| to take a phrase from Gautam Bhatia
|
'It's a monster. But if it stops changing, it will die'
As the London Architecture Biennale kicks off, its director Peter
Ackroyd tells Jonathan Glancey how money has transformed the city - and
will make it almost unrecognisable by 2010
Monday June 12, 2006
The Guardian
'London's always been an ugly city," says the writer Peter Ackroyd,
sitting in the bar of the Zetter Hotel, designed by local architect
Laurie Chetwood in the heart of Clerkenwell, London. With isolated
exceptions, the printers, clockmakers, prisoners, distillers,
seditionaries and revolutionaries of an older, darker Clerkenwell have
long given up the ghost. Clerkenwell is now the home, or "creative
quarter", of legions of young architects and designers - and as such
it's the focus of the London Architecture Biennale, of which Ackroyd is
the director, that starts this Friday.
Is London really so very ugly?
cont'd....
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1795527,00.html