The installation designed for the main exhibition space of Jean Nouvel's lucid building for the Fondation Cartier is entitled The Fall. Its ambition is to expose the fall as a micro-universe that crystallizes the dimensions of a precise, if abbreviated, moment. In the space measuring roughly 53 feet by 66 feet by 25 feet high, enclosed on three sides by floor to ceiling glass, a particular construction has been made, a physical and at the same time hypothetical manifestation of the fall.
Let us say, for the purposes of understanding the hypothesis, that the exhibition space suddenly collapses, as the ceiling falls down toward the floor. This fall may be the product of any number of different causes-structural defects in construction or design, a terrorist's bomb exploding, or something else entirely unexpected. The structural system, the materials supporting the building, resisting the imperative to fall, succumb to the attraction of gravity, suddenly giving way, precipitating a fall toward the planet's center of mass. Gravity is nothing more nor less than acceleration, induced by the attraction of masses. In this case, the attraction is manifest at 32 feet per second. In the first second, the ceiling of the exhibition space falls 16 feet towards the floor. After the next second, it would be some 25 feet below the floor, well into the buildings many basements. The ceiling structures of the basements slow down the buildings fall, as the upper floors meet the resistance of the subterranean structure. Still, the collapse of the exhibition space takes less than two seconds. Too fast to see, no doubt, but not at all too fast to conceptualize. This is the time-space of the fall--too brief to inhabit-except in imagination.
