Designers' Great Task is to green our cities

I've been asking my shrink why I'm so wary of writing again about Barangaroo. He blames the splatter-pattern vitriol that results. As if.

No, my real problem, I've decided, is with a name so ugly I can barely bring myself to let it on the page. BarangaROO. Bottom-heavy and air-headed, like a hollow-point bullet, it blows such a hole in a sentence there's nothing but soft tissue and verb endings from here to breakfast.

So I'm digging deep, because there are bigger things at stake than mere aesthetics. The future of the species, for one.

There's an aesthetic aspect to Barangaroo (see what I mean, there goes the sentence), although with each passing day this seems less of an issue.

Indeed, if you graphed the scheme's blood-oxygen levels over time, they'd show a steady descent, with the occasional stockmarket freefall, all the way from that first, joyous little package that, with Martha Schwartz and the rest, first kicked its way into life back in 2007. And now the forces of dullness gather to saw off its last bit of feist, the hotel.

Reviled as a ''hotel in the harbour'' it was really just a decorative re-shaping of the already synthetic shoreline, a rococo sandbag against the flooding boredom. But that was its big sin. Shamelessly aggressive - individualist, thrusting, erectile - it was, OMG, male.

Steadily, just as naughty-boyness is being tut-tutted out of our primary schools, that original lively scheme has been herded, squashed, cheap- ened, detextured and deflavoured by committees, politicians, developers, protesters and tut-tutters of every stripe. Each cut has made it worse. Dull, duller, dullest.

Not that I care. Do what you like with your rotten city. It's the world I care about. And that's just it, really. The desperate, global need for a light on the urban hill.