Architecture on ice

摘要

Edmund Burke's famous distinction between the sublime and the beautiful - between big, bad things that filled the mind with delightful horror, and small, smooth objects of love - was so 18th century. It summarised just about everything you needed to know about the obsessions of contemporary artists and designers, neatly capturing the contrast between wild beasts and innocent girls, awful chasms and rolling hillsides, vast craggy edifices and delicate details. Today, we can learn as much about the preoccupations of our own time from the aesthetic categories of hip-hop, laid down to rhyme patterns that would have caused Alexander Pope to pop a pentameter. Hip-hop aesthetic terminology is often defiantly obscure, but a few terms have made it into the linguistic mainstream. 'Wack' is a useful addition to the lexicon of critical disapproval and 'bling bling' has recently secured a place in the Oxford English Dictionary.