A demolished landmark can hover over intimate scenes to mark historical rupture

Evidence

The tower is thus positioned as the inverse panopticon of perpetual London, a derealized physics that also disavows the technicalities of historical time. Visible from the bedroom window, the palace illuminates one of the couples in their post-party aborted tryst: … Passion, at its truest and most fierce, does not liaise with toothpaste. It does not wait around for toning and exfoliation … No, there would be no love tonight … From the wide stretch of land at the top of Westwood Hill, the Crystal tower loomed and shone red … The palace was no longer standing. It had burnt to the ground in 1936, after a long and steady decline. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 348

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates what Kornbluh means by a setting performing ‘inverse panopticon’ work — architecture as social-structural mediation rather than backdrop.
• XREF: Feeds the reader’s desire to name the features of immediacy and their opposites: here the banal present (‘toothpaste’, ‘toning and exfoliation’) versus the historical that pierces it. Evans’s palace functions like a mediating figure the immediacy aesthetic would excise.