Future Ruins
Short Film
Future Ruins
Overview
A short film depicting a hypothetical post-apocalyptic environment focused on a designed, not accidental, ruin of the MASP museum.
Site
Where
It Sits
The subject sits on Avenida Paulista: a box suspended from two red beams spanning 74 metres, leaving an open plaza beneath.
Concept Designed Decay
"The ruin is not accidental but designed. Every element of decay was choreographed to reveal how the building would fail."
The project takes Lina Bo Bardi's MASP as its subject: a building already understood as a suspended object, held aloft by two massive red concrete beams. The nuclear event does not destroy the building arbitrarily; it exploits the building's own structural logic, rotating it by the force of the blast and collapsing it inward along its weakest axes.
The Event
A Nuclear
Displacement
The building has been displaced from its original footprint, rotated by the force of the blast and partially collapsed inward. The shadow cast across the surrounding urban fabric marks the extent of structural debris, making the scale of destruction legible from above.
Plan of the Ruin
Still 01
Interior
in Collapse
The interior of the MASP in collapse. Structural members have fractured and tilted, debris fills the floor, and a faint blue glow from residual radiation illuminates the space from within. The building is recognizable but irrecoverable.
The famous exposed red beams, Lina Bo Bardi's most iconic gesture, are fractured at mid-span, collapsing toward the interior. The glass walls have imploded inward.
Still 02
The Broken
Reactor
The last shot of the film: the broken nuclear reactor that caused it, still glowing in the radioactive fog beneath the ruin.
Still 03
Aerial
Reclaimed
An aerial view of the MASP ruins after a nuclear event. The structural skeleton of the building remains partially intact, reclaimed by overgrowth, while radioactive residue marks the ground around it. The ruin is not accidental but designed: every element of decay was choreographed to reveal how the building would fail.
Still 04
Exterior
Frozen Mid-Fall
The exterior of the ruin at ground level. Vegetation has overtaken the site while the building's façade tilts at the angle of impact, frozen mid-collapse. The green glow of radioactive contamination reads against the darkness, making the cause of the catastrophe legible without depicting it directly.
Structural Logic of Decay
How a Building
Chooses to Fail
The MASP's structural system, two red beams spanning 74 meters with no intermediate supports, makes its failure mode legible.
This structural logic informed every decision in the rendering: where the glass breaks, where the beams crack, how far the floor descends. The ruin is an argument about structural honesty: the MASP's architecture always revealed its own vulnerability, and the ruin simply makes that legible.