I am not busy enough to have a city break

To break this silence that I negligently afforded by adjusting myself to the job and house market circumstances in the UK the last two months, I have to start with my most recent experience.

Being lucky enough to spend four days at the World Travel Market in ExCel, London Docklands, last week, I have a picture story from my phone to tell; and apart from sharing my fatigue with the rest of the financial labour workforce on DLR those days. The latter experience is equally traumatic, but I will start now from the impressions of how national stands at the Fair produced the pictures of the imagined land on their territories.

I deeply admire the inventiveness to make an asset out of the desert, but there is a very funny combination of the 'serious' financial districts' models and the leisure resorts with architects like Frank Gehry pushed to the fore, to securitize (and I am not sure if I should use that word here, but try thinking of it metaphorically) the playfulness of the whole project or the high art values.
On the stand of United Arab Emirates you could take a picture of yourself in one of the luxury cabin aircraft chambers with the tacitly charming stewardess. Apart from that work&pleasure principle, you could have a pure exoticized European-looking lady playing with an eagle in her hands, happily posing for the visitors of the fair (who are, to stress that - also the businessmen fellas from the other countries, as the Fair is not open for the citizens and average mortals). White, beautiful and mute, I bet they had a message here to share between the lines.

Please, enjoy the pictures, as what is documented after the crash says completely the opposite. The building sites in Abu Dhabi have been abandoned for months now and there is only sand and security awaiting for the glitzy towers and ever new airports. Sorry for the blurriness, it is a result of my flirting with the treasury keepers in order to mask my disgust by the engulfing amount of fake Ives Klein around.

Nice to meet you?

Milka Forcan and Miodrag Miskovic


Milka Forcan, Josep Lloveras and Olli Rehn


Project for Belgrade Danube Waterfront by Daniel Liebeskind, space property of Port Belgrade




My friend's, Branko Belacevic's, witty observation of what exactly is going on in Belgrade Danube Waterfont project


Renderings of project for Varsavska Street, Zagreb


Tomo Horvatincic, the investor of the project in Varsavska Street


Peaceful protests in Varsavska Street, Zagreb

Business women from Serbia, Milka Forcan has stirred up the public opinions lately with the news of her break up over the shareholdings of Delta holding company with her 20-year-old business partner Miroslav Miškovic, absolute monopolist on Serbian financial market. She states that it was not an easy decision, having emotions about the place she had also invested in it during her lifetime. Oops, looks like there is a formula to mix business and pleasure here?

It is important to know the power position of this woman in the international affairs, as she reported she will continue her career in lobbying, after she had proved to be an important player in Serbian business' contribution to EU integration; discussing these issues, for example, with Olli Rehn and Josep Lloveras. In this region, there is a popular pattern of direct ascribing political potential to the financially successful individuals. I don't know if I support this woman for being such a strong opponent to Mišković, in the male dominated state, or just dislike her, as it looks like they have quite the same aims and objectives. I wonder if the monopoly of Miskovic's emporium has helped her be seen as AAA woman of the region- attractive, actual, active.

Knowing that same Delta's first man was financing political parties, and has been involved in criminal activities of illegal privatization of Port of Belgrade, even Daniel Liebeskind could not resist his power, and created this flashy project, promising a bright future for the Belgrade waterfront.

In addition, talking about the powerful connections of state and the business, and politics of public space, this is already late information, but 140 citizens were arrested last week in Zagreb, protesting non/violently over the long, similar, dispute of turning the square in the centre of the city into a shopping mall and closing the pedestrian paths.

Are politics or space of the countries with EU accession ambition in need for more lobbyists?

Aloha Friday

In a recent conversation, Trenton has uncovered an astonishing truth to me about the early Friday frenzy in the City of London.
It is indeed sometimes a wonderful social image seeing people happily drinking outside the pubs already around lunch time on Fridays, be it winter or summer. Still, in London, it is mostly not because these city employees are such relaxed chaps, but because - other big stock exchanges in different time zones are already closed at that hour. Alas, in the name of the globally supervised, untied, mostly male crowd, already for hours standing on the pavements slightly eastern from the City, small warning from Saint Etienne:



See you on Monday on the Central line. Cheers.

Who will harvest the opportunity?

