The Age of Spectacle: Adventures in Architecture and the 21st-Century City

"Dyckhoff very successfully paints a picture of how these things get made, and why people want to build iconic structures in the first place. Living in these urban landscapes it is quite hard for us often to see what the drivers are for creating them. They seem like abstract forces. Whereas the urban landscape is the result of decisions by developers and architects and others. He is a very good storyteller who puts these protagonists front and centre. The Age of Spectacle tells the story of specific places and developments, like London’s Docklands. This was a derelict part of London that featured for example as the backdrop for a film called The Long Good Friday , a hardboiled French Connection -type thriller set at a moment in the seventies when London was rather in ruins, in the same way that New York was at the time. This is Dyckhoff’s starting point, and he explains how you get from there to plans to redevelop the area for the London Olympics. In that film, it’s all about corruption and money. He makes a really compelling series of connections about where the money comes from for these projects, who the people involved are, why they want to get the project built, and especially, why everybody is in a weird competition with one another. The competitive forces in fact shape the landscape, but it’s competition often at a very personal level. Guggenheim Bilbao is another powerful example: the idea of using architecture to create branding for a city. Cultural regeneration becomes a very powerful way for people who are running cities to reconfigure their cities, change them to get more outward investment. This may sound like dry financial matters, but he really brings it all to life, like the drama that it is. Forces that might otherwise seem quite abstract, he is able to pinpoint and relate them vividly. Like Anna Minton, who does a similar account of cities through an economics lens, he looks at the macro forces at work, but moreover he brings us in to encounter the people involved, and these characters are what make for a really good narrative. The dramatis personae in these civic dramas are people often invisible to the public eye, but with their own motivations and their own agendas, which find themselves realised in our built environment. He talks to some really big names like Zaha Hadid , big international figures who actually are almost as iconic as the buildings that they’re creating. She was creating her own brand in much the same way that her buildings were building a brand for the places that she was creating them for, which is really interesting. Behind the famous facades, of people or buildings, there are many, somewhat invisible people that remain largely unknown. In some cases though, they have been hugely influential in what gets built or doesn’t."