In the name of convenience vinyl floors and plastic mouldings are gradually replacing marble mosaics and wooden parquet floors, becoming the hallmark of contemporary taste.
“Throughout the city, you now encounter the recurring colour schemes of salmon and teal, or pink and baby blue – from the newly refurbished auditorium of the National Theatre to the locker rooms of the renovated May Day Stadium. These new spaces look like they have been assembled from crisp, unreal planes of colour and exude an anaesthetising aesthetic, candy-coloured decoys that distract from a reality of mass poverty across the country. It’s no coincidence that they feel like stage sets. These are backdrops for carefully managed photoshoots and the admiring gaze of foreign visitors – who would be much more impressed by the period features that they’re busy tearing out.” Wainwright wrote on The Guardian.
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Trained as an architect, Oliver Wainwright has worked for a number of practices, both in the UK and overseas, and written extensively on architecture and design for many international publications such as Domus and, presently, for The Guardian. He is also a visiting critic at several architecture schools. The whole project can be found here.