Brutalism Under Wraps

Ooh!? Centre Point, all wrapped up:

It's a faintly amusing sight glimpsed whilst strolling down Tottenham Court Road: one of central London's most domineering buildings cutely packaged up for a piece of pop-up pop art.  Apparently, the wrap is a giant 'print', created by fashion designer Mark Eley and commissioned by the developers of the skyscraper's interior conversion into luxury flats to double as a screen to hide the construction works over the next 6 months.

It can be seen as part of a fairly positive trend at the moment (I've written about this previously) in favour of taking the trouble to inject some aesthetic content into temporary works, even if the concept here is a tad second-hand (uhm, the Reichstag wrap anyone?)

Is there a slightly sinister side to the message, though?  I'm reminded of Armando Iannucci's wonderfully accurate observation: 

"There are only two things in the world that give us absolute, total happiness. One is unwrapping a newly bought CD, and the other is seeing other people fail."

Whilst the latter guilty pleasure has been around as long as humanity itself, CDs are obviously a rather more recent temptation, and even the more generalised sin of unwrapping-joy is a creation of the steady rise of consumer capitalism over the last couple of hundred years or so.  

Now, if the cutesy appeal of the Centre Point wrap is, at some subtle level, derived from association with that cheap consumerist thrill that comes from the sweaty-palmed anticipation of de-packaging a pristine, virginal piece of loot from the High Street.... well, apart from the seediness of the image I've just set up (apologies), is this somehow an embodiment of the final triumph of shopping over architecture?  

Brutalism, modernism even, conquered by consumerism.  Owen Hatterley, in particular, would have a field day, one feels.

But don't feel bad, at any rate, for Center Point's architect, the late Richard Seifert.  One thing I learned from reading John Grindrod's excellent account of post-war construction in the UK, Concretopia, is that Seifert was one of the most commercially hard-nosed architects anyone has ever known.  He knew how to win commissions, and how to knock 'em out.  So he can hardly complain (from the great beyond) that what is probably his practice's signature work is, for the time being, being used a big symbol of commercialism.