smallprojects

The last time i paid Putrajaya a visit was the last time i did. For the unaware, the township of Putrajaya was conceived and designed around the new governmental and administrative centre for Malaysia: read Abuja, Brasilia, Shere-e-Banglanagar and Chandigarh, gosh dont they rhyme.

Never mind it was modelled on the discarded Radburn Scheme of decades past, that it wasnt located a hop-skip-jump from downtown, never mind it levelled the natural contours and trees of an arable landscape for the tortured and reshaped mounds of claimed perfection, never mind all but a little swamp wetland is artificially created.

Never mind any of that; the plain fact is, Putrajaya is ugly.

Not ugly in an its-deserted-kind-of-way. Or in a brutal sort of way. Not even ugly in an adorable fashion, which it all is, of course. Only that there is a lot more to it than that. It's ugly in a tasteless pastiche, Colonial Baroque, Neofascist Disneyland manner, the ugliness born of ignorance and through a thorough lack of proper research and insufficient exposure to what the rest of the world had already done and the way we could have bettered it. It's anyone's guess, but one might say that it really wasn't any one individual's mistake. The sad fact is, it probably began with misguided aesthetic mandates from those in administrative control, the rest of it might have followed from the mistakes of consultants who had not the integrity to say no when made to follow the mandates. Integrity. A tough word to live by these days, but what a price to pay for otherwise.

Enough now. Down south, the international airport does it for me everytime. A little further to get to, irritatingly ubiquitous, unarguably inefficient, but like the twin towers downtown, just feels like money spent with a lot more integrity.