Mark Campbell. Paradise Lost

About

While the US was the world’s greatest economic, scientific and cultural force during the twentieth century, it now faces a kind of unplanned obsolescence, in which the nation has become progressively obsessed with its own decline. In these circumstances, changing patterns of consumption and demand have often resulted in an architectural redundancy, in which architecture simply exists as a kind of by-product or residue of these processes.

This exhibition and accompanying publication provide a visual documentation of these architectural remainders. Captured at first with the careless haste of a tourist, these photographs were later recorded with greater care, in an attempt to explore a scattered and provisional history of American architecture shaped by patterns of political and economic upheaval. A history that is expressive of those contradictions which are clearest in the most banal, least continuous and anonymous of all architectures: those possessed solely by time.

On view at the Front Member's Room.