This article was written by Gerald Matthews of Matthews Architects.

I was twenty years old the first time I visited Paris, and at that age I was hard to impress. I was studying architecture, quietly curious about buildings that seemed to reach beyond their function into artistic expression.

Gerald Matthews of Matthews Architects, author of this opinion piece / supplied

My professors often expressed their dislike of unnecessary ornamentation; it didn't vibe with their modernist world view.
Paris, I was sure, would demonstrate that the marriage of art and architecture wasn't confined to history. What I didn't expect was that the most arresting example would be something as ordinary as a metro entrance.

I remember coming up to the street and only noticing the structure when I turned around to find my bearings. The canopy seemed to have grown from the pavement: cast iron curving into organic forms, painted green, both sculpture and functional shelter. I didn't know who had made it or when.

I circled it two or three times, not quite sure what I was looking for. It was only later that I learned the entrances had been designed by Hector Guimard, a French architect working at the turn of the twentieth century. The knowledge was satisfying, but secondary. The experience had already happened without it.

Someone had decided that a hole in the ground, purely functional as a transit entry, deserved to be beautiful. That decision has stayed with me for thirty years.

Guimard was not doing anything unusual for his era. For most of human history, purely functional public buildings were almost incomprehensible.

The ancient Greeks covered their civic structures with painted friezes and bronze figures. Medieval builders embedded imagery into market crosses and guild halls. Public architecture was civic speech, expected to say something.

The shift came gradually, then decisively. Modernism made ornament morally suspect – Adolf Loos declared it criminal as early as 1908. Later, development economics ensured anything non-structural became a cost to cut. Public art budgets shrank to token percentages: enough for a single sculpture in a forecourt, typically abstract, typically inoffensive, often ignored.

In Australia, we have developed our own version of this tension. Walk through the older precincts of any major city and you find neo-classical facades on banks, sandstone columns on court buildings, federation details on heritage streetscapes.

We reach for historical European styles because we recognise these shapes carry meaning, even when we've lost the original intent. But borrowing the costume is different to inhabiting the conviction. A neo-classical portico on a contemporary commercial building is not civic speech – it is a quotation from a language the building does not speak.

The genuine tradition of those styles emerged from commissioned original works; form and art made together. Now art is decoration added to spaces crafted to express as little as possible.

The blank wall says something. It says: you are here to pass through, not to dwell. Research in environmental psychology suggests that people's sense of belonging is shaped by whether a place appears to have been made with care for them. Public art is one of the most legible signals of that care.

It should not be surprising that one of the most powerful forms of social expression is street art. Street art is a community response to an environment that stopped speaking to the people moving through it.

It is raw, uneven, occasionally brilliant, animated by the same conviction that produced Guimard's metro entrances: that a wall shouldn't be blank if it could say something. The irony is sharp: cities now spend considerable resources either combating or curating street art that exists precisely because sanctioned public culture stopped doing the job.

There are places choosing differently. Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program has produced over four thousand murals since 1984, many created in collaboration with the communities they depict. Christchurch, after the 2011 earthquake, used public art as a central strategy for recovery, letting artists help reimagine what the city could become. Both share the same approach: art entered the conversation early, not as decoration afterward.

None of this requires grand gestures or exceptional budgets. Some of the most powerful public art is small: a poem set into pavement, a ceramic panel on a bus shelter, a community-painted fence that turns a boundary into a story. What it requires is a decision that the people who inhabit a space deserve to be addressed by it.

I still think about that metro entrance in Paris. A city, more than a century ago, decided that people descending into its underground railway deserved something beautiful to pass through.

Not because it was required. Not because anyone demanded it. But because the conviction existed that shared space was worth that kind of care. That conviction is still available to us. The walls don't have to stay silent.

Image: A metro entrance in Paris / High-Fliers on Envato

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