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. No. Its ugly in a tasteless pastiche, colonial baroque, neofascist disneyland manner, the ugliness born through a lack of proper research and design, insufficient exposure to what the rest of the world has been doing and the way we could have bettered it. Its anyones guess, but it probably wasnt 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, our international airport does it for me everytime. A little further to get to but like our twin towers, just feels like money so much better spent.