City Hide and Seek
Ever since the end of the 19th Century when the Romantic imagination capitulated to the powers of its long-term foil – the metropolis – the city has become the central trope of the modern imagination. 20th Century urban architecture was willowed down to a functional machine for living, cutting back the classical details of the Polis to create an iconography of Modernist materials – pristine cement, glass or steel. An iconic language that eventually, corroded and corrupted imploded into the dystopian shopping mall, housing estate or postmodern folly. Architecture is topography of both the physical city and the passageways haunted by the imagination of its inhabitants. It is in this binary of the physical and the imagination that our experience of the urban environment is constructed and contested.