Unkept Promises

a spiraling look at today's built environment

A tower raises mere land to the necessary height for belief. Raising it further and further.

Standing on the Pont de Levallois connecting Levallois-Perret, Europe’s densest city, to Courbevoie across the Seine in the wealthy western Parisian suburbs, we’ve gazed many times, with as much admiration as trepidation, upon the great shining towers of La Défense a couple kilometers upstream: Europe’s largest business district. Paris is nothing if not superlatives.

The bridge is so wide and long that you may as well stay a while, take in the counterfeit Los Angeles robbed of its automotive infrastructure as gravel barges and Franprix shipping containers make their way gently underneath you. Like freshly-calved icebergs, the paradoxically peripheral skyline’s many tips glitter through the biting winter wind coming off of the river.

Day and night, we returned again and again and again to that vast esplanade that serves as both backbone continuing the monumental axis emanating from the Louvre, downtown, and completely imaginary ground level for the dozens and dozens of towers plugged into it. Wandering around in the incomparable shadow of the Grande Arche, the monumentally hollow office cube that terminates the esplanade’s perspective—although at a deceptive 6.33 degrees off-center—we came to treat La Défense as a sort of psychogeographical resting place. The slate is always blank, no matter how many memories we accumulate there.

Like sand spilling and accumulating before radiating outwards, our tentative and tentacular fascination with these facets of the contemporary built environment grew. La Défense awakens primal urges in us, with its towering heights, expansive surfaces, and illuminated grids. It’s somewhere between removed and epicentric, a permanent transitionary state, a place so resolute and unrelenting in its gentle, dominating ambiguity that we have no choice but to surrender ourselves in awe, gleefully groveling at its many feet.

It’s lonely and it’s exciting and it’s sad. It’s a sadness that pulls pieces inside of you together, pieces that didn’t know they were meant to be together. We’re finally offered respite from the crushing neoliberal fantasy of individual responsibility, the swathes of the built environment crowded into today’s Western capitals that respond to a logic that Denise Scott Brown commented on in Learning from Las Vegas more than half a century ago: “[Tastemakers] produce mediocrity and a deadened urb.”¹

Indeed, she spoke with curiosity and openness towards places that “just grew;”² she remarked that maybe it’s in building outside city limits (and willfully sacrificing some prestige?) that the control necessary to just do things is regained. But just what do we find outside of the realm of “mediocrity” and “deadened urbs,” if we assume that the tastemakers’ grip has only tightened in the ensuing 60 years? What cathartic release of whatever our world wants to materialize itself as lies beyond certain crippling constraints of electoral politics and red tape? Beyond places where people “want” to spend their time? And most importantly for us here at xD SPACE as we install URBxD, what is it like to experience it?

Transposing Scott Brown’s logic at 1:1 scale onto the urban situations of our era isn’t easy to do literally. What we airlift from her approach is the willingness to explore states of exception that lie beyond the boundaries of “good” or “reasonable” taste, in particular those that are disconnected and distant, overbearing and poorly-aged, derelict and failed, and cybernetic and flashy—even if they are the product of certain tastemakers, maybe even mediocre, deadened urbs in their own right.

Another late twentieth-century thinker, Cedric Price, declared in 1981 that “the built environment is becoming a generous repository of buildings for nervous minds rather than a three-dimensional manifestation of a current optimistic civilization.”³ We think that the gulf between what gets built and inhabited within the public eye and what Price’s 3D manifestation would look like has only grown, and we’re interested in the casually calamitous edge cases that are not merely a weird periphery but actually representative of the veiled logics that underpin all the rest, coated in saccharine, confusing layers of tastemaking, marketing, and image-management.

What’s strange, though, is that these edge cases are as likely to be central, even the very center, as they are to be so removed that you cannot even really get to them. The elation of isolation—the sudden peace of that striking and fertile sadness—can be found in the densest thicket or the solemnest plain, built or otherwise.

