London has a parallel other that exists in the imagination – a place perceived and understood through the framework of literature, art and film, which is simultaneously a by-product and producer of the city. The poet and designer, William Morris, for example, saw London as a site of socialist work and production. Meanwhile, J.G. Ballard, who embraced new technology as inevitable, portrayed a decidedly dystopian London in order to comment on the fallibility of grand plans and the perversity of human nature.
This antipathy to the ‘plan’ is typical of London’s development, which has grown organically through the city’s consumption of surrounding towns and villages. Although it tends to resist large-scale planning, London has allowed the occasional visionary intervention. One of the best known of these is Croydon, a town situated at London’s southern edge, rebuilt after the Second World War in the international modernist style. To some, the new commercial centre of high-rise towers and raised walkways represented a mini Manhattan. In practice, the resulting blend of brutalism and sprawling infrastructures were problematic and flawed.
Croydon, without a clear identity, is fragmented by its own visions from the past and of future.
The notion of architecture as an essentially artistic practice is explored through the study of the ‘language’ of architecture. These drawings document the facades of some of Croydon’s modernist buildings, which are composed along rigid hierarchical orders. The relentlessly vertical expanse of grids appears to form a strong contrast to the fragmented ground condition.
In Western art history the grid has been positioned as an emblem of modernism. As Krauss writes in her essay, the mythology of grids allowed artists to “land in the present, while everything else was declared to be the past”.
These drawings are experiments of different compositions – grids and dimensions are extracted from the existing facades on the Nestle Tower in Croydon. They are deconstructed and recomposed, to create a variety of rhythms from existing dimensions.