This is a monumental work by Monika Sosnowska, now at Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York. It conveys how the steel structure of Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive tower in Chicago might look, if an earthquake were to lay it low. There have been a ton of recent pieces that riff on the failures of modernist design; I just saw a whole show of such works in the Bronx. But I believe that under all of them lies not a contempt for the modern, or even a disillusionment with it, but an amazement that something so gorgeous could, in fact, fail to deliver on its highest utopian promises. As in so many neurotic relationships, the criticism and disappointment is just the flip side of love. (Photo by Lucy Hogg)

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