Isolation is so often seen as something to chase away, but sometimes isolated places are interesting. Some places are isolated because it is in their nature to be so, others’ isolation would indicate failure, detachment, decay, forgetting and moving on. Daymark tower is an example of the former case and is the building that got us into this to begin with. For an example of the latter, one has to look no further than Pruitt Igoe, which admittedly has already been looked at probably as much as a demolished building can be looked at, in large part thanks to Charles Jencks who opened his seminal Language of Postmodern Architecture with a picture of it along with a fabricated exact time of demolition (3:46pm or something).⁴

Let’s focus on Daymark. The sweetly Germanic compound word rendered as a proper noun here actually refers to any structure acting as a daytime wayfinding aid. It’s a type of landmark. The jury is still out on nightmarks (moon gardens, however, are a thing.)

Whereas lighthouses mark points on the coast to indicate its presence even in the worst of times, daymarks are structure for the pure sake of raising a point high above the ground as visibly as possible under essentially ideal conditions. One of the most salient examples of such a structure is Kingswear Daymark, otherwise known locally as The Tower, so singular it is.

Look at it. Really, that’s all it wants. It’s just for looking at, for seeing, for noticing. Its distance from anything else (and yours too, should you have the chance to gaze upon it) is its primary condition. While the stacking of its stones dates to the 19th century, our endearment for it is completely contemporary. What is this that Daymark is allowing us to feel before it, this majestic presence? The majesty of being in a place that makes no greater demand of us than that we be there for it? That pretends to no program, that refuses to pedagogize?

Aldo Rossi, an Italian architect whose clean, warm interlocking grids inspire us every day, commented on the typical results of pedagogical space in 1978 while discussing the Swiss rationalist architect Hans Schmidt:

It is neither the responsibility of the state nor of the architect to create a pedagogic space. Such attempts always ended in theme park architecture, funny up to a point, but nothing more than that. Here, rationalism becomes a real problem of freedom. The architect should provide a comfortable ambience, solve certain problems, and interfere as little as possible in the private sphere.⁵

In any case, having recognized our passion for this one weird tower in Kingswear and convinced of the contemporary relevance of that passion, we began seeking out more such fragments of the built environment with the goal of tracing the edges of the system we would inevitably demonstrate them to be a part of. Or so we believed. The week of serendipity born from this xD affirmation is the subject of this piece as well as its frame of reference.

Theme park architecture is a real phenomenon and can manifest either literally, explicitly (Six Flags or Parc Astérix) or in the gradual, tangential way that Rossi commented on. What do theme parks aim to do but animate? Animate, instead of isolate. Still, the sadness lingers. It is important to specify here that “sadness” is not to be understood as something like depression. It’s more like forlorn, morose, wistful, elegiac or spectral. In these places, you finally take notice of the presence of others, and only because they’ve finally all gone away.

To feel anything, though, something must be done about the pedagogy. It must wither and die, it must leave only vacated shells and hollow husks in its wake, the better to suddenly recast as real players of a real century, to replenish with the fruitful tension between all their unkept promises, or what Mark Fisher calls “communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness.”⁶ These initially counterfeit places fail too and, in their failure, determinedly plod their way back to truth.

Hurling ourselves into the cores of these fantastical spaces, we think:

We would never want the world to look like this, but we’re so so glad it does.

It was around this point that we began to sense that we might not be entirely alone in some of these feelings. If we feel ourselves to be at odds with run-of-the-mill, establishment writing on the built environment, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we always feel at odds with those “experts” who trade rather in “the changes of sense perception,”⁷ the way Marshall McLuhan describes artists in a technological world. We landed on Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s dialogue-free yet anything-but-silent documentary Homo Sapiens from 2016, a film whose cover image on the documentary cinema platform tënk is no other than a decrepit theme park ride, shivering as it’s swallowed by endless ocean waves.

We immediately devoured the 94-minute-long sequence of fixed, temporary windows into places falling anywhere on a spectrum from just slipping out of use to abject oblivion. Not only does the camera never move, making for a distinctly painterly experience of the built environment, but many of the shots reduce the variables even further by composing a unique vanishing point. Watching the movie was a lot like being outside; we found ourselves relieved to connect deeply with the subject matter, especially given how much potential there is for a patently cringeworthy experience in any piece of media entitled “Homo Sapiens.” It was even while processing Homo Sapiens’ urbex-adjacent imagery that the simple necessity of the name URBxD became apparent to us. URBxD, like urbex. URB xD, the urban in any dimension.

