‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported the architectural listing of the Isle of Dogs storm water pumping station.
‘I’d been looking for that,’ I said patiently (I thought). ‘The listing is not the point.’ A reader had sent the paper to me because of the strange language used by John Outram, the architect of the Grade II* building, put up between 1986 and 1988: ‘Decoration is the origin and essence of architecture. It can mediate, in the theatre of a built room or a big city, the epiphany of a meaning. I aimed to invent that “meaning” and confirm those epiphanic techniques.’
Now, I’m not saying that no one can use the word epiphanic (though, before 1951, no one felt the need to).
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