Last Thursday, Peter Carl gave the first lecture in the 'Rip it Up' series curated by Keiron Long. It was enjoyable and revealing but overall, frustrating.
His content was dense and self-referential that alluded to, but never seemed to get to, the point. The question 'What is the city for?' was briefly dealt with when he showed a slide of Westfield's Stratford City shopping-living complex. I was soon lost in the mix of swirling vortex of vocabulary that I found hard to connect with and I suspected that it meant as little to me as it did the next person. I wondered:
Why did he choose to describe the city in that way?
Is it useful to describe the city in this way?
Does it answer the question?
I began to wonder what this lecture series aims to do and how it's started off. For me, a lecture is as much about the content as it is about the communication of that content. Overall, I felt frustrated that the there was too much discussion between all the usual suspects. This made me wonder why this series is happening. Is it a genuine attempt to generate a conversation within the ASD and beyond about cities, or is it just another self-promoting and self congratualting mechanism by the organisers?
Now that they are over, what's your verdict?!
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