Jonathan Meades – On The Brandwagon

Jonathan Meades looks at the branding and regeneration of inner cities through spectacular, but ultimately vacuous, signature buildings such as Bilbao’s “museum with nothing in it” – Gehry’s Guggenheim, and through loft style modernism light – rather like the ridiculous and vapid Phillipe Stark or Armani Casa condos being built in Wall Street, where I live.

The case is put with great wit and erudition, complete with sarcastic marketing doublespeak, throughout. The conclusion is that the end result of this insincere, marketing driven, regeneration is that the once diseased inner cities have merely relocated their problems to the areas beyond the ring roads. The places where they burn cars nightly in the Banlieus, but its not just in France.

This is the trend that was identified years ago by Mike Davis in city of quartz, but the difference is that Davis realized it is a phenomenon independent of the brand of politics, social libertarianism (read Blairism), that Meades sees as the culprit. But its worth seeing Meades do his bit because he says it so well. He understands architecture so much better than a Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind, who have become glorified window dressers able to plonk a building anywhere in the word, to rapturous acclaim, without actually having ever been there.

Play all parts.

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