Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo O. C. de Ostos, both recently tasked to author the next installment of Pamphlet Architecture, once proposed “a gigantic presence of a hanging funeral structure” that will hover above the war torn streets of Baghdad, floating unceasingly “from bright explosive mornings to airless night hours,” and lush with growth from an endless supply of dead Iraqis.
“Day by day, nearly hourly, it updates its assimilating heavy stocks, a statistic of a hundred thousand Iraqi corpses or maybe twenty five thousand.”
Lest someone say that this can never be built, a prototype already exists in the skies above Iraq. To see it, one only needs to track the endless flights of cargo planes delivering dead coalition soldiers back to their home countries. And also the countless parabolic airborne tracings of the injured getting airlifted from battlefields to waiting “cash” units; of celebrities and politicians for Thanksgiving or dubious fact-finding missions; and of celebrity journalists, some of whom will simply add to the spectacle and cause their audience to see the events they cover “as nothing more than a special effect or just another reality TV show” before they get seriously injured and are then swiftly flown away.
It's a Paglenian geography physicalized into a new hanging garden.
A book about this project should be coming out in April 2007.