Taking over Morris Adjmi architects. 2025
How do you plan to fall apart? Conceptual artist Pablo Gómez Uribe uses commonbuilding materials and techniques to explore the dialectical relationship between construction and destruction. Through sculptures, installations, and ephemeral gestures, he offers searing, wry critiques of architecture’s visionary yet romanticized approach to designing new structures, particularly in urban environments. Initially trained as an architect but quickly disenchanted with the field, Gómez Uribe’s works call particular attention to the paradoxical inefficiencies and political dimensions of construction in New York City and Medellín, his two residences. Taking Over features multiple projects by Gómez Uribe that explore intentional deconstruction, centering on El Gordon Demolition, an ongoing project Gómez Uribe initiated in 2012. El Gordon Demolition can be understood as both an artwork with discrete, elements and a framework for his overall way of working. In this way, and by “creating” work using deconstruction, in an act of architectural refusal, Gómez Uribe builds upon the legacy of artists like Gordon Matta Clark, whose “anarchitecture” practice embodied “making space without building it.”
Fundamentally, El Gordon Demolition is an artwork comprising a demolition company that mirrors an architecture firm. In Taking Over, the site-responsive installation of the work as a functional office may make Morris Adjmi clients think they have entered the wrong suite.Critiquing what Gómez Uribe sees as contradictions inherent in the precise yet lofty work done by architects who plan but do not literally construct buildings, El Gordon Demolition proposesremoving from instead of adding to the urban landscape, but with the same intentionality one might bring to a profitable new build. Living in New York, where empty lots are rare, the work also raises questions about the inherent wastefulness of choosing not to repurpose existing architecture. Gómez Uribe named the work for Matta-Clark, however the inspiration behind this tribute is not anarchitecture but a specific project: FOOD, Matta-Clark’s operational restaurant that can also be thought of as a relational artwork. Case in point: El Gordon Demolition is aregistered LLC. The legitimacy provided by the legal and economic systems that recognize El Gordon Demolition is crucial to its success, the absurdism of the gesture registering the projectas legible political satire.
To further legitimize El Gordon Demolition, Gómez Uribe designed its graphic identity and even uniforms for its workers (if they ever secure a client), and all are equally tongue-in-cheek. For example, the company stationary is tracing paper, a ubiquitous tool of architects, used to sketch modifications to the world with no real impact. Highlighting the irony of this potentially empty gesture, the tracing paper is construction yellow, a color synonymous with active work zones. At Morris Adjmi Architects, these elements are on display with some of the company’s test bricks, representing other “positive failures”: to know how to fix a brick, you must first subject it to tests and break it. In Taking Over, the comprehensiveness of El Gordon Demolition’s absurd anti-mission comes plainly into view.
Many artists move fluidly between creation and destruction. Both gestures can result in—or be—a work. With his mix of artistic and architectural expertise, as well as his biting humor, Gómez Uribe has found a way to make the concept of destruction itself an artistic conceit—and a business model for an alternate future.
–Emily Markert