Monument for Capital
Jonas Staal
(2017)
The long-term research project Monument to Capital takes as its point of departure the Barclays Capital’s Skyscraper Index, managed by the international investment bank Barclays. The index visualizes the “unhealthy correlation between the construction of the next world’s tallest building and an impending financial crisis.”
Barclays’ argues that there is a structural relationship between economic crisis and the construction of the highest buildings of the world, from the Equitable Life Building in New York constructed in 1871 – the year of the onset of the “long depression”– to the Burj Khalifa constructed throughout the 2007-10 worldwide economic crisis.
The highest buildings of the world as such seem to monumentalize capital at the very moment it disappears, hence forging a global “monument to capital.”