Grollo’s Amazing Melbourne Tower was lambasted by the soft left as phallic. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it’s because I’m a boy, but I just lerve things that are so big it makes me go ‘Wow!’. (Unless they’re unusually ugly, which they usually aren’t).
And we seem to get towards finishing the greatest monuments – they capture that strange complacent but frenzied world of the financial bubble – just as the next cataclysm hits.
So it is with the extraordinary tower that is nearing completion in Dubai. And now check out this floating successor to the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth in the 1930s. Click on the picture for a better look.
The ‘phallic’ criticism strikes me as inane. Oooh, missiles and big buildings and planes are ‘phallic’! Well, physics is also ‘phallic’, then – but we kinda have to live with physics so can we just get over it?
Honestly, the adjective seems otiose outside of art – is there anything besides art that is typically labelled ‘phallic’ and could practicably be anything else?
They say phallic like it’s a bad thing.
It’s hard to beat 330m of government infrastructure project, the spooky and unfinished Ryugyong Hotel.
Made all the stranger because residents of Pyongyang were ordered not to look at it, since their leaders are perfect and could never deliver a white elephant. Thus the largest object in Pyongyang officially does not exist… I’d call that a phallacy.
So
http://www.usmra.com/photos/bigpit/
utterly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingham_Canyon_Mine
and vulgarly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pit_gold_mine
vulvic.
Have we nothing better to do than rip great vages in the earth crust?
lol
A thing can be too big.
These two ships were famously docked at Circular Quay on the same day last year. I saw them both at the passenger terminal, the Queen Elizabeth 2 in the morning, and the Queen Victoria in the afternoon, if I remember right. I was struck by the contrast between the beauty of the former, and the ugliness of the latter. Big is beautiful, but only to a point, and shape interacts with size to produce an overall effect that’s attractive or not.
I’m about the last person to admire boats, cars and planes, for their lines, but I think jumbo jets are beautiful. I can never forget my first encounter with one, as a child, at night, entering by the stairs from the tarmac, some time in the early 1970s. The infathomable, deep hum of the engines must have been part of the inpression, as well the overwhelming size. By contrast, the airbus doesn’t have a particularly pleasing profile, and, like the Queen Victoria, is paradoxically just too big.
A thing can be too big.
These two ships were famously docked at Circular Quay on the same day last year. I saw them both at the passenger terminal, the Queen Elizabeth 2 in the morning, and the Queen Victoria in the afternoon, if I remember right. The contrast between the beauty of the former and the ugliness of the latter was striking. Big is beautiful, but only to a point, and shape interacts with size to produce an overall effect that’s attractive or not.
I’m about the last person to admire boats, cars and planes, for their lines, but I think jumbo jets are beautiful. I can never forget my first encounter with one, as a child, at night, entering by the stairs from the tarmac, some time in the early 1970s. The infathomable, deep hum of the engines must have been part of the inpression, as well the overwhelming size. By contrast, the airbus doesn’t have a particularly pleasing profile, and, like the Queen Victoria, is paradoxically just too big.
I tried to insert this picture in that comment, but it didn’t work.
James – can you give us the google images page, because the page you have linked to has been taken down.
But I agree with your point. Making something supersized can ruin its shape – as with the A380.