Esterni londinesi. Lo spettacolo infinito

The image of the "Greater London", capital of the Industrial Revolution, finds its visionary foundation in poetry, namely in William Wordsworth's Prelude (1851). Foregrounded by the poet's gaze (the poem was completed by 1805), London emerges as a 'spectacular city',while a Victorian establishment was launching a urbanistic and architectural project to make London an "exhibition" to the multitude for the multitude. The Imperial London was eventually made even more spectacular with the opening of collective and performing spaces that clearly emboded a 'participant spectacular gaze': according to a national ideology that reflected its power into a "progressive architecture", conceived also to entertain, astonish and 'control' the urban masses. From the 'astonished' gaze of the proto-romantic flaneur to the Crystal Palace (the 'wonderful' glass structure that in 1851 hosted the first Great Exhibition), from the "pleasure gardens" to the grand glass and iron buildings conceived by the fin de siècle Western establishments, an impressive cultural and aesthetic continuity has constructed the image of London as the modern "City of Wonder" (competing with Paris, Chicago and New York). A 'wonder' that would soon become a global tourist attraction (London. The Wonder City was actually the title of a best selling tourist guide published in English in the beginning of the XXth century): a modern metropolis implemented by heritage attractions and 'view points' that are also gaze-devices for an urban community that has been investing emotions and money in making itself a world-show. And this would come to a climax with The London Eye, the gigantic post-modern copy of Vienna and Chicago Panoramic Wheels, that welcomes on board the globalized masses allowing them to embrace the Third Millenium metropolis, to peep from high in its remote nooks and angles and guess its exploding boundaries. You can see them from the many antic city corners, circling in the air as if themselves embraced to a luminous and light web.