The
critics accused the Malloy circle of making a Romantic cult of
augmented reality and they were right, up to a point. We were
Futurists too, but it was the bunny slopes of Romanticism which got
people paying attention.
'Romantic'
was a name that each of us inner circlers at that time would have
borne with pride. To understand that, you have to remember what we
were kicking against in our everyday life. A city which had been
designed and desecrated by successive generations of incompetents –
ugly as sin, as cheap as a cheap thing, as user-friendly as a Latin
smartphone, with its fingers in its ears to the future. It needed
more than beauty, however you define beauty, but beauty was a startt.
When
Alasdair suggested that the city skyline should incorporate mountain
views from Caspar David Friedrich paintings, he was getting Shocked
of Sutton's attention to make a point. Not that the city's Great and
Good had no sense of humour – that would be shooting fish in a
barrel. But that Birmingham needed to think big in a new way, away
from corporate dumbassery or peak oil rabbit-in-the-stream fatalism
that once prevailed in these parts.
As
a blank canvass for beauty, with a surface reality of crumbling
post-war infrastructure and latter-day quick-up quick-down
cowboy-jobs overlaying neglected Victorian strata, the city needed
us. Who wouldn't want to make this more beautiful. And, lest we
forget, more meaningful.
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