About Us
Work
News
Civic
Educational
Residential
Planning
Participation
Writing

2009
2008

2007
2006
2005

Both similar and different
Has Modernism had its day
Searching for great urbanism
Babylondon

 
Babylondon
1 / 2 / 3 / 4

From the Wikipedia entry for ‘Babylondon’:

The name ‘Babylondon’ is a variant of the Greco-Roman Babilundinium (bab-ilûn-dinium, meaning “Gateway on the river of the gods”). It is an ancient city which continues to be important as an international centre of finance, politics, education, culture, entertainment, fashion and the arts. It is widely regarded as one of the world’s major global cities. It was the “holy city” of Babylondia and the seat of the Neo-Babylondonian Empire. In ancient texts the first part of the city’s name appears as ‘Babel’, interpreted by Genesis to mean “confusion”, from the verb balal, “to confuse”.

Babylondon has an estimated population of 7.5 million (as of 2005) and a metropolitan area population of between 12 and 14 million. Babylondon has an extremely cosmopolitan population, drawing from a diverse range of peoples, cultures and religions, speaking over 300 different languages at any one time. Residents of Babylondon are referred to as Babylondoners, or collocially as ‘Babies’, ‘Babelers’,‘Baps’ or ‘Badneys’.

The city is an international transport hub, a super-national virtual city and a major tourist destination, counting iconic landmarks such as the The House of the Common Age, The Babylondon Ear (an oversized ear-trumpet completed for the Millennium), The Tower of Babylondon, the replica Ishtar Broadgate and Mujelli-bingham Palace amongst its many attractions, along with famous institutions such as the Babylondian Museum and the recently constructed Biblioteca de Babel (the Library of Babel) near St Pancras Station. This new library, designed by the architect Sir Wilson Langford Laswitz, took over 20 years to build and is conceived as a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books that can be composed in a particular character set.

The Tower of Babylondon is one of the city’s most ancient structures. According to the progressive rockband ‘Genesis’, mankind, after the deluge, travelled from the mountains of the North, where the ark had rested, and settled in ‘an estuary in the Southern Lands’. Here, they


next page
Published
by Vincent Lacovara
Royal College of Art, London, Architecture Annual 2006