Contrast this with two recent and ongoing developments in Canberra – The Brindabella Office Park (surrounding the airport) and Childers Street/City West.

The commercial development at the airport purports to be 5 -6 green star development, all well and good, (though the landscape is irrigated with bore water) but on a ‘sense of place’ scale it does not rate. It is the same as any other business park developed anywhere internationally over the last two decades. The only pointer to anything remotely Australian is a temporary road sign to ‘Queanbeyan’ – (Queanbeyan of course has a sense of place – while there are many variations on ‘Kingston’ around the world, there is indisputably only one Queanbeyan!). The landscape consists of deciduous trees, irrigated grassing and blocks of generally exotic shrubs and ground cover. It is from everywhere, but creates a non-place.

Childers Street/City West has been developed and promoted as an ‘engaging connection of the Australian National University with the western edge of Civic’ (A kind of ‘Newtown meets Gown’ or something like that). It is still a construction site, but is rapidly filling with student accommodation, commercial space and multi level carparks. Trouble is, someone forgot to plant trees. There is a lot of colour and movement in the buildings, and again, they have been designed to meet Commonwealth mandated green star ratings for commercial office space, and wonderful water sensitive reed beds and stormwater management systems, but half the landscape is missing. The scale and proportion of the street corridor demands more than buildings and artworks. On a ‘sense of place’ scale, Childers Street would edge out Brindabella Office Park, but it is a marginal call.

It gets worse – Brindabella Office Park just won an AIA award for Urban Design in June….