Art History as a Nightmare from which we ought to Awake
More long things: a paper I gave last week at a UCL conference called 'Urban Artscapes'. Lots here reprised from this blog of course, but marshalled into something hopefully rather more sustained.
posted by owen hatherley at 5:26 pm
2 Comments:
Ahem. Am I alone in finding your use of that picture just a tad misleading - if not bordering on the distateful?
The implication is that the building is now a secure middle class enclave with the police presence to keep the great unwashed out.
However, the picture is from a BBC News story from 2002 about the triple murder in Sivill House - in which Badshu Miah killed his wife, Nurjahan Khatun, his four year old step-daughter Fahmeda and his brother-in-law Kamal Udin.
It is not exactly an advert either for the security of gated communities or the uplifting effect of Modern architecture on the occupants of buildings.
To the best of my knowledge, most of Sivill House is still in public ownership and in use as social housing.
Point taken, it was too good a picture not to use (and the only pic that wasn't on flickr so I didn't have to go through the rigmarole of crediting.
However, if I were to put a pic of Cromwell St or Rillington Place up no-one would assume I was making generalisations about the effects of terraced or suburban housing...
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