Almost 100 years have passed since someone proposed that with modern architecture, 'revolution can be avoided'. [1]These infamous last words were uttered at the end of a sort of techno-patriarchal manifesto, one that combined elegies of industrially manufactured objects – sports cars, ocean liners, airplanes, a window frame in Chicago – together with holiday pictures of white-washed Mediterranean ruins. Set against a background of a seemingly inhospitable landscape, an image series of the Acropolis in Athens is presented as a reminder that architecture is 'a pure creation of the mind.' [2]

If we turn our gaze from the surface plane of the temple towards the holy rock itself, we might find that this focus on the Parthenon object obscures the more than human workings that bear its foundations[3]. A vertical section of the rock body reveals a different geology of morals, one where shifting layers of strata cut across human and geological forces, blurring anachronic distinctions between form and substance.

But if modern capitalist economy relied on its emancipation from the limited constraints of the ground, late liberal capital seems to have found a new potential in the unearthed space that lies beneath.