ABSTRACT
Calatrava’s Wall of Nations in Athens is a neo-Constructivist tubular steel sculpture designed to quiver mechanically before the Agora and act as a giant projection screen. Its image is both of the past and of the future, like Antonio Sant’Elia’s drawing of a power station in the “Futurist Manifesto” or laboratory silos for chemical production in a dystopian industrial landscape. This chapter employs the Wall of Nations to interrogate the iconic project as a continuation of Futurism’s dark modernism—not only its formalist avant-garde, but its sinister irredentist politics and technocratic dream of a sped-up modernity, the post-human subject and the end of history.
