Plural Machine

Despite its undoubted cultural vitality, Glasgow has often had a grim reputation, especially south of the English border. Yet the very bleakness, exacerbated by epic mismanagement, aggressive deindustrialization and sectarianism has also made it a site of constant and sometimes tragically over-ambitious attempts at utopian regeneration. This can be seen in the now highly poignant film Glasgow 1980 , which was already being quietly forgotten and surpassed by harsh reality even before the city had reached the year the film is supposed to depict. It poignantly promised a gleaming, post-industrial future in which "muscle gives way to automation." Yet in between the completion of the film and 1980, the oil shock and economic slowdown shattered the dreams of its makers and backers. Relatively little of the utopian plans (which to some already seemed dystopian) was ever built and many of the hopes of the "white heat of technology" era came to nothing. Other buildings...

Title slide of my presentation. Image of the doomed Birmingham Central Library, June 2015. Photo by A.M. Last week I spoke at the Nonument Symposium in Ljubljana, focussing on the way that 'Brutalism' is used and abused in contemporary culture. The renewed cult popularity of Brutalism is a phenomenon I've been observing with a mixture of fascination, enjoyment, ambivalence and disgust for some time and the lecture had a packed agenda. It was an attempt to try and decode the various agendas and interests circling around Brutalism and to track them. I analysed a range of examples, from internet culture to contemporary design to industrial music to science-fiction.  Brutalism as a (life)style or even an attitude is arguably more 'sexy' and, for some, virtuous than ever, yet many of its most iconic structures are now being demolished or de-brutalised through cladding - a term now synonymous with the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire. Image of the doomed Birmi...

I have a major new text, in this excellent collection edited by Marc James Léger. ' Sponsored by Self-Management? Re-Constructing the Context and Consequences of Laibach’s Monumental Retro- Avant-Garde ' looks at the subject through the prism of pre- and post-war Yugoslav architecture and features rare Laibach illustrations. Full details on the book can be found on the Manchester University Press website .

Istanbul Brutalism. Photo by Alexei Monroe. Architectures against Strategy is a new base for my expanding work around architecture. The page will initially be more focused on architectural photographs and links but I'll also be developing some of the concepts presented at my recent talk in Maribor dealing with monumental London architecture as an ambivalent setting for the unfolding of cultural and political forces. This in turn was a sequel to my Tate Modern presentation discussing monumentalism and the work of the NSK architecture section Graditelji (The Builders).

Demolition of  the Island Block, October 2006. Photo c. Alexei Monroe On December 1 st I'll be taking part in an event in Maribor entitled A conversation about the formation of national iconographies and their framing . This is a closing event for a complex and challenging exhibition by the artist Jasmina Cibic.   My talk, Unacceptable Faces of Monumentalism?, is an interpretation of competing utopian and dystopian tendencies in London architecture, culture and politics. It's an experimental approach to analysing architecture, a subject I'm increasingly interested in. It's also a conceptual sequel to my Tate Modern presentation in April. Here's a sonic cue, Shockwork by Test Dept...