Part One of the Another Land series. Which consists of me wandering around, thinking about stuff.

There are two basic architectural briefs swirling around the finance buildings of London at the moment. The first and more obvious is Neo London – get off the bus in the middle of London Bridge and look around; you’ll see a concerted attempt to make the city look as much like the Tokyo of Akira as possible. Neo London is thick glass and thin steel, either stabbing its way out of Albion like the Shard or pouring itself across the land in oozing waves, as if to convince us that these huge construction projects are somehow a natural and inevitable growth, like the sproutings of potatoes that have left out. They’re aggressively Future but also ethereal, and they seem to disappear if you’re not directly looking at them.

The second architectural archetype is more obvious, but that much more subtle; sneak behind Liverpool Street to Broadgate and you’ll find Exchange House. Great black girders brace the building, riveted and welded with comically oversize joints. This is architecture gone Steampunk, buildings that display their technology as clothing. As outside, so within; for this is also finance gone industrial. A business that creates money from ethereal, conceptual matter tries to pass itself off as a place of production. London’s trading wizards have become self-conscious of the magic they make, and reached back towards substantial things.

And so too do the rest of us who work in services, media, middle-management reach back to craft. Guerilla knitting gets its own blog, a space to celebrate not knitted things but just the act of knitting, people revelling in their own ability to affect the environment through craft and craftiness. Does this sound familiar? It should, because graffiti arose from the same frustrations. People who could bear a world made for them, and given a glass and steel latticed ceiling.

As I cradle an Artisinal Baguette in the shadow of Exchange House and watch people in suits slip in and out, the building’s open slivers of silver and shining bolts make it look more and more like some giant diode in a circuit board. I watch the electrons that slip in and out, and wonder what buildings they dream of.