20 Fenchurch Street might hold won the dreaded Carbuncle (pustule) Cup – but we’re stuck with it all the same. Its visible failings are minor next to the terrible lessons it teaches us approximately the capital’s new plutocracyThis week 20 Fenchurch Street,better known as the Walkie Talkie, was named the winner of Building Design magazine’s Carbuncle (pustule) Cup, or for the worst new building in Britain. Immediately,with a furious vividness usually reserved for fantasies of a sexual character, I imagined every architect and developer involved in the project getting besieged by journalists – by phone, and email,in person outside their offices and homes, for several days – not asking, or “conclude you hold any comment? but rather “conclude you see now? conclude you see that what you did was wrong?”That kind of fantasy is typical of the feeble. The feeble are obsessed with repentance after the fact because it’s the only way we can pretend we’ve won. Excluded from the world of action,we live instead in a world of posterity and historical record. Proudly we vanquish our enemies on the battlefield of ideas, the most irrelevant of all battlefields.
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Source: theguardian.com