UNIT 3 THE THOUSAND DREAMS
Unit 3 continues to be interested in architecture’s ability to be complex and ambiguous, to be strange and to tell stories. We think architecture is first and foremost a cultural practice, capable of representing more than its own silent self. Like songs and monasteries, architecture can be a repository for the fragile stories and conditions that would otherwise be lost. This year we focused on London’s historic centre, the square mile originally bounded by medieval walls. Whilst there are many cities in the world, this is simply The City. Most European historic centres have become museum pieces for tourism or other designated uses, the architecture frozen in a committee-appointed time period. Not so the City. This is the centre of world capitalism, a position it has held almost unchecked for five hundred years. $3 trillion flows through it each day. The physical material of the City has needed to be fluid to facilitate this - under the banks lie pagan temples, Roman graves, and a hundred other things - all unsentimentally cannibalised and built-over, chopped and changed, to meet the pragmatic needs of commerce and the endless pursuit of profit. In the City it is conversely the immaterial - the conceptual, the imaginary, the psychological - that holds firm and endures. The laws, customs, rituals, governance, guilds, processions and street theatre; these arcane and opaque animating-forces provide the necessary permanence and continuity in the absence of enduring physicality. 70