Most cities today present a striking visual paradox—suspended between nostalgia and aspiration. They oscillate between preserving an idealized past and projecting speculative futures. On one hand, the historic quarters strive to preserve a romanticized past, resisting the passage of time. On the other hand, the soaring towers project into a hyper-idealized future, detached from their immediate context. Both narratives attempt to manipulate time: one by freezing it, the other by escaping it.

This project explores the disconnect between the city’s architectural imagery and its physical reality. Renderings of cities' high-rises often depict isolated objects silhouetted against curated skylines. Our intervention confronts this speculative condition and explores the surreal co-existence of the built and unbuilt, the modern and the obsolete.
Modern Times explores architecture’s consequences in jumbo and micro urban form through a 10-foot-tall physical model built from found objects. By overwhelming the form with material redundancy and spectacle, the project critiques the detachment of high-rise design from its urban and ecological context, exposing architecture as a product of unchecked ambition and commodification.