It would be disingenuous to deny the aesthetic pull of tower blocks. In their scale, their utopian promise, their sheer monumentality, they are a testament to man’s ascendancy and, inevitably, narcissism. Yet, to do so often implies a certain aloofness: namely, from the lives of those who actually reside there. The tower block has become an ivory tower in reverse. Cut off from the world, it is a living breathing example of the laws of attraction and repulsion. It seduces while representing all that is considered repugnant for modern-day living: cramped quarters, limited access to green space, anonymity, etc. If the ivory tower is aspirational, then surely the tower block is desperational.

Cyprien Gaillard’s introduction of tower blocks into 17th century Dutch landscape etchings belies the notional romanticism associated with these very landscapes. The buildings stand in ominous defiance, with dark overtones reminiscent of some Mary Shelley paperback; their seamless integration into another century and another medium only further re-inforces a certain unease, acting as a prism that instead of light refracts violence, off the towers onto the settings. When we look at an Anthony Waterloo or Anthony Van Dyck etching, we almost implicitly take it as a historical document. With the arrival of photography still at least 2 centuries away, the 17th century masters become our de-facto chroniclers of a bygone era, something that would surely make them turn in their graves. Through an associative and highly anachronistic intervention—that of the post-war tower block—Belief in the Age of Disbelief reminds us of the violence that was an integral and inevitable part of life in the 17th century, contrary to the idyllic bucolism of the original compositions.

“Si la nature physique est caracterisé par la périodicité, le monde historique se définit par la polarité.”
–Parent/Virilio

When I went to visit Cyprien in Lausanne, where he spent most of 2004-2005, I quickly came to understand the rhyme and reason of his new project. In previous years in Paris, we had spent many a gloomy Sunday hanging out in the rare neighborhoods where the tall and the massive were the norm and not the exception. We had collaborated on an intervention at art-fairs around the world and arrived back in Paris each time with a coming-down only these architectural anomalies could resolve. The tower-blocks were the methodone that allowed us to continue to travel the world without ever leaving Paris. At the affluent, private-sector end of the market was Beau Grenelle, a district in the 15th which stood in for a Tokyo neither of us had visited, with 70s high-rises like the Hotel Nikko or buildings that resembled 1960s Japanese metabolism. At the public-sector end were Les Olympiades, a low-income housing estate in the 13th where each tower had names harkening back to the heyday of the United Nations like Tour Helsinki or Tour Cortina. It was our substitute for Hong Kong. For the former eastern block, we would go north, and visit La Courneuve or the Pablo Picasso Estates near La Défense for their remarkable, iconic gestures in otherwise unremarkable master-plans. La Courneuve featured a large empty square in the middle of its massive block, as if 6 apartments had been surgically removed, creating a view beyond to the north. The Pablo Picasso estates included such aberrations as cloud-shaped windows and heavily pixellated patches of different colours on the façade.

In Switzerland, though, large scale housing complexes are not limited to ex-urban or suburban settings like Paris’ périphérie or London’s M25. They are often built amongst rolling hills, mountain ranges and pristine landscapes that have served as an inspiration to generations of painters from all over Europe and the US, like J.W. Turner, Claude Monet or James McNeil Whistler. One estate in particular, Le Lignon situated some 20km outside Geneva, juts out of green fields as if it were made of children’s building blocks. Between a muddy river and the 3 towers is a buffer of thick vegetation that could be mistaken for the more tropical climes of Rio.

They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages.

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty has re-surfaced and become a pilgrimage of sorts for the art community. Smithson’s exhibition, currently at the Whitney, leaves no doubt as to his importance for later generations of artists. The various pieces though—from sketches to sculptures—inevitably leave one with the impression that Smithson himself seemed to be, save for one or two exceptions, bored with the execution of his pieces or the idea of providing any kind of pleasure to his viewer. As Peter Schjeldah recently argued in the New Yorker, it is more as a thinker or writer or agitator that he will ultimately be remembered. Smithson’s particular take on entropy draws its celebratory views on waste and production from Bataille’s “Notion of Expenditure.” In the essay, Bataille argues for society’s obligation to expend, lose or waste in equal measure to its production or acquisition of wealth. Where Cyprien brings Bataille and Smitshon together is in the pathological nature of that violence. The redemption of destruction or waste could almost be a leitmotif to both his methodology and his work: from his video Paintings to the collection of photographs in Stolen.The redemption of destruction or waste could almost be a leitmotif to both his methodology and his work: from his video Paintings to the collection of photographs in Stolen.

