Memoriam (2026) | collaboration with Alex Lyle
Concrete is generally regarded as a structural material. Here we regard it as an archive and a memoriam.
Poured mid June, right now the slab is still fresh. It will cure suspended for several more months. The top will gather detritus, eventually hanging as a piece of the forest floor — ferns and saplings slowly gripping into its upper plane. Its lower plane preserves a reflection of the forest floor from the day of its casting.
Historically tablets were for imprinting information. Sometimes for posterity, sometimes not.
In place of clay the concrete tablet steps in to create a fast-fossil. Like a clay tablet, the concrete tablet records by imprint, extending our memory, memorializing what would otherwise be lost.
What would be a stroke of a tool is here a branch or a thick blade of grass. What is impressed is the work of the earth, the soil, sun, wind, and water.
But we are reminded that concrete erases. — It crushes and kills in more ways than one.
Concrete’s violence comes from its power to crush and displace.
Displacement of ground in order to mine its components. Displacement of vegetation and soil for plants to grow. Displacement of communities who hold the land sacred. Displacement of animal life. Displacement of water.
And crushing: When we were making this piece I had in mind the bodies of those crushed by bombs and buildings in Gaza, and the shapes of graves being dug in Congo.
Just two days after we raised the piece, a massive earthquake struck Caracas. In the city my mother was born, slabs of concrete were arrayed like fallen dominos. Once roofs, and floors — now graves.
In my industrial work we talk about 2 ton motors — the news talks about 2 ton bombs — here we cast 2 tons of reinforced concrete.
Concrete Architecture & Ungrounding
Memoriam, with its structural steel frame, reengages architectural Brutalism in its intent to bear truth and witness. Hanging, reinforced concrete, references Brutalism not in relation to structure or surface, but as witness. The Smithsons perceived brutalism as “an architecture of truth” because like the social forms it was tied to, it resented and rejected surface treatment. Here the surface is not treated so much as unveiled. As time passes the encrusted layers of vegetation begin to fall away. A chaos of organic material leaves behind sharply defined cellulose patterns and flows.
In Ungrounding Eyal Weizman’s 2025 book, practices of building are staged in direct contrast with that of destruction. He shows how Israel learned from the successes of European Jews who rebuilt their homes after Nazi raids, and ensured those in Palestine would never achieve such a homecoming after the Nakba. As such, beyond structural leveling, foundation lines and field boundaries were annihilated, pushing destruction to the particulate level.
After Warsaw’s leveling in 1944 its people returned, and undertook intensive efforts to reconstruct its home. Plans were smuggled out, fragments of architecture details were kept as reference for new ones, foundations were excavated, and communities sorted useful building materials from the dust in order to rebuild.
By contrast Ungrounding details a series and system for architectural and social erasure that reveals humans no longer as building animals, but animals that destroy. Those left behind or forced underground must navigate the soil itself. When Weizman describes the spatial logic under Gaza he describes a chaos of tunnels — ant-like, but built without the instincts of millennia underground. In parallel, families in Venezuela are tunneling through earthquake rubble to find their loved ones as the government threatens to bulldoze the sites.
While Memoriam is not heavy enough to bear the weight of these experiences, the tension in the cables relieve the ground below. Here at least, the crushing weight of the slab is lifted.
Lost Habitats | Examples
First Paragraph from UNESCO/ICOMO justification for the nomination of Mexico City into the list of World Heritage Sites:
It is difficult to formulate a nomination concerning the monuments, groups of buildings or sites that are located at the heart of the major contemporary city whose origins and growth they most fully and clearly illustrate. In the case of the capital of Mexico, it is truly a case of attempting the impossible. On the one hand, Cortès had the ancient city of Tenochtitlan razed in 1521-1522 in order to abolish any trace of the pre-Hispanic culture. On the other hand, the Spanish settlement, which was slow to prosper (100,000 inhabitants in 1537 compared with nearly 500,000 at the time of the conquest), has been totally swallowed up by today's gigantic metropolis of more than 17,000,000 people. The sole reminders of the Aztec capital and the capital of New Spain, and of the outlying villages, are a few ruins that have survived the flood of concrete which has engulfed the 2,500 km2 of the Mexico basin (altitude 2,250m).