Parkinsons lag och ECBs nya skyskrapa, forts.

Jag skrev tidigare om Parkinsons lag och ECBs nya skyskrapa


ECB har vackra bilder på de stolta för att inte säga storvulna planerna på något som för tankarna till Totalitarian Architecture

En artikel i dagens Financial Times behandlar den kommande skyskrapan - den nuvarande är inte dålig den heller - på ett mer lättsamt sätt och drar paralleller till professor Parkinsson.

Författaren av artikeln, Graham Allison, är ingen vanlig lustigkurre.
Han är director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government

- A decade in the planning, the building will consist of two towers – one 41 floors, the other 44 – linked by a vast conference centre. Symbolising a reliable, stable storehouse of value, the taller tower is said by some to represent the euro’s emergence as a second global reserve currency.

- Parkinson’s closest analogy to the new ECB headquarters may be New Delhi, where British architects envisaged their own Versailles. Each step towards the project’s completion corresponded precisely to a stage in political collapse. The British Viceroy moved into his new palace in 1929, the year in which the Indian National Congress demanded independence. As Parkinson concludes: “What was finally achieved was no more and no less a mausoleum.”

- When did the ECB receive construction bids for its new headquarters? The reader who has tracked Parkinson can guess: December 2009, the month in which the Greek debt crisis exploded. The project is slated for completion in 2014, by which, if Parkinson’s insight holds, the euro will have been relegated to the museum of retired currencies.

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