It was 7:30. I had to keep my appointment at the Rosefield complex. The security guard offered to get me coffee. A strange bed is always trouble, I said. The blueprints kept me up. And the ad was too bright. I could see it from my hotel. Even with the blinds shut, it cast a gauzy light on the mini-fridge. It showed a young woman raising a Pepsi to her mouth. After a sip, she wiped her lips and smiled. She glowed fifteen stories high on the facade of Tower 6. The guard chuckled. He was short and stocky. His name was Hoffman. On our way to the quad, he warned it would be muddy. The towers were aligned on an orthogonal plaza, paved in a checkerboard pattern. The rain had stopped, but everything smelled of metal, even the grass squares, on which statue groups depicted women and children in bronze. Some women carried children, while others stretched out their arms to protect seated children. Polychrome plaster children, eyes closed, surrounded benches in the center of the quad. At the far end was a granite arch decorated with bas-reliefs of children, to whom women tossed abstract spheres. Beyond that, on a pedestal in a dry fountain, a bronze woman held out a lizard for a child to see. Hoffman gestured to a mound of soggy bouquets and photographs at the checkpoint to the Tower 7 site. Long ribbons of caution tape blew around him as he struggled with the gate. “Wind tunnel effect,” he said. As he spoke, the lid on his coffee flew off, splashing our coats and the Canon around my neck. More spilled when he tugged the gate again. “Did I get you that time?” I wiped the lens and shook my head. It was hard to hear him over the cutting tools. The gate rose on the third try. He told me to mask. The ground was soft. I framed the wreckage at 35 mm and fired twelve rapid exposures. I said, I’m going to ask you to open this umbrella if it starts raining. He opened it. It hasn’t started, I said. He closed it again.

An entire quarto lay on its side, the incisions visible along its length. The other three quartos remained vertical. A hazmat team strolled along the exposed upper plane. It looked like a neat white honeycomb from the quarto above, Hoffman told me. “Before they cut in.” He pointed to some twenty opaque panels stacked in a flatbed truck. As we watched, two more panels were hurled from the top by the cutting crew. My photography unnerved them. They stared from the wreckage through their goggles and dust masks. That made me self-conscious. I turned the camera on the metal palisade that enfolded the exterior. It glistened with condensation and shifting light from the Pepsi ad across the quad. There’s no visible opening on this side, I said to Hoffman. He did not understand. I explained that the palisade concealed every door and window on the side facing me, and that to get a sense of the interior, I had to go up top. He frowned. He had not expected me to expose myself to danger. With my umbrella, he waved to the foreman above. “But stick to the indicated path. That’s all I’m asking.”

We ascended a temporary staircase bolted to the palisade. A grid of aluminum platforms and bridges had been fabricated for the cutting crew. From the central bridge, I had a clean view of the interiors. They were well-preserved near the top but crushed further down, in illuminated pits. Metal ladders protruded from rectangular holes where doors had been. It was nearly impossible to communicate with Hoffman over the rumble of debris, shrieking power tools,hissing drones spraying dust-suppressant. Directly under us, a team peeled back a wall, revealing numerous effects: atomized furniture, refrigerator components, electrical appliances mashed into colored glass, a bedroom poster, a showerhead, a plastic shoe rack. A headlamp flicked on as a goggled face ascended the ladder. The workman, who did not speak English, consented to remove his mask at the top. He smiled shyly for my camera and held out a spider plant in a hanging basket, which he passed to Hoffman before descending to the pit. In a minute, his headlamp glittered below like a lit-up submarine. Hoffman handed me the spider plant and peered over the railing, squinting to listen. “They’re complaining about the pumps. Lot of rain down there.” It was sprinkling now. I hooked the basket onto the railing and nodded to Hoffman that he could open the umbrella. I had in my case a Hasselblad powerful enough to capture the spatial recessions of the standing tower. While he held the umbrella, I assembled the tripod. The light rain did not bother the inhabitants of the vertical quartos. Many were already out on their small balconies. They drank coffee, smoked, watered plants, or stared below at the quad or the severed quarto. I tilted up the lens and set to work. The click of the shutter, like Hoffman’s voice, was almost buried by the drilling of the crew into another apartment, fountaining up sparks until the panels were loose enough to detach by hand. The wound on the vertical tower was perfectly schematic. Apartments were exposed but intact,their contents in place and distinguishable. It reminded me of a picture book I was given as a child, in which the illustrator had cut in half buildings and vehicles. Labels identified unfamiliar objects as the people went about their lives. They entered and exited, folded clothes and brushed their teeth, took showers and rinsed cups. There was little difference between the pages of that book and the open face of the quartos above me, except for the shrouds that rippled over the missing walls.

