The Ghost Acres of Architecture, 2020

This installation displays data and spatial information regarding the Seagram Building—an iconic modernist building in Manhattan designed by Mies van der Rohe, completed in 1958. The time from the first moment of extraction of its raw materials up to its present realities is presented through dynamic interactive visualization techniques that lay bare the immense territorial reach of just one single building project. The project evokes a broad range of evidence—drawing together digital projections and raw geological and architectural elements—to explicate the planetary reach of architecture, making design practice far less abstract and much more literal as a genre of terrestrial activity.

Unless architects begin to describe buildings as terrestrial events and artifacts, they will—to our collective and professional peril—continue to operate outside the key environmental dynamics and political processes of this century. Architects increasingly need to describe buildings in ways that constantly evince the inherent solidarity and reciprocity of people, places, and politics involved in building architecture. The environmental and social conditions of this century suggest a much more recursive description of architecture and its engenderment.

Team: Zeina Koreitem & John May (principals), Alex Yueyan Li, Jacqueline Wong, Sam Kaufman, Wendy Guerrero, and Samantha Vasseur. (MILLIØNS, Los Angeles) in collaboration with Kiel Moe (Sheff Professor of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal), Peter Osborne (McGill University, Montreal), and Remy Forth (McGill University, Montreal)