The Ozymandias Economy

So, if you go to the 42nd floor of the Leadenhall Building in London - which is an 'events dining venue' rather than an actual commercial restaurant - you will see the typical wine and water glasses, silver knives and forks and spoons, and candelabra, and white table clothes, of the Georgian style of London upper class dining.

Leadenhall Building is the tallest, triangular thing

Which all seems a bit peculiar if you consider the actual building itself - which is all steel and ballistic-proof glass and hailed as ultra-modern.

Down below somewhere, if you look at the skyline of all these new buildings in the City of London - down below near the Leadenhall Building somewhere - is the old Leadenhall Market which I showed you last week.

The Leadenhall Building is on the site of the old P&O premises designed by family connections of mine so I'll have to admit to the potential for prejudice. All the same, modern architecture conducted for the large trusts that bank pension and superannuation funds largely, is missing the elements of true modernity when it comes to actual modern life and lifestyle.

Koishimaru silk interior of a high end spa

If you compare what interior designers do for the high end luxury private spas around the globe, you will find not merely the usual 'modern-esque' commitment to simple and clear lines, but also the desire to be around luxurious textures, and emotional motifs. Today's expensive architecture of tall buildings on the other hand is really just an extension of Brutalism, and a fetish for certain materials - glass and steel and aluminium.

 

For me it is a wonder that so much money in the hands of mindless and talentless and artless committees can have stayed intact for so long - there is no possibility they are making the right decisions over the investment of those funds just as they are very far short of what modern technology and materials innovations and genuine architecture and design can do.

But then, there were also Pharaohs for a long time too, and it was only Shelley the poet who really put the final line under them two thousand year after they had already long died out!

Often, because we are living life, we neither see what we are looking at, nor comprehend what we are witnessing, nor do the ants themselves understand their own position. The ancient classical Sanskrit philosophers knew about ants - they wrote that every one of them thinks he alone is the King of Worlds. If it's not hydrogen embrittlement, it is Osama, and if not Osama, then some asteroid.

Asteroid? Did I say, 'asteroid?' Mistake, I'm sure.