Thursday 30 October 2014

The Cranes That Ate London



Central London is currently one enormous building site.  In Southwark, on the corner of Stamford Street and Blackfriars Road, yet another monster crane stands in the rubble of whatever was there before, and is putting up yet another high-prestige monster building.  I'm not sure what message the illustrated hoarding is intended to put across, unless it is that from the top of our monster prestige building you'll have a terrific view of all the other monster prestige buildings.


1 comment:

Debra Morris said...

The weird phenomenon of the detailed "developer's impression" presented on the building site hoardings seems to have given rise to a new response when the hoardings are removed. That's another reason that this recent series of yours is so interesting, Mike - the repeated self-referencing. Once a reaction to completed buildings might be: What a remarkable building/what a hideous structure/that planting scheme is ambitious/the landscaping falls far short of what might have been achieved.....and now, the immediate reaction seems to be: "it looks just like it did in the picture". The first time I noticed this was when a large, biosciences building on campus was completed about 4 years ago. Comparison with "the developer's impression" distances us from the transformation that is wrought.