3 April, 2004: Truth in advertising

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Here is a picture of a building site. Like many building sites, this one has been annotated by its architect with a billboard showing an artist's impression of the completed building. Unlike many other building sites, the building work at this one is more-or-less finished:

Boathouse

(This picture was taken a few weeks ago.) The right-hand picture in the above is a blown up view of the artist's impression on the architect's billboard; apologies for the lousy quality of the photo. Note how the artist's impression is a fair rendering of the new building. The artist can be forgiven for not showing the builders' skip in their picture; instead, they have included an attractive tree, which grew on the site before the building works began.

You will note also that this tree is now gone. As you can see, it stood just in front of the new building. Where the billboard stands now. Nice one, guys.

(You can see this more clearly in this picture, which combines the photo with a better-quality version of the artist's rendering:

Vandalism: before and after

The building in the picture is the Goldie Boathouse; since I'd guess that -- like me -- my half-dozen readers couldn't give a toss about rowing, I probably needn't have pointed that out. The architects responsible for this surreal piece of postmodern vandalism are Cantos Bailey, ably assisted by Bluestone, a building contractor.)


Copyright (c) 2004 Chris Lightfoot; available under a Creative Commons License.