No crack or tilt was visible. Exposed tubing whined in the northwest quadrant. Below, subterranean pumps discharged water into a channel along the north end of the complex. A red pennant fluttered on the main pipe. I framed the tower and positioned myself below the umbrella as droplets splashed from the ruffling shrouds. On Floor 22, a woman hung laundry from her balcony. On 17, a woman washed dishes in her sink. On 6, a child drew on the balcony wall with a stick of blue chalk. These figures provided scale references. Others moved within the lattice of cubic modules and stacked floors behind the translucent shrouds. Matte gunmetal spikes extended from the cardinal incisions at regular intervals. Their tips glowed with cobalt light, while picric-yellow rings stained the bases. A solitary diode pulsed on the exposed shear-plane.

I heard a light drumming of rain on the umbrella and asked if the crew had stopped for the day. “They found something organic,” said Hoffman, eyeing the conveyor that snaked up from the freshly opened apartment. The distant water channel, combined with the hum of the grid, distracted me more than the power tools had. I adjusted constantly to overcome distortions. What appeared to be walls often resolved, with focus, into deep voids and galleries interlaced with bridges and elevator shafts. Under the apartments, visible to my lens but not to the inhabitants, sewage coursed through unlit pipes. Condensation dripped from ductwork. Figures rippled beneath the shrouds. Helicoidal staircases looped in fits of crosshatching from the dim, wet light that filtered through the far ends of the tower. Occupants ascended on incised treads, ramps, and ladders, emerging onto barium-white mezzanines or dimmer, narrower platforms choked with clotheslines, cables, and signs, only to climb on, crossing paths on slender bridges that spanned the central void. Other occupants observed the mat eye level on interior balconies cluttered with flowerpots, antennas, and lightbulbs. On the surfaces of hemispherical conduits, their wandering silhouettes bulged in distorted light. I fired a burst as a figure on 38stepped into a recessed corridor of boundless length, only to appear within seconds at its far end. In the uppermost heights, amid cantilevers and skylights, shafts and ducts shifted color from amber to antiseptic white. The viscous yellow fluid I had observed was visible here too, threading from severed hydraulic lines and dripping along the guillotine tips. Sunlight warmed the awnings and furniture of the balconies. More tower residents were out now, as if to pose for my camera. On Floor 22, the clothes had been folded. On 17, the dishes were drying on a rack. On 6, a round face had appeared in blue chalk.

I was late to the conference tent. The guard at the gate did not recognize my credentials. I told him I had full clearance. I was a documentation officer. I asked him to call Hoffman, who ordered him to let me through. I took a seat in the back row, on a folding chair that tilted slightly on the soft ground. The translucent tent walls let in diffused light. The exposed face of Tower 7 loomed beyond over the fallen quarto, where cutting had ceased for the press event. The only outside noise was the hum of the distant pumps. The air smelled of damp soil, plastic, and metal. A panel with a timeline chart blocked my view of Marina Brankovic. “…but it was a complete success,” she was saying, “and total vindication of Aldo’s theories.” I could only see the top of her head, her thick black curls bobbing as she spoke. To her left, on a large screen, the northwest quarto detached from a high-res wire frame rendering of Tower 7. Spikes extended from the vertical structure. The quarto tilted outward and landed cleanly in the fall-zone. The animation looped continuously, zooming in at regular intervals on the spikes, the guillotine tips, and the pulsing diode on the uppermost shear-plane. Behind her, another screen displayed a photograph of a man’s hand, his gloved fingers elongated by the glass box into which he reached for a lizard huddled in the corner.

I moved to the back of the tent for a view over the heads of the audience. She was tall, about my height. She wore a charcoal suit. Her hands moved constantly, emphasizing her words with quick sweeps. On a low table in front of the podium, a pleasant, cakelike model of Tower 7 showed the structure in its original state, a Platonic solid divided into four equal prisms. I turned to three exhibits near the entrance. Two screens, side by side, played old video sat a low volume. A painting hung next to them. I leaned in to hear the videos.The first showed a darkened gallery hung with black curtains. Twelve antique ventriloquist’s dummies sat in a circle around an old radio. It crackled with news of disasters, wars, elections, assassinations. Slowly, the dummies’ eyes filled with water. It began to squirt in rhythmic jets, soaking the floor and curtains. The placard beneath the screen read: Aldo Vasari, Giochi d’Acqua, Geneva, 1966. The second video revealed an even darker room, where a faint mechanical ticking emanated from sealed floor grates. The placard read: Aldo Vasari, Time’s Abyss, Zurich, 1964. The painting depicted an ochre plain with sere trees beneath a sky the color and texture of an orange peel. The sun guttered in the upper right corner, dimming the foreground, which was dominated by a massive, limbless, headless female torso. The breasts terminated in round pink areolas, and a thick stand of pubic hair concealed the base. Tangled in the hair was a razor, with which perhaps the torso had amputated its limbs and head. The placard read: Aldo Vasari, In Defense of the Female Body, oil on canvas, 31.8 x 39.4 cm, 1974. Brankovic was explaining amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