Indeed, we equate urbanity with freedom. In a word: it is when we are urban that we are free, free to be human, that is to be technological, the built environment constituting a technological ensemble. Heidegger said in his 1951 lecture “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” that “...to build in itself is already to dwell,” and that “...man is insofar as he dwells.”⁸

Where Homo Sapiens succeeds is in its deft handling of the potentially sickening irony dripping off of every frame given their juxtaposition with the film’s title. Irony as a device is as tired as it usually is, but Geyrhalter reconstructs these places with a deep and sincere affection and curiosity for the simple reality to them, an exceptional reality rendered here without affect. We were impressed.

In fact, we recognized ourselves in those dusty corridors; we remembered our own pilgrimages, flights of fancy that became real. We remembered the empty dormers of Burj al Babas near Mudurnu, Canary Wharf’s iron grip on its private domain, the last industrial vestiges on the edge of Giudecca in Venice, the phantasmagoric towers surrounding Brussel’s Quartier Nord, and Cergy-Pontoise’s 3200-meter long, totalizing Axe Majeur (featuring no less than Europe’s largest clock).

...it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.⁹

Coming back to doomed Pruitt Igoe—all at once the form of desires, eraser of city and city erased—and the fabled beginning of its end in 1972:

Rarely can it be demonstrated today that the failure of a given built environment is explicitly, intrinsically linked to the built forms themselves, i.e. the spatial organization of “dumb” matter. One can extend the conclusion of Bernward Joerges’ 1999 essay “Do Politics have Artefacts?”¹⁰ to debunk this idea. It follows that architectural boogeymen created by Charles Jencks and others capitalizing on the gradual collapse of faith in grand narratives in the 1970s continue to hold far more water than they deserve to, given how rooted they were in purely formalist arguments. For example, the popular prejudice against rational buildings, which presupposes the existence of inherently “fascist” forms. This is a criticism that originated with Charles Jencks, first leveraged in general against modernist architecture and in particular against Aldo Rossi’s 1972 contribution to outer Milan’s Monte Amiata Housing complex; Block D, to be precise.¹¹

This architectural history aside is necessary to properly and clearly contextualize our views on how Pruitt Igoe’s demolition was made an image and then how that image’s reception set the stage going forward for society’s interpretation of the subsequent demolitions of tens of thousands of public housing units across the Western Hemisphere. Jencks essentially worked backwards from his own ideologically-charged foregone conclusion, picking artifacts from a history of architecture built by fascists in Italy in order to reverse engineer the justification of an aesthetic coup that would replace modernism with post-modernism. Once popularized, even if it wasn’t the original goal, this enabled a positive view of the general eradication of optimistic, post-war public housing (however genuinely flawed and dilapidated). Critically, Jencks did not investigate and was uninterested in the real flaws of these programs and their roots in broader systemic and governmental failures.

By heightening the drama of Pruitt Igoe’s demolition to that of the death of modern architecture, Charles Jencks and friends succeeded in disseminating both the notion that certain rational forms at grand scale are somehow fascist and an anxiety thenceforth surrounding any architectural drive to materialize sweeping, socially-motivated transformations.

Still, we recognize that, elsewhere, we are indebted to and in the lineage of his theoretical advancements, and we don’t take issue with post-modernism (architectural or otherwise) in general. We remain post-modern, after all, don’t we?

With these perspectives in mind on what it means when buildings fail, what it means to bring them crashing down, we want to explore the beauty of failure.

As the cycle of slum clearance and/or urban renewal reared its ugly head again in the tail end of the 20th century, wrecking balls and dynamite tackled larger and larger swathes of not only the built environment, but also incidentally of the public imagination. The Paris region was no stranger to this movement, having built public housing out enormously in the 1960s and 1970s. While the most emblematic is likely the progressive demolition of the infamous Cité des 4000 Logements (4000 Apartment Housing Complex) in La Courneuve starting in 1986 and lasting almost four decades, it was the demolition of a random tower block in Meaux, an hour east of Paris, that provoked a mayoral staging of a thoroughly post-modern spectacle that transformed the blasting of people’s homes into a community event the night it was demolished. Complete with façade light show and laser projection, fireworks, and a Jean-Michel Jarre soundtrack, the huge feast for the eyes culminates in a choreography of explosions and an instantly vacuous patch of land.

