tree in a place where there could be a tree. The Melbourne work you link to is much better, at least it is of a scale and strength that can be experienced from a car. And it is ‘disruptive’ it is an unusual and unexpected moment on the motorway, offering, however briefly, an opportunity for reflection on the forms we build for ourselves. Least you feel I am getting too off topic, this is relevant, there has been a terrible tendency for decorating lumpen civil engineering work instead on the building of elegant forms in the first place. NZ Motorways and bridges used to better than they are now [Pukeko bridge excepted], like the lovely ‘W’ shaped bridge structure on the way into town on the Southern. Now we get largely prosaic ‘post-and-beam’ forms with a facile outline of Rangitoto like some apologetic figleaf. It’s one thing to build the cheapest least elegant form that your talentless number crunchers come up with, but please don’t add to the insult by then covering it depictions of flora and volcanoes. Why do we have this crazy idea that only the natural world looks good and if we just copy a bit of that no will notice the eight lane motorway? Concrete can be very beautiful if allowed to be itself; fluid, strong, elegant. Apologies for the rant, just that there’s not that much to look at when you’re stuck on the motorway, oh at least we’ll soon have another set of prisoners looking back us trapped in our cars…..

The initial post was about the rather infamous sculpture that sits in the midst of the motorway spaghetti that is our central motorway junction. The one in the picture below:

I must say that it took a while for me to figure out that this was a Pohutukawa Flower, rather than just a weird looking something. Perhaps that’s just because my brain is not particularly well artistically tuned, or perhaps it says something about the sculpture itself.

But anyway, the main point is not about this particular sculpture, but also about efforts in general to put a bit of “artistic-ness” into our motorways. Things like the patterns put into the median barriers and onto the retaining walls, and so forth. I don’t think the issue is quite so much about engineering structures that have just been designed in a way that happens to look nice (such as Pukeko Bridge which I think is awesome). We’re more talking about the imprints in the concrete or the bizarre structures that are appearing on motorways in Australia. Personally, I have a mixed opinion about the issue – and in many ways my opinion somewhat mirrors my concern with what I term “PT-washing“, when the miniscule public transport benefits of what is primary a roading project are used to help “sell” that project to the general public – with AMETI being an absolutely classic example of “PT-wash”.

The link between PT-washing and what could be called “motorway prettifying” is that largely symbolic and ultimately pretty meaningless gestures are being made to justify what are – by in large – pretty sub-standard outcomes. Just as slapping a few interrupted bus-lanes through Panmure while we build massive new roading viaducts all over the place as part of AMETI is an insult to actually properly improving public transport, small and meaningless gestures such as the above sculpture could be interpreted as an effort to make up for an acceptance of design mediocrity elsewhere in these projects – mediocrity in terms of the “big stuff” that really matters.

And that is the excellent point that Vincent’s comment above makes. While I think the sculpture is ugly and looks too industrial (you almost expect that it’s hiding an electric sub-station or something – maybe it is?), I actually quite like the designs on the concrete median barriers and retaining walls through the CBD on other newer parts of the motorway network. But like Vincent, I think that we should demand better real design in our large engineering projects. In some of the most recent projects I think we are starting to see that, in the form of Pukeko Bridge, some of the pedestrian bridges over SH20, the proposed pedestrian bridge over SH1 through St Mary’s Bay, some of the design elements of the SH18 Hobsonville deviation and so forth. So we are getting there, and perhaps the somewhat useless symbolic gestures such as this Pohutukawa sculpture do represent a step along the path towards the more meaningful outcomes we’re now seeing.

However, I still think that we need to remember 4-6 lane motorways are pretty ugly beasts – no matter how many little architectural elements we try to introduce to mitigate that ugliness. As Nick R comments, some of the “motorway sculptures” may make driving along that route slightly more pleasant, but if care isn’t taken with their design, they could actually just exacerbate the negative effects of the motorway on the surrounding neighbourhood. So to answer my original question of whether we should prettify our motorways, I would say that the best thing we can probably do is minimise the extent of the motorway as much as possible (through tunnelling, trenching, fewer lanes and so forth), and beyond that if we are going to make it pretty then do so in a real, legitimate way. Build a fantastic looking bridge or whatever, but don’t try to get away with mediocrity in parts of the project that really matter by tacking on a few “pretty” thing as an afterthought.

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