In the public imaginary, skyscrapers represent something like the pinnacle of architecture. Cities compete to have the tallest. The most iconic become keychains. Tourists wait for hours—and forfeit cash—to climb to their tops. But according to John Southern of Urban Operations, there is something deeply sinister about the skyscraper and its role in the contemporary city.

“If the early modernist skyscraper proposals of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were attempts at utopian urbanity and aesthetic prowess, then today’s towers reflect a darker, more nihilistic attitude toward spatial democracy,” writes Southern in a text accompanying his new exhibit Hot on the Heels of Love: Sensational Speculations, which opens this Saturday at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles.

“Packed with every experience and function, and produced in almost every shape and material finish imaginable, the contemporary skyscraper has become a disaffected breeding ground for neoliberal proposals, which reject the optimism of architectures postwar engagement with egalitarian social reforms.”

The exhibition comprises five “polemical stories” about the role of the modernist skyscraper in late capitalism. The works attempt to illustrate the contradictions between the skyscraper’s “seductive” image and the darker reality of its role in the city. “The result is a tactical fiction, which is not an escape from the psychological terrors of the post-9/11 metropolis, but instead a mirror held up to society and writ large,” writes Southern.

Don’t miss the opening of Hot on the Heels of Love: Sensational Speculations Saturday, November 5 from 6 PM - 10 PM. Jai & Jai Gallery is located at 648 N. Spring St. in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. For more information, click here.