[lbo-talk] Crap architecture

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Sun Sep 18 11:35:53 PDT 2011


Doug: ‘You can hate the social arrangements without hating the people, James’

No doubt you can, but that’s not an aesthetic criticism, is it?

And since we are talking about architecture, it is not obvious to me what social arrangements you are talking about. Those that lead the Basildon Council to evict Gypsies from their Green Belt built settlements, perhaps? Or the overcrowding and flatsharing that is booming thanks to my country’s housing shortage? I certainly object to those social arrangements. The failure to build enough homes to house Britons – that sounds like a hateful social arrangement.

Every time I see another page illustrating the imagined threat to the British countryside from developments that never happen, with a scene of rural beauty, I remember that those fields were once thronged with Anglo-Saxons, cleared by their Norman landlords to make way for their deer runs. That’s an ‘aesthetic’ judgement, I guess.



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