Artist:
Corey McCorkle (born 1969 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA; lives and works in New York City, USA).

Materials:
Film; 3 min.

Description:
“Tower of Shadows, as a final meditation on the incontestable utopian poster-city of  [the twentieth century], in spite of and perhaps because of the abject state of its incompletion, serves as a calm on Le Corbusier’s perforated monolithic vision. Designed to fill the gap left in the Punjabi state after partition in 1947, the new capital of Chandigarh was meant to be the inspiring city of the future—wide avenues flowing into expansive government plazas envisioned future pageantry on an impressive scale. Particularly, the Tower of Shadows at Chandigarh interests the artist as it is a structure to house nothing, a romantic pavilion… purely an optimistic essay of light and dark more than any municipal place of assembly, any place of use-value. More over, McCorkle is drawn to it as another irresistible and unyielding new ruin in the folds of twentieth-century urbanism.”
—Press release, “Corey McCorkle,” Office for Contemporary Art Norway, November 8, 2007.

“…In Tower of Shadows McCorkle brings to life Le Corbusier’s ‘Tower of Shadows’ in Chandigarh, India, an unfinished structure which was designed ‘brise-soleil’ to block as much sunlight as possible. Filmed from dawn to dusk on the shortest day of the year (the day on which the least possible amount of light would enter), McCorkle treats this folly as an allegorical ruin of a modernist, utopian dream of integrating architecture and nature.”
—”Dan Graham/Corey McCorkle,” Murray Guy.