Luckily, the city of Meaux even thought to videotape it all. It is here where the URBxD week of discovery picks up again. After watching Homo Sapiens, we recalled another artist having dealt with buildings’ demises, or rather we faintly recalled images of a Dallas office building’s scintillating catastrophe one honey-thick, lazy Texas afternoon. Today, this is enough information to dredge a video up from the depths of the web, and we quickly landed on Cyprien Gaillard’s aptly-named 2009 video project Cities of Gold and Mirrors.

Poking around the 45-year-old Paris-born and Silicon Valley-raised artist’s body of work, we discovered such spectral landscapes as Real Remnants of Fictive Wars, in which otherwise unassuming landscapes were filmed as fire extinguishers were brazenly unleashed upon them, instantly painting new spacetimes with broad, impressionist gestures. Importantly, we encountered Desniansky Raion, Gaillard’s 2007 video project that takes us through towering, utopian housing blocks from Serbia to Ukraine—stopping at the demolition in Meaux along the way. The demolition tape is presented unabridged in the film but set to a soundtrack by electronic musician Koudlam, and the focus, the simple lending of an eye to this spectacle frozen in time is augmented by its forced recontextualization: a disco demolition sandwiched between two far bleaker, distant and analytical approaches to tomorrows that never came.

Writing for Artforum in 2009, Tate Modern director of programme Catherine Wood said “...Gaillard also explores grand attempts at relational counternarratives—from urban planning to communal festivals to public sculptures. In investigating these moments of human agency, he stages a collapse of past and future into a heightened, unfamiliar present.”¹²

There is a fine line to walk, in all of this, between blind glorification of that which makes us uncomfortable and sincere investigation of why we’re so drawn to the highly questionable.

Scenarios accelerated after having explored Cyprien Gaillard’s work. We drew a connection from his frank analyses of stark human landscapes to (also) French filmmaker Virgil Vernier, whose short films like Andorre from 2014 or Imperial Princess from 2024 labor towards a deconsecration of the most highly questionable of today’s built environment, from luxury pseudo-pyramidal ski resort hotels to the kilometers upon kilometers of Monaco’s concrete tunnels and pedways paved with metaphorical gold.

It is neither by denying these and other marks of opulence nor by explicitly railing against them that Vernier produces a beautiful, engrossing critique of the malevolently hypnotic world that they come from. It is true subversion because it is currently undetectable as such, a rare balance only mastered by the experts in changes of sense perception that we should expect the best artists to be. We imagine it is also what Catherine Wood was describing in Gaillard’s work when she evoked “...a heightened, unfamiliar present.”¹³

We say scenarios accelerated because we realized the night of this particular investigation that Imperial Princess was showing at a cinema down the street the very next evening in the presence of Virgil Vernier himself, along with filmmaker Mila Olivier, his collaborator and protégée showing her film Diamond Himalaya. Taking in what we could of Vernier’s work over the ensuing 24 hours, we arrived at the Cinéma Saint-André-des-Arts that evening primed for exchange. After having been glued to the refreshingly Shot-on-iPhone scenes of a daughter of the Russian oligarchy fallen on hard times in the gilded, alienating snow globe of Monaco, we were delighted to find ourselves part of a modest audience clearly as interested in exchange as we were, given the discussion with the filmmakers lasted well over an hour.

Vernier made an eye-opening comment during the discussion, which was really very casual. For him, people who pretend to be above or beyond the hypnotic trappings of capitalism’s material culture—especially under the guise of serious “artistry” or “politics” or “ethics” or whatever—are not only fooling themselves, but from an artistic standpoint, they have a resultant critical oversight and lack of honesty in their would-be Marxist analyses of the infinitely contradictory world they claim to be so concerned with.

