Certainly a fake, but also a rather tasteful one, nicely picking up on the original building. In that way, not unlike the Sainsbury extension to the National Gallery, although one has to allow that there the old is a lot larger than the new, while here it is the other way around. Nevertheless, I thought it looked well this morning, a lot better than some of the office blocks put up in East Street at about the same time.
I think the commercial nursery is fairly recent, but I forget what it was before.
Next time I am there, I must check whether the two potted trees are fake too. I did not think this morning.
A bit further along, I came across an estate agent taking a picture of a different sort of building in East Street, using a camera big enough to need a bag the size of a small shopping bag. The agent explained that it was only a semi-real camera, being digital, but that he could remember that, when started out, all the best estate agents used Polaroid cameras. He thought that he would have retired before telephones took over the game entirely. Continuing on my way, I decided that the advantage of a big camera was the big lens, with less of the fish-eye distortion that you get with the lens in a telephone. But maybe the telephone people will learn how to deal with that with tricky software, so I then wondered whether the sort of tricky cameras described at references 1 and 2 might not give real cameras a further lease of life, their optical machinery not fitting in with the telephone format at all well. Cameras which would provide enough information to attempt three dimensional reconstruction of the stuff in view, rather than the measly two dimensions of a regular camera.
Reference 1: Single lens stereo with a plenoptic camera - Adelson and Wang - 1992.
Reference 2: http://www.plenoptic.info/index.html. A site with far trickier graphics than I can manage.
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