Property developers as "box tickers", the grudge between preservationists and modern architecture and mixed responses to the Ituango Hydroelectric Dam project.
"They go wrong when property developers, who are basically box tickers, say things about interaction with the local community - consultation, stimulation of local employment - often they're paying lip service to these things."
Prodesign
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"If you want to save a building from the wrecking ball - particularly if the wrecking ball is about to start swinging - you need blunt, dramatic arguments. But the relationship between postwar architecture and preservation is anything but black and white: Many leading preservationists, inconveniently enough, still hold an active grudge against modern architecture. And when you're working to slow down the march of the blindest sort of progress, ambivalence usually just gets in the way."
Los Angeles Times
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"Agents from the hydroelectric company will come to educate the benefits of the dam. Politicians will come to boast this public works project as civilizing and modernizing. And environmentalists will come to praise this new source of clean energy. But other environmentalists who have actually done their homework will come to counter the engineers and bureaucrats with the dam's monumental destructiveness. Indigenous peoples will come to protest their displacement from their ancestral lands. Downstream localities already suffering from water scarcity will come to claim their water rights. And many more will come to seek redress of unfair compensations for their lost properties."
Pruned
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"The facade is an off-putting hodgepodge of faux classical columns, strange and useless decorative elements, and penitentiary-like small windows, with a depressing color scheme of brown, pink, and white (throwing in some tacky blue glass for good measure)."
Travel and Leisure
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"Britain is run by property developers. Money is what we value. End of story. It's a little to do with arrogant architects, too. The profession here has been bow-tied, plum-mouthed, not wanting to engage."
Times Online
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