Brutalissima

It's unfashionable, I know, but I'm going to miss the St. James Centre when it's gone. Demolition preparation has begun, and it is closing for good next month, when the long process of dismantling it will begin.  

In (soon-to-be-only-a) memory of it, and of Edinburgh's postwar utopian concrete dream, I have been looking through some of my brutalist/modernist photo frenzies of the past few years (random selections on a crappy phone camera). Apart from the sheer orgiastic authenticity of these concrete monoliths, I don't know quite why I love it all so much - perhaps because I think of postwar concrete buildings as a kind of marker for what was lost in the war (often literally, as replacements for bombed buildings - hence London being uglier than Paris, etc.) and for the egalitarian, civic-minded hopes of those postwar decades. Glassy, sandstone, privatised cubes (or spirals) don't really cut it as markers of either memory or hope; the best that can be said of the replacement is that it will no doubt be replaced itself within a decade or two (such is the cynical, short-termist modus operandi of investment groups behind developments like this) - hopefully by that point, it will be a case of "come back state/council-led concrete building projects, all is forgiven".

Here be dragons: in celebration of illustrated maps

Do you ever wish you hadn't googled something (apart, of course, from anything medical)? - Well, I wish I hadn't googled the phrase "here be dragons"... I have been thinking a lot about maps, illustrated and otherwise, recently - and started thinking about all those maps bearing this phrase. I used to love the image that it conjured up, of medieval cartographers (in my mind they are illuminating - and illuminated - monks, with a proper sense of the absurd), diligently delineating the known world, and then reaching the end of their knowledge and inserting a jaunty dragon. Imagine being so bound up in accurately recording something for posterity and then being forced to go no further. "Here be dragons" in my mind became a symbol for the terror, and the rich mytholgical possibilities, of the unknown: just as the pillars of Hercules at the gates of the Mediterranean bore the injunction non plus ultra, to warn adventurous sailors to go no further - a literal warning that beyond the plillars lay "nothing" itself - so hic sunt dracones served as an exhortation to cast one's mind no further beyond the limits of knowledge.

To me, they made maps more than just a physical geographical guide, but turned them into something which both told a story (and I've always loved a story), and acted as a guide to the limits and navigation of knowledge. They also seemed to confirm the analogy between physical and mental exploration.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I tried to find some maps bearing this phrase to rekindle my imagination and discovered that it only exists on one map - and that that map is actually a globe (the Hunt Lenox globe - a tiny little sixteenth-century globe that is now in the collection of the New York public library). If you look below, you will see that the dragons appear to live on the south-east Indian sub-continent - and that the coast is pretty well delineated. So much for the limits and possibilties of knowledge - my monks probably just didn't know how to spell Pondicherry....

Nevermind - my love of maps that tell stories remains (mind maps not included - they do not tell a story), as does my fascination with Grayson Perry's map etchings. He doesn't always call them maps, but that is absolutely what they seem to be. They may not be a map of a recognisable place, and they may be full of judgement-laden labels as to population and perversion, but maps they nevertheless are (and I have seen more than my fair share of judgement-laden colonial maps).