The Sleepwalk of the West

How big is the Good Society? What is human-scale – and are our cities within it? Success – as it prevails in the material urban mind – is a measure of one’s ability to deny the city. There are various ways the rich do this: in secondary country houses; in pleasantly expensive tree-lined oases, in the “exclusive” (note its shameless literal meaning) silence of penthouses.

A vast office and retail building is rising next to St Paul’s Cathedral, set to “transform the City into a seven-day shopping and leisure destination with a difference“. A friend in the trade told me the story: The site was up for redevelopment (why? it looked grand as it was). Certain constraints apply around the Cathedral to [...]

Modernism, otherwise known as Nihilism. Ok, yes, it’s highly innovative, etcetera. But I recently stayed a few doors away from this cube-home, and it just got uglier each time I saw it. That was my “response” to it, so presumably it is “valid”.