Urbanism

A Worker Informs a Lord on the Subject of the Guillotine

Adapted from Heinrich Heine, Wintermärchen. 1844.

“King Louis the fifteen died,

 Quite peaceful, alone in his bed.

The sixteenth, however, was guillotined,

Along with Queen Antoinette.

The queen showed great courage,as has been told, given the severe situation,

Although her small dog did yelp and did cry

While she suffered her neck laceration.”

The V&A’s butchered chunk of Robin Hood Gardens is a vile and arrogant monument to the social cleansing of London. Architecture, or a reified slice of it, is preserved and celebrated for aesthetic contemplation at the very same moment that it is destroyed as people’s homes. It’s an obscene spectacle, where working class housing is usurped for middle class pleasure, social vandalism whitewashed by the circuits of cultural heritage.

First Announcement and Call for Papers:

Art and Housing Struggles: between art and political organising