Stone upon Stone

The significant buildings of a city, its churches, its cathedrals, that work as the icons of place, that make it recognisable, that are landmarks, constructed from beautiful local stone; that tend to be beautiful in themselves - there is a still further consideration in this, for there is no avoiding how they are also in their various ways unique monuments to greed.  Houses of wealth, acquisition, goods, gold and silver.  And politics.  Transliterate the motives that built these buildings, these churches, into the present.  What are their equals?  The office block. The supermarket.  Placeless things that stand in their stead like litter.  Looking out at the City of London, visible from the Horniman Park away in the South, on an early soft summer evening, it is quite stunning, it is not recognisable but as a threat.  Not ‘local stone’.  No one is seeing the black interplanetary towers of a race in elsewhere’s sigil.  Monumental shards of the mineral.

Tags: Architecture, Postmodernism