Ah Wellington, city of art, culture, and architecture.
Look at this snap of the City to Sea fountains for example. It’s a lovely water feature that runs from up near the pyramid thingy, and down towards the Michael Fowler centre.
During the summer you can see kids jumping up and down in it on the hot days, and it gives off a wonderful sound of falling water.
Lovely, right.
Nope. This fountain is a civic disgrace, and it and a few other things around town need to be either sorted out of gotten rid of.
The fountain is disgusting. Half the time it’s switched off because it’s clogged with algae or crap, and they’re constantly working on it.
Frankly, everyone who pays rates in this city should be alarmed that they’re paying good money for this monument to bad planning, and that it’s allowed to stay.
They should either:
- demolish the whole thing and plant actual gardens
- sort out some kind of self-cleaning system similar to Waitangi Park.
So what am I complaining about?
And this is the fountains looking relatively clean. Probably the fact that they haven’t run water through it for weeks now.
Nice to see the seagull having a nice time though.
With any kind of luck this disgrace will be taken away from us, and soon.
25 August, 2008 at 9:31 pm
I used to love this when they had the painting on the bottom of the fountain … still have a soft spot for it.
25 August, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Ugh. What an awkward fountain. The blue paint makes it look like some 1950s concrete swimming pool.
The trouble is the space. When the Michael Fowler Centre was built, the intention was to knock down the Town Hall, so I assume that side of the MFC was designed with the idea of more space around it.
Instead there’s a narrow gap with the Town Hall on one level and the MFC on a lower level. So I can see why a fountain might have seemed like a good idea for what to do with the space.
But what would be a better use? Seating? A wider thoroughfare? Another sort of water feature? It’s such an awkward, unintentional space. It’ll take some creativity to make the most of it.
26 August, 2008 at 9:38 am
When did they erase the ‘lovely because it was slightly amateurish’ mural in the pool? Whose stoopid idea was it to get rid of it…? Bah, says I.
26 August, 2008 at 10:16 am
i’m inclined to agree. the mural was nice. the blue pool full of seagull-shti is not.
and the area gets a lot of light if not sunlight. they could do something with it.
no. they *should* do something with it.
@robyn. yeah… but what they did with the other side of the MFC was build a big ugly carpark. doubtless they wanted the same for the town hall side.
what they could do is put in some small cafes or retail space. there’s a lot of foot traffic through there.
26 August, 2008 at 12:18 pm
i loved all the murals around this and the one between the gallery and library
now it’s just depressing
26 August, 2008 at 10:52 pm
The space down by the library, with the artwork by that eminent NZ sculptor seems to work much better. Perhaps they could widen the thoroughfare and replace the fountain with something similar. I do like the idea of running water going through there. Hopefully without spending squillions – the council often seems to spend incredible amounts of money to do quite simple looking things.