A range of factors have contributed to a housing crisis facing many cities, including this case study of London. These include, lack of social and affordable housing, rising rents, councils budget cuts and disparity in wage affecting many residents.

This is despite a construction boom spawning large residential building projects, redevelopments, a wave of gentrification continues to sweep thought the city. Many of these new building projects have little or no affordable housing in their plans.

Idealised CGI imagery and slick promotional videos marketing new developments are matched by wording in brochures, hoardings and websites. The language used sells these projects as a lifestyle, evoking notions of luxury, exclusivity, identity and culture. The sales pitches are homogeneous, so alike that they can be interchanged regardless where the building is.

You’ll need new words to do it justice isolates and alphabetically orders individual verbs, adjectives and nouns appropriated from these developments.

The work continues the approach of looking at language used to market the buildings. These single words, even removed from a sentence, connote ephemeral values, ideal lifestyles, abstract attributes and sell fantasies that the building supposedly holds, which projects onto its potential residence and the area it's located.

When studied thought this process, this language can boarder on the ridiculous. It is exaggerated, sometimes contradictory, strange, ambiguous, changing the original intended use of linking text to desirable attributes, and values in mass developments.

The work and the website you are currently on acts as a database, seeing the limits of what words and attributes can be attached to bricks and concrete. New words will be added too when unique ones are found.

The notion of luxury sold is at odds with the urgent reality facing the citizens of London.


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