Gang-gang. Belconnen's elegant brute: Wayfarer apartments begin to tower

But in fact the building of Wayfarer, destined to be a towering-by-Canberra-standards 88 metres tall with 27 floors and with 331 of what the developers promise in their pamphlets will be "sun-drenched" apartments, turns out to be well under way. It is already looming and impossible to miss.

When you are a sensitive soul, something really rather exciting about watching and listening to a very big building being busily built. Looking at it, admiringly on Wednesday from across the road, it seemed a living, noisy thing. The site was a cacophony of drilling and hammerings. A great concrete panel was being hefted aloft by a tall but slender crane.

This columnist is not a real estate writer but the Wayfarer is, like the same developer, Geocon's, Infinity Towers project at Gungahlin, of interest to anyone who is a student of Canberra. Our city is changing before our very eyes.

Then as well, well-travelled, cosmopolitan Canberrans hanker for some true skyscrapers to break up the monotony of our city's low, shy skylines. Infinity Towers and now Wayfarer give us at least a kind of skyscraper lite. A city without any buildings that tower and swagger and call out "Look at me!" feels like a meek, milksop city, a city with an inferiority complex.

Geocon minions issued us with hard hats and with fluorescent green fluor vests. My protests that the vulgar vest clashed with my boyish complexion and with my powder-blue shirt fell on deaf ears. We were taken into the shell of the building, the whole place delicately perfumed with the heady scent of raw cement. We ascended to the sixth floor in a builders' lift that rattled excitingly.

Geocon was anxious to show us some typical sixth-floor apartments, already furnished for display purposes. Geocon's dynamic supremo Nick Georgalis was there to enthuse to us. He assured me that he had forgiven me for calling him, after a previous interview about Infinity Towers, a kind of "Satan". We had meant that he is Satan to those conservative Canberrans who hate the satanic ways in which his Geocon aspires to alter the city. Geocon has designs on the Manuka district. He loves to use, approvingly, the d words (like "density"), which of course leaves ashen-faced those conservative quarter-acre Canberrans who don't want to live in a city that teems with people, life, etc.

He and Geocon are very keen to stress how some apartments at Infinity Towers and every apartment at Wayfarer have "water views". And sure enough, when he pointed it out to us from a sixth-floor apartment's balcony, there not far away was a corner of not-very-majestic Lake Ginninderra. It was 50 shades of grey. On Wednesday a bitter Belconnen breeze was coming off it, reminiscent of how cold it can be in Finland when the breeze is off the Baltic.

Should the carp-infested waters of Lake Ginninderra fail to entice, Wayfarer is going to have, on its 27th level, a sparkling infinity swimming pool. See our alluring picture in which three residents (including fair Ingeborg, the blonde Nordic goddess who stars in Geocon publicity materials) wallowing in what is of course the city's highest pool.

We chatted with Mr Georgalis who reported there is going to be an element of "brutalism" about the looks of Wayfarer and that this will do some echoing of the already "brutalist form of Belconnen". Architecturally and aesthetically, words like "brutalist" are not the epithets they sound to the untutored. The brutalist movement, originating in the 1950s, favoured simple, unfussy looks that used facades of raw, unpainted concrete. Aesthetes adore brutalism.

"I think," my host continued, explaining what he meant, "in the brutalist context in previous forms in Canberra we've seen quite low-rise, squat buildings."

Here we thought of the School of Music, the High Court.

But with the Wayfarer we were going to see, he explained, not so much a brutalist building, let alone a low, squat, brutalist building, but a tall and elegant building that was going to use a lot of "off-form" (unpainted) concrete, brutalism's signature material.

Raw concrete has all sorts of virtues, he rejoiced. As well as its ruggedness and plainness, that appearance of stone, "it doesn't break down, it doesn't discolour ... so when I talk about brutalism I'm talking about using raw elements, raw forms. We've taken the brutalist form of Belconnen that everybody knows and we've applied it to this building."

He is a great believer in how, while it's fine for suburbia to retain its leafy bungalowdom, town centres have to have oodles of people living at them to make amenities viable. As he spoke like this we braced ourselves for some d words.

"Town centres need population. They need to be dense. They need height, They need people. Canberra is growing as a city and becoming more sophisticated and we're seeing people in their 40s and 50s becoming more accepting of [apartment living]. You need that density. In a town centre if you have squat buildings here you'd never achieve that density."

The Wayfarer contribution to that local Belconnen density is going to be considerable. He calculates that Wayfarer's 331 apartments (90 per cent of them have been sold already) will house approximately 800 Belconnen souls. Their densifying presence will he thinks help give the teeming neighbourhood the feel of "a mini-city".