The good, the bad, and the ugly Frank Lloyd Wrong of Ugly Melbourne Houses and Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen of F*** Marry Kill

The good, the bad, and the ugly

A conversation between Frank Lloyd Wrong of Ugly Melbourne Houses and Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen of F*** Marry Kill (Melbourne Buildings Edition).

Frank Lloyd Wrong (FLW): I think about aesthetics a lot, particularly ugliness. From the moment I rise in the morning from my gold-plated Bolivian rotating home theatre, Evian-filled waterbed all I think about is ugliness and aesthetics. For me ugliness is endlessly fascinating and engaging with it in a format like Instagram can be confronting and hugely enjoyable. People get very violently passionate about what ugliness is, what it isn’t and who gets to decide. Unfortunately, this endless postulating has made me very, very, confused and I find myself mostly asking the question: Is aesthetics dead and does it really matter?

Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen (YG + YS): Aesthetics is definitely alive – probably more than ever. In fact, it’s one of the easiest ways for the public to engage with the architecture of their cities, by making a judgement call about whether these buildings are ugly or beautiful. This focus on aesthetics, or Instagrammafication of architecture, has negative consequences – for example, certain celebrated projects photograph well in key areas, but are not functional, built well, or the design of the rest of the building is neglected. However, on the plus side, social media also offers an accessible way for the general public to see images of good architecture, and to join in on discussions on what good architecture is, something that @ uglymelbournehouses does so well. With our project F*** Marry Kill (Melbourne Buildings Edition), we were interested in the social media of architecture, embracing both the surfacelevel, aesthetics-focused aspects of it, as well as its amazing properties of accessibility and levelling the playing field when it comes to discussion. For the project, we created a platform similar to familiar dating apps, where instead of swiping on singles in your area, you swipe on 55 chosen buildings in the Melbourne CBD, with an option to comment on why you liked or disliked a certain building. Each of these buildings had their own dating profile, which went into detail about the history and design strategies that went into the design of the building. By getting people to swipe left or swipe right on buildings, it gathered information about how the public felt about the buildings of their city, as well as encouraging people into the discussion who would normally not be engaged in conversations about architecture. We felt that there was a huge disconnect between the way architects talk about architecture, and the way the public speaks and thinks about architecture. With the lack of post-occupancy analyses done by architects after jobs, and insular awards that are given by architects to other architects, it felt to us that the industry is extremely disconnected from the people who use these buildings

on a day-to-day basis. By creating a platform that was easy-to-use, fun and playful, it resonated with people who usually feel intimidated to engage with architectural commentary, or simply have never considered it. What we learned through our F*** Marry Kill experiment was that, although discussion of aesthetics was the easiest way to enter the conversation when discussing the architecture of our city, the memories that people had in certain spaces, their historical legacy, and their environmental sustainability were all factors that, in some cases, had more sway over whether someone liked or disliked a piece of architecture, rather than only aesthetic concerns. In terms of aesthetics, the public preferred older buildings, as well as buildings that told a story, such as the William Barak Building. Colourful buildings such as the Pixel Building were rated higher than we anticipated, with people commending them for being fun and exciting to walk past. Brutalist buildings were mostly hated on, with people saying they felt cold, similar to a prison, and just plain old boring.

Do you get a difference of opinion between designers and non-designers on @uglymelbournehouses and with the FMK project?

FLW: Well the big advantage in Australia is that absolutely anybody is allowed to design and build their own house so everyone is an expert in their own way. What this means is you don’t have to spend several years at university specifically studying how to design buildings properly and you are still completely qualified to design them. It’s a great advantage. Unfortunately, we don’t apply this theory to dentistry or brain surgery which is a real pity, as I’ve seen some people’s teeth and experienced some people’s brains and frankly both professions have a lot to answer for. It’s clearly not rocket science, or is it?

Uglymelbournehouses is a fantastic forum for seeing how much everyone knows about buildings and design, everyone, everywhere always knows what they like and that they could have done a lot better themselves. It’s is a hugely sarcastic, mean-spirited, fun-loving enterprise and everyone has a very different take on it, whether they are designers or not. My main aim has always been to get people to engage with what is built in their city and question it. Also if I can use canapes, roller discos, robotic pizza ovens and Tuscan vacuum cleaner hairpieces as descriptors then that helps enormously. YS + YG: We definitely had a big difference in opinion between designers and non-designers, especially when it came to aesthetic concerns. Many architects love Brutalism, and other Minimalist pieces of architecture, but we found that this really didn’t rate highly with the general public. The project was really targeted towards non-designers, and we had a lot of people tell us afterwards that they learned so much about architecture and Melbourne by using our website. It was great to hear all the discussion and debate on our exhibition opening night, where one architect told us that the rankings (determined by how often each building was swiped right on) were all wrong! Are architects and planners the arbiters of taste in our buildings? Should they be?

FLW: Being taste judges and exercising their aesthetic muscles is fundamentally what architects love to do, the bad ones, the good ones, and all the ones in between. Although architecture can often be dangerously close to stylistic accountancy the essential role of the architect is to have casually neat haircuts, a really great selection of retro coffee percolators and the ability to decide what looks really good and then try and make a building out of it. However, the problem with buildings is that everyone else has an opinion too, particularly people who don’t have neat haircuts and this makes architects go slightly insane. Admittedly this happens very slowly over a very long period of time until they get to a point where they can’t remember what looks good anymore. Then they just design everything to look ironically ugly, just to piss off all the haters (mostly their parents). This happens at around 65 to 70 years of age but is sometimes seen in 25 to 30 year-old architects, and a lot of the other ages in between, and has been noted in some architects just after birth (prior to their first haircut). Using irony is really important in architecture as it makes it a lot easier to justify making something that looks ugly. If people call it ugly, you can just simply accuse them of not understanding the concept of irony. After that you can simply roll your eyes and continue reading your 1986 Encyclopedia Britannica. The issue of irony is where the most violent collision between planners and architects occurs, because planners have actually never heard of irony (unconfirmed). Despite also having casually neat haircuts they are often incredibly serious and insist on all buildings being very, very, symmetrical and having awfully large setbacks that can sometimes extend into the outer stratosphere. If an architect

mentions irony most planners will just stare angrily at their fantastic selection of highlighter pens.