These places, the ones that make up the world we actually live in, aren’t fairy tales, nor are they some kind of place to be. They’re just real, and for Vernier, it’s by looking deeper into the quotidian hypnotism of it all, by looping all the displays beaming messages into us back upon themselves, deeper and deeper, that we begin to get closer to understanding what that reality is like.

The fascination with anything shiny, anything tall and imposing, and especially the two together is a recurring theme in Vernier’s work, one that made us feel like we were touching base, seeing eye-to-eye. Beyond the coldness, beyond the distance, what happens when we submit ourselves to massively kaleidoscopic, hypnotic cityscapes? What is it like when the frozen blocks framing our city lives suddenly spring to bittersweet life?

Every time we’ve encountered (almost always temporary) examples of marvelous displays gracing the faces of skyscrapers and cities, information living freely in the same world as our flesh bodies, we’ve felt pangs of longing, mourning, dreaming. Chaos Computer Club’s 2001 building screen project elegantly christened Blinkenlights after the light-up readouts of mid-20th century computer towers and originally designed for Alexanderplatz in Berlin even came to Paris, temporarily living in the 18-story tall façades of the simple rectilinear towers at each edge of Dominique Perrault’s then-new Bibliothèque nationale de France. We deeply regret not having been present for this.

Honestly, what happens when buildings say things, when the city talks back, shows us something? The idea is hardly novel; the eclectic and visionary French-Hungarian architect Nicolas Schöffer first envisioned what he called the cybernetic tower as an Eiffel Tower-rivaling monument adorning the new A14 highway outside of Paris as part of the first round of La Défense competitions in the 1960s. Replete with different colored strobe lights running the height of its complex, cubist structure, the tower was intended to receive, process, and communicate data from far and near, including but not limited to sound levels of discussions at the national assembly, the stock market, and (naturally) the weather. Although only a meager preview of Schöffer’s dream was ever realized in Liège after the oil crises of the 1970s brought La Défense plans to a halt, his ideas live on. Today, in Shenzhen, the lofty cityscape itself transforms into seamless display every weekend, albeit more for pure spectacle than cybernetic harmony.

Between the enlivening effect at the scale of individual buildings and the unifying effect synchronized across a skyline, these sorts of displays are uniquely haunting, phantasmagoric. To witness cold, seemingly inert matter come alive, a whole city leaping and bounding, streaming and flowing as one contradictory body, goes beyond the sort of stoic domination that the built environment has commanded from ziggurats up to even the most recent “gravity-defying” starchitect monstrosities.

Intentionally considering experiences situated in the flashy, the trashy, the new or old leftovers of the present built environment is an undertaking we are framing as a recovery of crucial and complex potential. We’re after sites and spaces that bleed invisible, uncertain tomorrows with real vitality, if only we could turn the right eye at the right time. These places where we feel the most engulfed by the massive and the ephemeral together are what URBxD will approach, docking with xD SPACE’s broader, constant goal of interfacing with the technological systems through which we relate to reality today.

A current, optimistic civilization is on its way.

1. Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 82.

2. Ibid.

3. Cedric Price, “The Built Environment—The Case against Conservation,” in Cedric Price Works, 1952–2003: A Forward-Minded Retrospective, vol. 2, Articles and Talks, ed. Samantha Hardingham (London: Architectural Association; Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2017), 325.

4. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 4th ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), p. 9.

5. Aldo Rossi, as quoted in “What Is Progressive Architecture?,” Nullus Locus Sine Genio, October 13, 2016, https://nulluslocussinegenio.com/2016/10/13/what-is-progressive-architecture/.

6. Mark Fisher, “Break It Down: Mark Fisher on DJ Rashad’s Double Cup,” Telekom Electronic Beats, 2013, https://www.electronicbeats.net/mark-fisher-on-dj-rashads-double-cup/.

7. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 18.

8. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 95–96.

9. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 35.

10. Bernward Joerges, “Do Politics Have Artefacts?,” Social Studies of Science 29, no. 3 (June 1999): 411–431.

11. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 20.

12. Catherine Wood, “Openings: Cyprien Gaillard,” Artforum, 2009, https://www.artforum.com/features/openings-cyprien-gaillard-190073/.

13. Ibid.