ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the public's succession of failures and set-backs evidence some form of intervention into the smooth colonisation of space that Baudrillard might want to insist marks the arrival of contemporary architecture and the transpolitical mode's expansion without limits. It examines the other set-backs and deferrals of its completion as a series of interruptions. The Public had apparently programmed everything in a way that assured success. It had keyed into New Labour's recommended regeneration strategy for the new millennium: a cultural initiative in a post-industrial site involving the local community had employed a renowned architect, Will Alsop. The Public's failure may tell us more about the motives behind such projects than those cultural initiatives that are successful. Buildings such as The Public, or Paris' Pompidou Centre are, for Baudrillard, 'monuments of cultural deterrence' which serve 'to keep up the humanist fiction of culture'.
