THE FIRST GREAT FEMALE ARCHITECT - Jonathan Meades on Zaha Hadid (2008)

Its with great disappointment that this article from the outset appears, in my view, to have a significant motive to address gender before architecture. I am not a fan of Zaha Hadid, nor of her work, but I would guess that the mulit-award winning designer would rather be hailed as a great architect due to the catalogue of work she has produced and not because she is a women, maybe I’m wrong? The title of the piece makes this rather obvious but unfortunately the author feels it is necessary to distastefully over emphasise his hidden agenda by capitalising “ARCHITECTURE IS DOMINATED by men”. I’m not disagreeing that architecture is overpopulated by male figures, however, like so many others the author should've just written an article solely addressing gender  issues within architecture and titled it accordingly.         

The general mood of the article attempts to flatter the architect but to say that Zaha is “the first architect to be blessed since Mies (van der Roche)” is a little audacious, I can only assume that within the eyes of Mr Meades the likes of Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando, Oscar Neimeyer, Peter Zumthor, are all right offs.

As for the dialog between Jonathan Meades and Zaha...it's honestly not worth my time. Dribble.

Diary - Will Self on Battersea Power Station (2013)

Or, ‘Deny Oneself’ by Will Self; maybe this would of been a more fitting title. Being a student of architecture the Nine Elms development is a topic of debate that interests me, so after reading the original title of this article I was instantly interested in what the writer had to say. I for one am a generic lover of the Battersea Power Station, a public structural figure that most Londoners love to admire and sadly, are mortified at the fact it is soon to be removed from our vista. The article itself starts strong, rather daring, identifying the power station's iconic status by referring to Adolf Hitler's ideological obsessions with monumentality as comparison. However this bold approach would not resonate through the course of the piece and fall flatter than a Nazi comb over.

The writer merely hovers over the sub-genres of which this article should of had the courage to devour into, such as the “£400m the Malaysians paid for the site” and the “happy flats for rich shiny people”, whether he agreed or disagreed with the plans for development. Instead the article digressed into a banal monologue of himself and some PR twat selling flats, raising the issues he had with how said twat uses the term ‘iconic’ to describe the power station.

Shame, after overtly romanticising his cycle route over Chelsea Bridge, you would be left to assume that someone that lives less than a mile away would have something more provocative or interesting to say about the Battersea power station and where it futures lies.