Recorded above are the names, sites, lifespans, and collapse-times of five modernist housing blocks from three different countries, convened here for their linked stories of creation and downfall. These housing blocks were erected amid post-war conditions of mass urbanization and related housing booms ss to house the expanding lower-working classes of their respective regions.
Built on the sites of razed slums, these megastructures share corresponding conditions of conception, and in this they resemble other large housing projects. Displacement by the state to clear the way for a large housing scheme was, already at that point, an age-old story. By the time they were destroyed, the structures were deteriorating and inhabitants were disaffected with their living conditions. These destructions s-early s were typically highly mediatized and yielded spectacular images.
Thinking with Guy Debord and his writing on the spectacle as a phenomenon endemic to modernity under conditions of capitalist production, I review the spectacles co-created by these images in order to understand how they deflected attention away from the multiple erasures coextensive with the fall of the buildings.
If, as I argue, the spectacle of these demolitions had the effect of occluding antecedent and ongoing dispossessions, the purpose of this operation of making-into-spectacle nevertheless remains to be theorized. What was at stake for authorities and architects in the speed of the respective demolitions? How were film and photography exploited to produce semblances of instantaneous collapse in spite of the months of sustained labor required to prepare the buildings for implosion? In each case, the state made deliberate choices about the necessity, speed, and form of demolitions based on economic and political anxieties.
Primary among these concerns was the prospect of resistance by tenants. The logistics of demolition and its representations demand careful study especially for this reason. In order to represent the function of these demolition images, we will have to also look beyond their content to the fact of their ubiquity in print and broadcast news at the time and in youtube videos today. The degree of coverage and circulation the images have enjoyed is the mark of an insidious procedure of power whereby erasure, captured and condensed by spectacular images, becomes productive.
