This Time Tomorrow critiques the UK’s capital gains tax exemptions, which have incentivized the development of luxury apartment towers in central London, marketed to world’s wealthiest, and the role of digital media in amplifying these urban processes.

A series of hyperreal images and constructed ‘selfies’ capture familiar picture-postcard scenes in central London, disrupted by profane residential development. Taking cues from the montage practices of ‘Radical era’ architects like Superstudio and Archizoom, the images depict absurdist towers grafted onto London’s sacrosanct sites. However, unlike the abstract, analogue montage approaches of the 1960s and 70s, today’s widespread accessibility of post-production photo-editing software means that absurdist fictions might be experienced on some level as fact. These images were published in a satirical online article in POST Magazine, discussing the very serious effects of foreign property investment on the city, and were subsequently picked up by a number of online news outlets and print magazines, moving some to protest, while others wanted to invest. Clues exist within This Time Tomorrow’s imagery which require unpicking by the audience: for example, if the towers are under construction, they can’t be simulations, because architectural renderings as a rule depict impressions of completed, constructed buildings. In this way, the images challenge audiences to discern not only which parts are fabricated, but also which parts are true.

Ultimately, This Time Tomorrow explores the affective potential of the viral image in the age of social media, and the capacity for architects, as producers of visual culture, to appropriate platform technology as a means of rebellion, growing global networks to contest the financialisation of housing and cities worldwide.