2018 Brexit Monument

Location	Calais
Year	2018
Type	Open competition
Category	Architecture
Note	The present text was the only document we submitted to the Brexit monument open competition.

Unsatisfactory outcome

This past decade, attention has been irreversibly captured by information technologies.

In our optically saturated world, it would be a fundamental mistake to entrust architecture with symbolic efficiency.

We will leave the senile naivety of expressive desire to the preceding generation of architects.

Architecture’s contemporary role is solely one of partitioning space. Dividing and assembling space constitute the finite set of operations available to us. They are how one reconfigures political structures.

Buildings are received in a single manner: by use. Or, better: tactilely.

Monuments, by definition, have no use, no tactile nature.

Thus, built monuments would be nothing more than nostalgic and narcissistic gesticulations, stripped of any political project.

Monuments cannot exist in physical space.

No Brexit monument.