Historian Eric Hobsbawm once said that the profusion of historical documentaries on TV was ‘a protest against forgetting’. In The Times, curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist quoted Hobsbawm, with reference to the exhibition of Chinese videos that will take place at Battersea Power Station this month. Olbrist admitted that the reason most people would go to the show was because they wanted to see Battersea before it changed. Given that Parkview International is experiencing what Jim Pickard in the Financial Times described as ‘a Catch 22’ over securing tenants and further funding, the exhibition of Chinese videos seems to be as much about advertising as memorialising.

Battersea is always being remembered. It was remembered when Pink Floyd needed an image to represent the stultifying atmosphere of Britain. They added a floating farmyard animal and stuck it on an album cover. If it wasn’t for that we would have demolished it long ago.

Bankside, further up the Thames, is a realisation of the lessons Giles Gilbert Scott learned at Battersea. It is there that the majority of the piffle written about architecture this month found a home. Quite how Isabel Allen, editor of The Architects’ Journal, could decide that a cluster of sheds was good Herzog & de Meuron (H&dM) and the Tate Modern extension was bad is anyone’s guess. The new Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, was ‘a considered distillation’, while the Tate was ‘Trocadero meets Stringfellows for the chattering classes’. Private Eye accused H&dM of failing to understand Gilbert Scott’s architecture, which is tripe. Tate Modern may be cramped but it gets 4.1 million visitors a year – twice the original estimate. Still, there were others who were willing to use the same weak evidence
to praise the building. ‘As compelling as the most hyped blockbuster,’ said Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian.

That the Tate has a narrow window to attract funding and H&dM is a safe bet, if ever so slightly disingenuous. A glance across the unprecedented range of renderings gives you as many different buildings as you want to see – a cubist explosion or a department store (a French journalist at the launch even claimed he could see a face in the rendering). So politically sensitive is the issue of art-led regeneration that each interested party discerned exactly what they wanted in the building. Perhaps a protest against remembering is needed on the Thames.