Swan House. Soon to be joined by much needed offices.
Newcastle has many unused office blocks.
Most have had no tenants since completion.
French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) director Jean-Luc Godard made a film in 1965 that parodied American culture and 'B' picture film genres, notably the film noir style that he so admired; low budget films that were quickly made but that, to Godard and his fellow enfant terribles of emerging seminal French cinema, inadvertently expressed something definitive of our present human condition than more sophisticated stories, beyond mere entertainment. They said more with less. That film was Alphaville.
What Godard thought they brought was a sense of the ridiculous, paranoid and controlling that was inherent in our emerging modern world. But all of this was summarised by the banality of our developing surroundings that had become, to echo Kierkegaard's dictum, 'emptied ... of its significance'.
That comparison came to me as I walked about through the No Man's (sic) Land that lies between the epic Tyne Bridge and Manors. Re-development has done nothing for the desolation and alienating landscape produced by T. Dan Smith's 1960s schemes, excepting Swan House now shows its contours openly to the world or that bit that is so confused as to wind up walking in this increasingly hostile at all hours of the day and in all weathers Dead Zone.
But judge for yourself. Photo album here (off site link). Note on the way, those fragments of an older Newcastle orphaned by planning.
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