At the close of the dispiriting year, I offer you Adrian Rheinländer’s odyssey of the world’s largest failures. Rheinländer uses photography to examine constructions that have failed on a massive scale. They are too large to remove, too dangerous to destroy, or perhaps intentionally left in place as monuments to failure.

The project confronts the full extent of each fiasco, but it also looks to see if any good may have come in the aftermath. At times, there is a new use for the place, like the surreal Wunderland Kalkar amusement park, built in the former nuclear power plant. More often, the sole good to be found is a lesson. (i.e. the devil is in the details when constructing a bridge.) The pictures ask — during the next round of Olympic mania, might the prospective countries take a good look at the abandoned heaps of money decaying in the unused facilities in Greece before bidding on the games? Rheinlander works to illuminate hard-earned lessons, even if others want them to disappear.

Would we ever risk any large undertaking if we saw only its potential implosion? I can’t help but wonder how the designers are affected by the physical rubble, if they are alive to witness the great failure, or if their project is aborted mid-stream. Do the people who pressed for their golf resort in Spain ever go, quietly, to revisit the site? Do they nurse regret? Or might they simply shed responsibility, shift blame, or somehow move on.

As I grapple with the staggering defeats of 2020, I find strange comfort in these pictures. They affect me like the Roman ruins. Even after this, people will build and rebuild their dreams.

-Lisa Woodward