Is Modern Life Rubbish?

(Image via)

Yes, but here are some good things I've been reading:

Brutalism, Banham and Blur appear in recent posts at the excellent Radonbrainstorm. The post on Blur is particularly good, heroically attempting to reclaim Modern Life Is Rubbish from Britpop ignominy. Personally I'm with him all the way on this album and its "enchanting tale of lovers caught punch-drunk in the vortex of London life".

It also makes an interesting companion piece to the quite possibly definitive history of Pulp via urbanism, sexuality and class, currently underway at The Measures Taken.

I'm also intruiged by Radonbrainstorms image from '80's TV show Minder, mainly because I've missed the first episode of its return and am intrigued to see how it portrays London. London in the original Minder was relentlessly grim, a pre-Costa coffee and gentrification landscape of deserted backstreets, burnt out cars, grim clothes, gentleman's drinking clubs and British Leyland vehicles. Will it have been restyled by a combination of Urban Splash and the Urban Task Force?

Finally, Mockitecture's addictive architecture/music pairings scenario has turned up at Life Without Buildings. I'm not sure about the resulting equation of lo-fi music with primitive structures and igloos, but any excuse for some My Bloody Valentine is alright by me.

On Shore Architecture

An update on VSBA's Lieb House. Firstly, A link to some video footage of the house on its way to the river prior to being shipped to Long Island, and secondly a story here that it might be broken up if this doesn't happen soon enough. The rather desolate photo above is via this story in the New York Times.

(Thanks to Richard Paine for the links).

Offshore Architecture

(Map of offshore finance havens via)

Another more vicious and destabilising kind of relationship between architecture and fluidity is suggested in this recent Guardian article. In it William Brittain Catlin points out some of the hideous ironies of the (specifically) US/UK economic collapse.

At one end of this collapse we have houses as supposedly safe and solid investments, both symbolically - in the sense that they represent the high point of our aspirations) - and literally - in the sense that the size of our mortgages limits our options and keeps us tethered to home) - grounding us. At the other we have the free-floating, nationless, homeless, deregulated hedge funds that finance such painful dreams.

During the last three decades houses have assumed an ever greater importance in our collective value system, becoming more reassuringly familiar in their symbolism at the same time. Meanwhile their financing has become ever more abstract, intangible and destructive. It is as if finance itself has taken on the dreams of boundary-less freedom we might once have wished for ourselves, while we have invested all our desires and more than we earn in staying put, staying home.