She said:

“At his invitation, I joined him in Chengdu. I cared for him for the last four years of his life. His muscles were atrophying by about a centimeter a month. When he died, I completed his system of autotomic stability as faithfully as I could.” A sequence of photographs replaced the image of the lizard. High-rise apartments nesting in fractal patterns. A young Marina Brankovic leaning over the back of a wheelchair to embrace a frail, much older man. Her chin resting on his head. The same man, younger, standing with a cane at the end of a long desk flanked by banana trees. On the desk, a matte white model of Tianfu Interlocking Towers. “This wasn’t easy. Aldo had a terrible habit—those of us who loved him know this—of writing his ideas on note cards and storing them in green cardboard boxes on his studio shelves. You might never see them again. He rarely wrote down precise measurements. That was for drafters like me. Everything was concise, poetic. He was an artist before he was an architect. He loved colored paper, dollhouses, toy theaters, animal skeletons…”

The model of Tianfu Interlocking Towers, or another like it, was displayed under plexiglass opposite the entrance from the videos and the painting. I pressed the lens of the Canon to the case. It was Vasari’s best-known building,commissioned at the peak of urban renewal in Chengdu. Aside from its Corbusian influences—roof gardens, ribbon windows, pilot is, modular apartments that maximized volume and minimized congestion—it was his first work to incorporate the elements that defined his later architecture: his emphasis on psychological expansion of perceived space, density without oppression, and the quarto-logic of structural stability. The frost-white cube, forty-one stories high,consisted of four quartos locked together like puzzle pieces. Interior features encouraged an illusion of spaciousness. Recessed balconies and multicolored grid facades increased visual depth. Mirrored panels doubled the apparent lengths of corridors.

“I would not have designed it,” said a light, refined, if slightly plasticky male voice, “but for an unpleasant event that occurred in my youth on a tram in Zurich. The crowd in the car was so dense, it pressed me against the doors. I had a claustrophobic attack, with the wide open Bahnhofstrasse gliding behind me. That horrendous crush, and my uncontrollable panic, compelled me to reflect for the first time on the concept of space.”

The voice continued, following a stately pause:

“I made my first buildings out of paper, decorated with hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs, on rainy weekends in my mother’s apartment overlooking Lake Lugano. In that high-ceilinged room, tinted by the green glow of a banker’s lamp, she taught me to build houses with playing cards. We lined them on the burgundy leather of a Restauration desk in Cuban mahogany and buttery ormolu, with a frieze of nautiloids and a drawer-lock in the shape of Polyphemus’s eye.”

The photographs on the large screen had been succeeded by a digital avatar of Vasari in an open-necked shirt and linen jacket. He looked much younger and healthier than in the photographs. He was lean, wiry. His gray hair curled elegantly at his temples.

“Her pianist’s hands smelled of lavender soap, and so, consequently, did the cards, which were slightly warped from the humidity of the lake.”

“Aldo is able to speak to us himself,” Brankovic explained, “with the help of AI techniques and extracts from his memoirs.” She turned to the avatar and smiled. It smiled back and began to describe his early projects. When it finished, it froze in place, its eyes half-closed and mouth slightly open. I resumed my seat and photographed the motionless face and the model on the table below it. It occurred to me, apropos of nothing, that I had entirely forgotten the spider plant on the railing over the fallen quarto.

“What Aldo began with Tianfu,” said Brankovic, “he intended to complete here, with the Rosefield Towers. The particular problems of the site, its alluvial profile, the marginal ground, could only be solved by his program of autotomic logic. Of course, he wasn’t able to draft the work himself, and I was obliged to step in. But the essential plan, the model, is his.” She turned back to the screen, where Vasari’s avatar faded, replaced by an eighteenth-century drawing of a ruined Doric temple, where cattle grazed and drovers sat with clay pipes and collared dogs. The avatar’s voice spoke over the image:

