The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

9 Mar 2024

Is ornamentation really a crime?

1890 — Grey Lynn, Auckland.

Time to build, build, build. There’s a brand new subdivision and there’s money to be made. The streets are laid out, in a neat grid. Except that awkward hole where the swamp is. New houses, mass produced. All of them more or less the same, with their bay windows and porches. Get a load of mass produced widgets to decorate and customise their looks a bit. Tacky, perhaps, but it gets the job done. Nobody wants to live in a landscape that looks like a bunch of cardboard boxes with holes cut out, right?

Panorama of Mount Eden, with Grey Lynn visible in the background on the right. *1

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