On Books and Trains Stations

I didn't want to say anything about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but I will say that I deeply approve of the use of the train station. Train stations are magical places: journeys begin and end there. When they were first built, lives ended and began there. Train stations are intersections of everyone's world: your world with all the people around you; your old life with the new life awaiting at the end of your journey. With technology, the train station has largely been replaced in this role with the airport. Which is why it's such a damn shame that, with the exception of the now abandoned TWA terminal at JFK airport, airport architecture is so utterly anonymous and boring.

The builders of train stations through the 19th and 20th century understood the importance of what they were doing. You can't walk under the enormous, soaring arc of the roof of Paris' Gare de Lyon without feeling something. You may say that a train station requires an enormous roof - you need something to fit the trains under - but there's more to it than that. A train station does not require the main concourse of New York's Grand Central station. Humans required that grandeur for a building this significant to their lives.

And this is why I'm so disappointed in airports. Books aren't switching from train stations to airports because airports aren't inspiring or significant. They look like low, bland, corporate office blocks. Full of bland, inoffensive corporate colours, with plenty of practical reusable furniture and rooms. As train travel becomes less and less common, we're in danger of losing a whole raft of ideas and images. In 15 years time will a child reading Harry Potter who's never been inside a train station really understand the significance? Will that chapter grab them? Do children reading now understand this? Architecture is not just about building the most practical, useful building for the cheapest price. Architecture is about shaping our world, and thus our culture and experiences.

Is Something Burning?

We suspect this singe:


On this cat:


Was caused by one of these lights:


Trendy though they may be, it seems that if you have a brain the size of a peanut and a love for heat, heat, glorious heat, halogen lights set at floor level are a little too attractive on a cold winter's morning.

If they hadn't attached themselves to humans cats would long since be extinct. Probably through some accidental fire.

Where-house?

These were taken in January, after we picked up the keys but before our stuff had been moved in. By now I figure that those of you who can make it here to see our new home have, so these photos are for the rest of you.


The building is a converted warehouse from the late 1890's. Until (I think) 1994 it was used as a warehouse. For most of that time as the headquarters, offices and printing rooms of the Sunday Times, Sydney's third Sunday paper. From the 1840's to the 1890's there were smaller buildings on the site, and before that, the area was market gardens.


The envelope of the building (the external brick walls) is original, and a lot of the original materials have been reused in the reconstruction. There's an old wooden pillar by the front door, for example, and some of the floor joists are original, though the floors themselves have been moved. Moving the floors has given us the 6m ceiling I've mentioned before, and the bedrooms have been tucked into a mezzanine that hangs over and opens out into the living area. The black rectangle in the photo is one of those openings.


They don't mention the joys of living in a converted 1890's warehouse in the trendy New York novels: our wall leaks. That's right: wall. Ahh, well. I call it character.