for sale: mausoleum, used
{ getting crushed by it is a rite of passage, Iris Yaun, 2026 }
In 1983, the industrial chemical titan Union Carbide commissioned and built a gleaming modernist headquarters hidden between ridges in the hills of Danbury, Connecticut, officially known as the Union Carbide Corporate Center.
This unusually shaped nerve center, with ten branching wings splaying out from two central parking structures, sat elevated above the surrounding landscape, obscured from public view.
{ Aerial photo ca. 1990; author unknown. }
The design was heralded by its architect, Kevin Roche, as a vessel for collaboration and innovation, the nature of which unspecified. In interviews about the design, Roche spoke of the intent of the structure using the same language with which a planned community might be described.
The utopianism and horizontality was farcical, given that this was a facility occluded from view in the hills of Fairfield county, only accessible to three percent of the 100,000 Union Carbide employees globally.
{ untitled, Iris Yaun, 2026 }
It was the early eighties. Neoliberalism was nascent, and cost-cutting, profit-maximizing business strategies and structures were proliferating with it. This was the peak of the physical corporation, and the hinge into the unraveling of a physically based economy in the metropole entirely as networked communications and transnational finance reframed the zeitgeist of production and material orchestration.
{ nowhen, nowhere, Iris Yaun, 2025 }
A year after moving into their Corporate Center, Union Carbide's Indian subcontinent subsidiary had a minor but concerning leak at its pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal. Lax regulations, transnational liability evasion, austere approaches to maintenance, and negligent strategy at all levels meant that Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal was approaching dereliction, bereft of numerous essential safety systems. A disaster was inevitable.
And yet, production had to go on—then push came to shove.
{ untitled, Iris Yaun, 2026 }
An aging tank of methyl isocyanate, an intermediary in their primary pesticide manufacturing process, leaked its liquid contents into the atmosphere. 40 metric tons of liquid MIC expanded into multiple millions of gallons of toxic, asphyxiating gas, heavier than air, and wafted across the landscape of Bhopal, India. Thousands died in their first minutes of exposure to the cloud of death. Thousands more in days. Hundreds of thousands lived through their poisoning, affected for the rest of their lives.
Condemnation rang from the Indian government. Union Carbide offered $5M for aid, rejected by the Indian government on account of how insulting a sum it was for the worst industrial disaster in history, and fought every attempt by the Indian government to collect the billions they fined Union Carbide.
No individuals were charged for their culpability for over twenty five years after the accident, and when they eventually were, not one of them were among the Americans orchestrating the neglect in the web of subsidiaries fragmenting the liability of the corporation.
Union Carbide's neglectfulness became their negation. Union Carbide left Danbury within two years of the disaster.
The snake without a head ceased its twitching, and was scavenged. The Corporate Center was released. Rapid downsizing and sale of Union Carbide assets and subsidiaries ensued. The company was largely liquidated, and the executives received severance and cashed in their equity and moved on through the revolving door into obscurity and luxurious retirement.
Accountability never came for a single person in the global leadership based in the United States.
DOW Chemical, who purchased the Union Carbide Corporation in the unwinding and sell-off, abjectly refused all calls to clean up the site and adjacent area. The disaster drags on.
The site of Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal has still, to this day over forty years later, not been remediated. Methyl isocyanate is not the only pollutant; after decades of sloppy industrial chemistry on the surface, groundwater in Bhopal registers mercury levels between 20,000 and 6,000,000 times the mean, and trichloroethane at fifty times the mean. Lead, mercury, DCM, 1,3,5-TCB, chloroform, and more show up in the breastmilk of nursing mothers.
There are victims of the Bhopal disaster still yet to be born, still yet to be conceived.
{ śūnyatā, Iris Yaun, 2021 }
The building still stands, all 2,100,000 square feet, but forty years later, it still hasn’t been of all that much use to anyone, not like it was planned to be. Roche's grand vision was a flash in the pan impelled by the disembodied daydreams of a machine too large to maintain itself.
Built for the present equivalent of $600M, this derelict, shuffled from one private equity or corporate real estate group to another every few years since, the most recent of which being for $18M.
{ nothing, everywhere, Iris Yaun, 2021 }
The opening notes of the Corporate Center were mass homicide by austerity and negligence, but for the statistical majority of its existence, the building has otherwise facilitated nothing for no one. Of late, it facilitates a modest amount of somethings for a few someones. The future explicitly asserted in its design never came to pass—and in a certain sense, it is good that this phase of Union Carbide went unmanifested—for the future implicit in the ideology of the design did, and millions have suffered for it.
{ spent shotgun shell, no bullet holes to be seen, Iris Yaun, 2026 }
In the evenings nowadays, the deer wander through. Rabbits hop and perhaps even coyotes chase. The leaves sprout and green and foliate and fall and compact and rot into soil under snow. All the while, the sun and stars and moon spin.
And nothing, nothing, nothing happens on the majority of its square footage. Functionally, it is a geologic formation. A strange aberration of concrete amidst the trees. A static monument, enclosing stillness inflected by the echoes of mass death. A tomb no one visits.
{ matrix multiplication is just birdsong in another register, Iris Yaun, 2025 }
If the purpose of something is what it actually does in the world, and not just what it is stated to do, then perhaps the Union Carbide Corporate Center at Danbury can be understood as an unmarked mausoleum to the victims, past, present, and future.
The Bhopal disaster did not happen; it was done.
{ stillborn future, Iris Yaun, 2026 }