How to Apply Concealer
I was not around in the 1960s or 1970s to see the buildings of the South Bank Centre in London, so I don’t know what the signage was like in those days. But I do know that the big colourful signs that are tacked all over the complex now betray a certain lack of love for their architectural heritage on the part of the people who run these buildings. 1960s brutalism, as exemplified by the Hayward and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, both pictured here, can indeed be hard to love. That is, it can be hard to love if what you love is flat, multi-coloured, letters-as-cartoons.
These flaky masks deny all the qualities (volume, substance, materiality, roughness, depth, anchoredness) that the buildings stand for. The original design is so uncompromising, however, that the undeniable, unconquerable volumes win out, and the contemporary signage looks like so many price-stickers that one day will be faded, curled and outdated as they cling to a forgotten tin in the back of your cupboard.
