A system for the ruin, 2024
3D modeling and printing, nitrocellulose, smoke, digital video.
With this project, I explore the architectural possibility of ruins. I am interested in highlighting this from a posthuman future in which life prevails after a possible "end." To do so, I use the Eccles Building as the setting, which is the headquarters in Washington D.C. — and the main headquarters — of the Federal Reserve System of the United States.
In the now classic 2009 Activision video game "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" – partially funded by the U.S. government as part of its nationalist propaganda muscle – this building is destroyed by thermobaric missiles because the city of Washington D.C. is taken over following an invasion by Russian forces. Once again, the United States imagines its destruction and decay.
This building is crucial to the American institutional network, as it is the financial center that supports the country's Military-Industrial Complex, whose productive cycle involves the existence and incitement of wars to sustain the North American economic apparatus. This building is depicted in ruins, being absorbed by nature and darkness. Through a review of Art History, particularly Romanticism, I based my approach on the paintings of Hubert Robert, a French Romantic painter who produced oil paintings of ruined scenarios — as seen in his painting "Imaginary View of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in Ruins" — I am interested in finding architectural qualities from the historical review of the space and its features that make it possible for a construction to end up in such a condition. At the same time, referencing Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias,' I wrote a poem that takes the eagle adorning the top of the front architrave of the entrance as the protagonist of the building’s decay. The Eccles Building was constructed in an architectural style known as "Stripped Classicism" or "Starved Classicism," which refers to classical architecture with its monumental characteristics and the primary use of columns without the ornamentation that could be found in these constructions. I am interested in how constructions from the classical period are the ruins of the present; therefore, I highlight how this building, which was constructed in a style I will call "post-neoclassical," can be a perfect setting for a potential ruin resulting from the operations that occur within its walls.