When I first saw the etchings, they reminded of something Constant Nieuwenhuis would have created, had he been living under a National Socialist or Social Realist regime. Constant was a brief member of the Situationist International but, like most relentless visionaries, he soon found the confines of a reified movement, regardless of its claims otherwise, to be suffocating. Constant imagined a future city of automated production in which life was nomadic and where social institutions and architecture itself have withered away. New Babylon consists of infinite labyrinthine sectors existing on platforms above the ground. Each sector can be infinitely and spontaneously reconfigured according to the inhabitant’s movement through the space. New Babylon covered the whole planet, freeing man from his normal, utilitarian engagements, and paving the way for Homo Ludens. Such a figure, stripped of work, free for associative play, could be found in such incommensurate places as les Avanchets outside Geneva, Nova Hut near Krakow, or Petrzalka outside Bratislava during one of the artist’s many surveys of tower blocks. Even the consumption of material and accoutrements of travel were automated. By choosing to purchase necessities on location—from daily amenities to material for work—and discard them once used (up), the actual journey became a scorched earth counterpart worthy of the subject of interest: scorched earth developments. The tower blocks and housing estates that served as peripatetic stops throughout the former Soviet satellites are inextricably linked to the ravages, whether military, financial or social, of the second world war.

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.

When Ronald Reagan spoke these words at his farewell address in 1989, he dreamt of a landscape probably not so far off from those found in these etchings. The artist was born the year Reagan was elected to the highest office and spent some of his formative years in the golden state the former actor-turned-president called home. Where Reagan’s architectural vision would be more akin to that of American suburbia, a rosy-tinted vision of a hamlet that somehow doubles as a vibrant city, Cyprien sees in the tower block a will-to-dynamism lacking in conventionally proportioned habitations, in homes that resemble their owners. His interest in the tall, the massive, the heavy construction is a stubborn one. To the point of disbelief, in any sense of accountability, to others, to intention, situating the work closer to the sculptures of Bodys Isek Kingelez, or architectural proposals of Constant or Architecture Principe. Kingelez’ extrême maquettes are derided as ‘African fantasies.’ Virilio’s and Parent’s oblique buildings were chided as follies of the late 60s. Constant’s New Babylon was written off as a dystopia. Just as former Trotskyists can become prime ministers, so too can utopian architects enjoy the last laugh. The latter two for example—Constant and Architecture Principe—have played an immensely influential role in current architectural discourse and practice: from the work of Rem Koolhaas and OMA to Bernard Tschumi or Daniel Libeskind.

It is only normal for us, as part of the generation who grew up amidst the architecture of the Reagan era, to look back to those buildings that preceded us, from the 60s and 70s, with a certain affinity. Of course, only a handful were built by the architectural stars of that era—like Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breueur or Kevin Roche. None of these tower blocks anyway. Driving back from Dixence to Lausanne, Cyprien asked me what I think had happened to the architects of post-war tower blocks that had fallen out of favour. They were stars of a different sort, surely: they must have been quite significant figures in their profession to receive such large-scale commissions. And yet, now, like the trajectories of certain Greek figures like Icarus or Philoctetes, these architects are scorned, to the point of ridicule, for having built such monstrosities. Do they get eggs thrown at them when they leave their house? Are they forced to move cities, to take on other identities? Is there such a thing as an architect relocation program? Probably not. Instead, the anonymity of their designs rubs off on their lives, like a superhero’s glutinous coat of invisibility, providing a bubble of protection from history’s critics. If from Moscow to Washington D.C., we have memorials to the unknown soldier, why not then the same for the unknown architect and planner?