Saturday, December 27, 2008

Waiting for the wall to fall

I've been to a couple of cold places this year - to Berlin in October and to Crystal Palace park this morning. But it's not just the climate they have in common. Both also feature monstrous blocks of concrete decorated by graffiti artists in an attempt to humanise them. The difference is that one was installed by a repressive regime to control people moving from one part of the city to the other - the other seems to have no purpose at all. Can anyone explain the Crystal Palace 'wall'?
The Crystal Palace 'Wall'

The Berlin Wall

1 comment:

David said...

One of the things I love about London is that there is this natural response by so many Londoners to 'humanise' so much of the brutal concrete, to express internal narrative on a landscape so aggresive if you do not fight back it damages you.