Last night I went to an arts event at the Barbican Centre in London. I always forget just how overwhelming the Barbican complex is. When you enter this crumbling vision of the future, you leave contemporary London behind. The Centre imposes its logic on you, and you feel like you've always been aboard it, a vast Gormenghast of a spaceship, rumbling through space for hundreds of years on a mission that its cocooned inhabitants have long forgotten.
As I attempted to navigate my way through its maze of halls, stairways and passageways to the nearest washroom facilities (located in Sector C.4, one click past the uranium ore processing plant), I imagined a life in which nothing else existed but The Ship: where it was a two day shuttle journey to get to the casino halls on S deck.
Of course, these are clichéd sci-fi fantasies, courtesy of Star Trek et al., but that is the power of such Modernist projects. Their vision seemed to reach up into the heavens. Now that these concrete expressions of utopian hope begin to crumble and decay, there's an added layer of pathos in our experience of such places.
. 
