I'm getting increaslingly annoyed that every Londoner is ignoring the elephant in the room. Its not like you can avoid the bastard thing, is it? It has practically view-raped every corner south of the river.
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| Ladies and Gentlemen, the elephant, now with three blades for a closer shave. |
I am, of course, talking about the Carbuncle Award winning architectural fucking atrocity that is the Strata Tower of Elephant and Castle.
Old news, I know, but sometimes rage takes a while to bed roots and, living within spitting distance of it has certainly bed some redwood-like ones.
Lets start with the obvious flaw with its aesthetics. The building is a gargantuan body-hair groomer with a zebra striped grip. It is. It seriously is. Its so large that its practically unavoidable. 43 storeys of pure contempt for all the beautiful architecture in London. Nothing for me says that more than this particular photo.
This is the architectural equivalent of photobombing. The proverbial drunk man showing his arse in an otherwise classy picture of you and you girlfirend on holiday. An isolated incident, I here you cry?
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| BOW DOWN TO ME, PUNY HUMANS |
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| I AM OMNIPOTENT AND ALL-SEEING |
Clearly, the showpiece of our new inanimate Overlord is the three wind turbine blades. Now, I say this with utmost confidence. It has been complete for around a year. 95% of the time it has been inhabited, I have had to look at it [I live a 15 minute walk away] and I can say with conviction, I have never seen them turn. Not once.
I'm all for environmental design. In fact, I actively encourage it. Good environmental design is a crux point to limit climate change. But the blades are completely tokenistic; a greenwash. It boasts as being the first building to incorporate wind energy into its architecture, potentially providing up to 8% of the energy used in the building, but what good is that when they sit in complete stillness the majority of the time? In fact, the blades are so noisy, they have to turn them off at night anyway. Furthermore, the audacity to claim green credentials from a feature which has such an enormous expenditure of carbon to engineer is ludicrous.
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| "Now I can take a shit while I think of all the poor people that live below!" |
The more troublesome issue though is its place in the apparent redevelopment of Elephant and Castle. The gargantuan effort and cost to erect a skyscraper, hideous or not, is completely disproportional to its supposed benefits. Elephant and Castle's problem is not a need of housing, and certainly not a need for luxury housing. Have you been to E&C? It is a concrete shithole with no public space, and no commercial areas, apart from the sadly dilapidated shopping centre.
The money needs to be pumped into public amenities and local grass roots programs, rather than some monumental dildo that seems to try its hardest to disengage with its surroundings completely, snootily looking down on the proletariat while the £200k a year tosser in the penthouse can gob at the passing poor people.
Hate it or hate it, its staked its rather sizeable claim on the London skyline and will be ever-present for ever and ever and ever. Still, at least it won't dominate it for long. Over yonder on the horizon, a new, larger behemoth emergeth.
