London - a global city (2)

I very rarely ask my readers to immediately click on an image when they visit my blog, but today is an exception. So click! (but do please come back in a second or two to finish reading).

As promised, it is the second highlight of the Global cities exhibition at the Tate Modern over the summer. Part of a larger work, (bits of which can be read here and also here), it's more of an pictorially annotated essay than fine art, but is a thought-provoking work all the same. The second link is particularly thought provoking, about how planned architecture is a thing of the past - the public sector is now less influential in developing cities, there are no grand ideological theories of architecture as there are no public purses to patronise them. 'Architects no longer write manifestos. At most they write portraits of particular cities... an absence of a utopian drive is perhaps almost as serious as an overdose of it.'

I have always had an admiration for the architects of the 50's, 60's and 70's, who built - often but not always - buildings which, by today's (and probably most eras' standards) look horrific. The reason they built those modernist buildings was because they were constructing a new utopia for all. There's an urban myth that the architect of Peckham actually hanged herself when she saw how it had turned out. I don't know whether or not it's true, but there was certainly a lot of passion that went into the new architecture.