>From: "feedickson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: what's it called? CUMBERNAULD/response to gair >Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 11:29:28 +0200 >MIME-Version: 1.0 > > >Gair,=20 >enjoyed that peice of work lots and lots. A nostalgia for the future = >piece indeed. (and for my personal past - I have visited mendelhsson = >tower and been unable to find it, engaged in workshops with Peter = >Smithson on several occasions and found him rather brutal indeed, = >studied the antecedents of meta-structures such as cumbernauld and = >found the reality incredibly strange)=20 > >Have you read 'Our fathers' by Andrew O'hagan? Fiction all about New = >towns, would fit well with your peice.=20 > >The modernist abandoned/decaying structures almost seem to me like = >monuments from a future that never happened/ accidents in space/time.=20 >They are a strange dichotomy, ugly enough to turn the stomach yet = >containing codes of an idealism and hope long disappeared.The ikea shed = >and the acres of garden sheds in b and q proliferated instead..should we = >be sad or glad? > >One looks at cumbernauld, and any other of the concrete clad town = >centres that mushroomed across the uk, now filled with wind and crisp = >bags and empty of shoppers, life or hope, and wonders why such good = >intentions, working for community rather than commerce, failed so = >utterably to create a space/place, leaving behind only anchronistic = >monstrous concrete, beautiful only to the trained eye, missed only by = >the architects who see beyond the rainweathered grey of concrete to the = >mental visions that were once encoded within. > >I sat amongst many resident committees of those who still lived in the = >concrete estates. As if with one voice, they reject evrything about the = >metastuctures and plead for brookside. for defensible space, for houses = >that do not set them apart as a subclass abandoned in high towers. And = >yet, there are still memories of how good it felt to arrive in these = >towers thirty/forty years ago. > >I couold go on forever..i just wonder how, in forty years time, the = >future will look back on the often-idealised visions of a virtual world = >we are creating now, and how they will judge the consequences. Are the = >architects of virtuality as doomed to fail as the architects of = >modernity? > >
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