Utopia Minus

Susan Briante

An author’s statement as a tour of the sites that inform these pages

“All language becomes an alphabet of sites, or it becomes what we will call the air terminal between Fort Worth and Dallas.” —Robert Smithson

NJ Transit’s Northeast Corridor: I grew up in suburban New Jersey, took the train into New York City: Rahway, Linden, Elizabeth, warehouse, factory, cathedrals of brick and broken glass, cars abandoned under the overpass. I’ve always had a predilection toward the half-built as well as the crumbling. Forget the statues of bayonet-bearing soldiers, other monuments punctuate our landscape, tell stories cut with shift whistle.

Intel Building, Austin, Texas: This proposed ten-story building begun in 2000 became a high-water mark for the dot.com boom on the banks of Town Lake. It was abandoned at six stories in 2001, demolished in 2007. Before it went down, a dance troupe staged a performance in which dancers floated down the building’s skeleton on riggings. They looked like suicide angels. Robert Smithson calls these “ruins in reverse” or “the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before.”

South Tower’s Façade, Ground Zero: America is land without ruins, the famous memorialist declared as the World Trade Center site was sanitized. Now they are building a new ruin to remember it by. But Atlanta had its ruins; Richmond had them. A century later, the Bronx had block after gutted block. Remember General Sherman, remember Robert Moses. What we forget defines us as much as what we commemorate.

Relics of the Great Recession (Various Locations): When the Great Recession hit, we stopped building, but the half-made and foreclosed remain. They map our monumental mistakes. Before the ruins of downtown Detroit, photographer Camilo José Vergara: “After all, large fields in Pennsylvania have been set aside to commemorate the Battle of Gettysburg. Why not secure the blocks with the tallest and most notable structures….and transform the space into a memorial to our throwaway cities?” Look around you. How many monuments can you make?

Austin and Dallas (Various Locations): While I was writing this book, I was also building a relationship. Brick by brick. In blasts and booms and teardowns. I’m happy to report we’re still standing, mostly plumb. You’ll find some of that demolition/construction in these pages as well.