http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2009/05/future-is-boring.html
"... so what if the Labour movement was obliterated, so an entire history and tradition of working class culture was wilfully destroyed - can't you just get over it and enjoy looking at pictures of the new cultural district in Abu Dhabi?
"Although my writing is driven by a feeling that those of us born in the 70s, 80s and 90s were cheated out of a certain kind of future - the future outlined in Patrick Keiller's London of 'what we used to think the future would be like' - equality, technology, infrastructure, sanity - I'm well aware that I write more in this blog about the past than I do about the future.
"And here, Abrahams' critique seems linked up with a more general one we have heard since the banking crash made suddenly, vertiginously obvious the vacuity of the last 30 years of political thought - what does the Left offer bar a return to the system as it existed before 1979? (((Hey, wait a sec – if we're getting all nostalgic for pre-1979, how about some good old-fashioned Stalinist Gingerbread architecture? I know where to find lots!)))
"The first problem with this is the utterly moronic level of futurist thought over the past decade or so, from the 'Singularity' to the starchitects. (((Awaiting the first Singularity Starchitect here – boy, that could be pretty lively. I'm nominating Lars Spuybroek.))) As anyone who has ever perused the Architects Journal's 'emerging markets series' can attest, we have faced a future constructed by the most brutalised helots, indulging the ego of power and architecture either via an Ayn Rand series of formally whimsical galleries and opera houses for the edification of feudal despots or visiting plutocrats - or perhaps buildings for the oligarchies' rigorously controlled press, or stacked trading floors for now-failed banks.
"Formally, this always looked 'futuristic', but mostly by drawing on earlier ideas of what the future was supposed to look like, be that googie and space-age design, Constructivism, expressionism, science fiction. Needless to say, this 'future' has been lovingly photographed and spread over the pages of Blueprint for several years now....