YG + YS: Although architects and planners are professionals who have studied and researched buildings and perhaps have more of an idea of how they should look, there is definitely a problem of insularity, where each group share ideas in an echo chamber, dismissing what others (the people actually using these buildings) think of these decisions. We wanted to open up the conversation of taste and beauty to those who have less of a say in how our cities look. We think it’s a two-way street – architects and planners can learn from the opinions of those who use these buildings, and by learning more about how these decisions are made in the first place, the general public can also learn about how their cities are designed.

Is there a way to tell what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?

FLW: Gosh, now that’s a doozy. Perhaps some sort of spreadsheet with some numbers should be used. Surely there must be a way of getting a definitive answer. However, as a person who has explored the concept of ugly since 1976 on Instagram, I have basically come to the conclusion that I have no idea what ugly is and who is capable of deciding. I have developed a sort of ugly PTSD. People say to me, “Frank, you total bastard. What’s Melbourne’s ugliest building?” and I just end up mumbling incoherently for hours, which apparently when recorded and played backwards sounds alarmingly like Kenny G’s stunning cover of Toto’s Africa on a harpsichord. You do the maths. Interestingly though, before 1980 when computers ( ie the internets) were invented most people really had no opinion on architectural aesthetics, except for a couple of German academics and Brad Pitt. Basically, everyone trusted wholeheartedly what architects decreed and the whole concept of ugliness had no relationship to architecture whatsoever. If you called a building ugly in 1979 people just assumed you were wearing your pleated double-breasted knitted tweed disco jumpsuit too tightly and kept their distance. Everyone agreed if an architect had designed it, it must be beautiful. However, the moment the first email was faxed, people who weren’t architects started acting like they knew everything about how to design buildings (except for Brad Pitt) and subsequently the McMansion was born, coincidence? I think not. Now, 40 years later, we are basically a society of architectural design experts. Walk into any suburban home in Melbourne and you are sure to find Barbara Streisand’s stunning design manifesto My Passion for Design and a framed computer printout saying “If Designing is Wrong I don’t want to be right”. I have copies of both displayed in my Neo mock-Georgian roller disco ensuite.

YG + YS: It’s funny you joke that we’re a society of architectural design experts, because we feel like designers often immediately dismiss the tastes of the general public as wrong. When, isn’t democracy a case of majority rules? It’s interesting to take it even further and think about a website where the general public can vote on buildings and that’s how buildings make it through planning. We’d probably end up with developers making a whole heap of bots to vote and end up with an even uglier city though.

What do you think of the idea that all planning regulations end up just being majority rules? The most popular get built and the least popular get booted? What kind of city do you envisage that creating?

FLW: I think this could be the single most important planning policy revision we could see in our lifetime or anyone else’s lifetime, like totally ever. Perhaps some sort of town planning public trial may be in order. Once a month everyone gathers in the nearest village square to eat a wide selection of canapés and all new planning permits are displayed by the town crier. We then either throw rotten fruit at them (not including the canapés) or release them to the nearest streetscape. Let’s not forget in Medieval times they absolutely loved public trials and they all lived in pedestrianised urban paradises with access to services, public transport and rather fetching hats. Yeh ok, there weren’t many functioning ensuites and no-one even had a home theatre, but clearly there’s a link.

YS + YG: If the data we collected has any say, it would end up creating a city dominated by Victorian revival buildings with huge green lawns on every CBD street. Every second building would be a theatre, and Brutalism would be banished on pain of death. Regulations are about minimal compliance, but what we see as the benefit of F*** Marry Kill is that it uses data collection to learn more about how people really feel about their buildings – not just their height, edges, shapes, and the tangible, but realising

how important it is for people to have spaces that create memories and feel deeply entrenched in the cultural identity of a city. By looking at these opinions from the public, it allows architects and planners to get a macro-level view of how people respond to our built environment, and perhaps use this to inform regulations and individual design decisions in the future.

FLW: Yes I agree the more knowledge architects have about how much people hate or don’t hate them, their haircuts, their coffee percolator collections and their buildings can only be beneficial and for the greater good.

Frank Lloyd Wrong is a senior executive amateur content delivery professional @uglymelbournehouses, an outbound marketing and non-sales platform that attracts customers by reviewing ugly house imagerybased material. A renowned obsessive perfectionist and workaholic, Frank writes achingly romantic 17th century classical French Provincial industrial poetry and sculpts uncannily realistic impressions of 1980s sit-com cast members in genuine faux marble. On Sundays he religiously hunts for ugly houses in the outer suburbs of Melbourne with his three Irish Wolfhounds: Pikasso, Monnet and Provinciale.

Yuchen Gao & Yiling Shen are two young designers undertaking the Master of Architecture at RMIT University, while having worked in the industry for several years. They recently created and delivered F*** Marry Kill (Melbourne Buildings Edition) for Melbourne Design Week 2022, leading a team of 10 web designers, web developers and architectural students to create the web app and exhibition. The idea of F*** Marry Kill was also a finalist for the Fishermans Bend Innovation Challenge, organised by the City of Melbourne and pitched to a panel of judges and audience last month.