“The Italians seem disappointed in their ruins for not resembling Piranesi’s more faithfully. His etchings can often be seen in the windows of antiquarian bookshops—not only in Rome and Milan, but in Tivoli, Naples. There is a great appetite for Piranesi’s dream-Italy: a world a little bigger than ours, where the people are much smaller, scarcely more than afterthoughts compared to the dilapidated monuments they haunt. Thirty years ago, in Milan, I noticed one of the large drawings of Paestum from his final series: a depiction of the Temple of Hera II, as it is now known. The roof, of course, is completely gone; cattle are peering in through the colonnades. The floor is thick with weeds and cow pats. When sunlight fell on the print in the shop window, I remembered, instantly, a late spring day when I was ten. We were on holiday in Italy. It was very cheap to travel there after the war, especially in the south. Paestum is not so far from Naples by train, and the Tyrrhenian Sea is only a few hundred meters away. We spent the morning on a piney strip of beach. After a lunch of salads and mozzarella, we visited the temples. In those days there were few tourists. The town was, and is, very small: two or three streets lined with stone pines, an archaeological museum built by the Fascists. The temples were accessed through a simple gate, where a man sold postcards. My father, unbeknownst to anyone,had only a year to live. He stood by himself, watching buffalo graze in a field where, today, you can see what has been excavated of the ancient town that was neighbor to the Eleatics. In May, the ground between the two Doric temples of Hera becomes a sea of wildflowers; old Paestum was famous for them, and for the perfume made from wild roses. My mother sprawled out with my baby sister on a carpet of red poppies, yellow and white daisies, blue chicory, buttercups, vetch, clover. My mother pressed flowers. She was very old-fashioned, a woman of the nineteenth-century born too late. I played alone in the Temple of Hera, the travertine sunny and rough beneath my palms and knees. Cicadas were loud in the oleander, which was just beginning to bloom pink and white. Italian wall lizards basked everywhere, on column drums, paving stones, darting into cracks when approached, even by our shadows. As I climbed over a fallen block of entablature, I startled one with my hand. Imagine my shock when it shot off and left its tail wriggling on the warm limestone! I was sure I had hurt the poor creature. Horribly ashamed, I called my mother, who soon came running up the steps of the pronaos with my sister on her shoulder. She was gentle and understanding. She calmly explained that the lizard had thrown its tail away to distract me; it had assumed I meant to eat it, and that was how it liked to trick predators. It had not suffered. I had not caused it pain. But in order to survive, it had sacrificed a part of itself, which would grow back in time anyway. Of course, being a little boy, I was morbidly fascinated by this. I went to find my father, who was still contemplating the local livestock, and demanded a matchbox from him, with which I returned to collect the tail. That night, I sketched the fracture plane on hotel stationery. It was this memory that resurfaced when I saw the sunlit etching in the window of the Milanese bookshop. ‘In the twinkling of an eye’, I was changed. The sudden association between ruined buildings and caudal autotomy altered my philosophy of architecture completely. The seed for the quarto system was planted in that single memory.”  

Brankovic showed photographs and a brief video of Vasari’s preparatory studies for Tianfu Interlocking Towers. To observe modular severance, he built a 30 x 30 x 30 cm glass cube with a removable partition. Captured male lizards waited inside for Vasari’s hand to appear through a sleeved opening. The specimen in the clip—an Italian wall lizard, like the one he had disturbed in Paestum—stood motionless in a territorial pose, inflating its bright blue throat as Vasari’s fingertips approached. Brankovic explained: “The tail snaps off cleanly thanks to fracture planes in the vertebrae, which are rather like perforated lines on a train ticket. Meanwhile, to prevent blood loss, the lizard constricts its sphincter muscles. The tail continues to thrash for about half a minute, keeping the predator busy while its owner escapes.” Vasari’s hand held up the severed tail with a pair of tweezers, then dropped it into a jar of formalin.

“As you can see from the model here, and in the animation playing to my left, each of the Rosefield Towers is a perfect rectangular prism, subdivided into four identical quartos and fused at the cardinal divisions by pre-scored vertical joints, or fracture planes.” She approached the model. The red beam of the laser pointer hovered over key features. Vasari’s biomimetic approach, she explained, aimed to compensate for geotechnical flaws like those at the Rosefield site, with its soft alluvial soil. “If AI sensors detect threats to a tower’s stability—subsidence, for example—damaged quartos are automatically jettisoned by pyrotechnic charges and hydraulic guillotines in the joints. This is to prevent cascading structural collapse. I will now demonstrate with this 1:200 scale replica of Tower 7.” I stood up, raising the camera as she activated the model. She smiled and stepped back so I could photograph the northwest quarto as it detached with a pop, tilting forward on its hinges like a toy drinking bird. The stabilizing spikes, represented by tiny pinheads, poked out from the cardinal incisions to steady the wobbling quarto until it dropped neatly into the pre-reinforced fall-zone, a patch of green baize. A containment palisade unfolded along the sides of the wounded quarto, while above, over the exposed apartments of the vertical tower, plastic curtains lowered in shiny parabolas to complete the demonstration.