"Manhattan is the richest, most professional, most congested and without a doubt most fascinating island in the world. To attempt to plant , sustain and harvest two acres of wheat here, wasting valuable real estate, obstructing the machinery by going against the system, was an affrontery that made it the powerful paradox I had sought" Agnes Denes, Wheatfield: A Confrontation 1982


via The City Project


Damon Rich, Cities Destroyed for Cash, 2009, 1431 plastic markers on a panorama of New York City, c.30 x 30m. Photograph: Damon Rich


Damon Rich, Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, 2008. Installation views at MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA. (Photos: Judith M. Daniels)


Centre Point tower, London





I have no intention here, alas, solving the puzzle ever revolving around the question whether architecture is just the means and instrument, or the very source for changing the world. Yet, we know for sure that the real estate and the buildings themselves, at least in their very physical presence accelerated the last credit crunch. 'It's quite fascinating how this is possibly the first crisis of our times that has a distinctive architectural aesthetic - empty, detached suburban mansions connected by deserted streets, or slum-like frame houses in varying states of dilapidation,' says Joseph Grima, director of Storefront for Art and Architecture.

While the architecture of financial districts brings no hope of resolving the aforementioned puzzle, as it only makes them culturalized products, their today immense unrented, empty space offers maybe a crack into the heart of the problem. In Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, the facade became more valuable than the space itself. Look, also, at the enormous TINAG collection of London City office space waiting to be rented.

The housing schemes are unmistakeably connected to the corporations whether East or West. Maybe contemporary art has retained the means to confront the problem without falling into the culturalization trap. Damon Rich from Centre for Urban Pedagogy is in his project Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Centre trying to unveil how does the notion of financial risk affect the built environment?

Office space is mirroring the capital, but sometimes, like in the example of Centre Point tower of London, built in the 1960s - floors waiting to be rented for years did not reflect the lack of the interest in this space - but the power and the monopoly of one man to raise the rent by such a gesture. There we are again at the same integral interdependent point of the state and its tax relief for the land developers. In Britain, it took a long time for broader public to accept the outlook of the tall buildings and the city smart facades, but in this country the traditionalists would probably embrace its first failure to use it for their understanding of some 'more human' form. If the dragons and lions did not help the City of London headway, can Feng Shui (in the year of Tiger) or at least, Maneki Neko?

Public art of private space?

After the graffiti spraying This is Not Art over the sculpture in SoHo last year, the decision has been made to continue with showcasing artworks in the same spot, as otherwise it would "lie vacant", said curator Adam Kleinman.

Curiously, the 'filling up' process of these vacant spaces by big names's artwork
seems to be a win-win combination for both city authorities and the investors of financial districts' developments around the world. The first group counts on receiving acclamation for enriching the public space by a mere display of art objects, and the latter ones on eliminating height restrictions by investing in public amenities.

The space in-between the office towers and on plazas among them is often given the 'new identity' by artwork such as James Turrell's five glass panels in Brookfield's Bay Adelaide Centre in Toronto's financial district, Michael Heizer's fountain in Manhattan, or Jenny Holzer's instalation in LA Standard Hotel. Broadgate Estate in London is proudly mapping the art around their properties. Influence on public opinion and a qualitative change of space attained by these installations is debatable.

However, artists in Hamburg crossed the border of the permitted art. Their open discontent by the newest establishments has been not acknowledged as the enrichment of public space, but simply as protests.

For more on 'American' model of politics and aesthetics of public space read a text bySharon Zukin.
Art collective Platform has been running critical project Museum of Corporation and walks around London City promoting an alternative model of art taking place in the spatial set-up of London City.

Timeline of GIFT City Mega-development

Gujarat International Finance Tec-City has been promoted as a city for the next generation, India's "financial muscle" and the infrastructural source to augment the capacity of Mumbai . Planned by ECADI, public-private partnership, but also the largest project of Gujarat state government, it was aimed to cope with existing financial districts like Shanghai or London Docklands. State decision to build GIFT City combined with the planning ideas of green and recreational space allocated by the skyscrapers' low occupation of the land, and the sustainable energy consumption, all evoke the grand times of Modernism. However, the physical space has been supported by CISCO , partner for Internet Protocol services, in order to improve the management. A question still stays why this "New York of India" needs to be promoted both as a contemporary business district development and a place where traditional ideas of building codes are respected.

Shift of focus in London real-estate: from the City towards the West End

Britain’s second-largest real estate trust, plans to invest 330 million pounds in redeveloping properties in London's West End. After selling 50 per cent of Broadgate complex last September, British Land announces plan to slowly move from the City and office space towards entertainment and shorter lettings due to the drop in the rents there.

Architectures of Dereliction

Owen Hatherley's article published on Mute website. Reviewing the books Where the other half lives and The Architecture and Urban Culture of Financial Crisis, he claims the fatality of architecture as a discipline for the neoliberal Non-Plan trend.