Today sees the unveiling of the latest in a series of
phallocentric London skyscrapers. For those of you who don’t live here and
may not have seen The Shard, it is a vast, ugly, meaningless insult
to the capital created by an unholy triumvirate comprising a former Labour
deputy prime minister - bloated,
greedy, philandering, philistine oaf, John Prescott - some obscenely rich property
developer, and a screamingly pretentious Italian architect who was partly
responsible for that ghastly eyesore, the Pompidou Centre.
Designed in 2000 by Renzo "You Hum It And I’ll Play It" Piano,
the plan to build the tallest skyscraper in the EU in Southwark, where it would
act as a vast middle finger to the 99.99% of Londoners who weren’t enormously
wealthy or politically powerful, attracted a great deal of opposition. John
Prescott ordered an official inquiry, which allowed him to personally approve
the plan in 2003.
Last night, BBC2’s Culture Show ran an item on The Shard, in
which Alan Yentob (who in the BBC does this man have damaging information about?)
interviewed Signor Piano on a rainy day on the Embankment. Piano laughed a lot
(I expect most successful charlatans do). Canalletto “would have been pleased”,
he told us (having been born in an age of exquisite aesthetic taste, Canaletto
would, of course, have been utterly appalled). “As an architect, you have to be a builder for the
first half hour of the day. After that, you become a poet” (i.e. you spend half
an hour working and the rest of the day being a pretentious twat). He said he
had never previously designed a tower because they’re arrogant, all about power
and money, and they don’t tell “a very interesting story”.
Instead of beating this odious poseur about the head with
his umbrella, Yentob was twinklingly quizzical. You can find the programme here
– the Piano interlude commences at 22’00”.
At the start of the interview, Piano splits a piece of balsa
wood (or an enormous, white crispbread) to create a shard, and seems
to imagine that this justifies everything (in much the same way as the architect
who designed the South Bank back in the 1950s might have takes a large dump and
pointed to the results as justification for his designs). I was hoping that Yentob
would yank the shard out of Piano's hand, run round behind him and ram it up the orifice
the blister was talking out of.
After the revelations concerning John Prescott’s disgraceful antics with his “diary
secretary” Tracey Temple, she likened his organ as a
“chipolata”. I wonder if the fat fool’s
approval of The Shard has anything to do with that snippet of information.
It’s hard not to look at the 1000ft tall act of vandalism as the greatest
example of masculine compensation in all of human history.
I have two suggestions. First, that John Prescott be lifted
to the top of this vulgar monstrosity (the building, not John Prescott himself) by helicopter and then dropped directly onto one of its spikes.
Second, in honour of the three men most responsible for it, The
Shard should be renamed The Penis Extension or, more simply, taking a lead from the classsic Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch above, The Prick.
If you are looking for other examples of non-sensical architectural projects I give you the Scottish Parliament Building [or, Parlamaid na h-Alba, if you are one of the world's 20 Gaelic speakers]. It is a dreadful blot on the Edinburgh landscape and a monument to the hubris of politicians. The project was given to one Enric Miralles of Barcelona. The bid price was £40m in 1997 and ended up as £414m in 2007.
ReplyDeleteMr Miralles died aged 45 a few months after construction started ["Vamonos muchachos, vaya con Dios."] Since completion, bits keep falling off, the roofs have flodded and the majority of the chairs have been replaced because they were too narrow for the arses of Scottish politicians.
There was a perfectly adequate building available [owned by the Church of Scotland], but this was rejected as not grandiose enough.
When we visited the Scottish Parliament, my wife described it as looking like a provincial Spanish airport - and I think she was being kind. Mind you, I expect a lot of the SMPs feel at home there, because their ludicrous salaries no doubt allow them to jet off to Spain on a regular basis to tank up on cheap beer and wine, stuff their faces with greasy, unhealthy food, and get their pasty, freckled skin severely burned because they're too pissed to locate the Factor 50.
ReplyDelete