The Uncle Sam Atrium

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Visual Nonfiction
Played: 7/15/26
Playtime: 5m

There is some art (if not MOST art) that only flowers into fullness when you understand its context. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a harsh fable of power corrupting until you have a deeper understanding of the Communist Revolution in Russia. The Last Waltz was the 1978 film of The Band’s final* live performance, a marathon concert with a stunning array of high wattage guest musicians showcasing an act whose connections to that era of music ran deep and wide. The concert was a powerful musical statement on its own, but it is made that much more powerful when the film dives into the career and personalities of the artists.

Of all the arts, perhaps architecture is the most bound by this dynamic. This makes some kind of sense. Of all the arts, architecture is the BIGGEST. It is an endeavor of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people creating something so outsized to human scale that its artistic statement can’t help but strive in proportion. It is bound by physics in a way few other arts are, its defiance of such a culmination of contemporary material science and static engineering. Simply CREATING something that large requires resources only possible on a grand scale, often limited to collective government. (And where not, that too becomes a remarkable aspect of its statement.) Beyond funding, land allocation and zoning must be navigated, deeply integrating politics and so the mores of the times into its bones. And the active creative span can stretch across decades if not centuries. With such a span, history inevitably leeches into the artistic statement as well.

“Wow, reviewer, you got all that from a 5-minute Ren’Py piece?” I mean, yeah. I don’t NORMALLY just sit around thinking up stuff like this. USA (wait, THAT’s the acronym for this???) is a contemplative piece experienced as a Visual Novel except Real. It starts by introducing us to the most time-bound of projects, a 1980’s vintage shopping mall now in deep decline. Then it jumps us backwards to expose the historical, political and social context of it, ultimately introducing the idea that at conception the COST of such endeavors are are no better understood than the ultimate VALUE of the completed piece. Both must be negotiated by history and society.

Translating art from one media to another is a fraught prospect. See also 2019’s Cats movie. USA is focused on the CONTEXT of its subject rather than trying to somehow recreate architecture in words and pictures. And yet, the words and (super evocative) pictures can’t help but tickle our brains and flesh out our appreciation. The building is not an UNinteresting piece, and its photographic presence alludes to that. USA is a piece as much about local government’s best if all-too-narrow intentions, what they are willing to pay for them, and the ultimate large scale crapshoot these things become. It becomes simultaneously a cautionary tale of ill-considered consequences and an almost nostalgic look at civic hubris.

I think its really cool that a work this short and focused generated all this noodling. Just don’t read those last two lines of the previous paragraph without context. That just makes me sad.

* ok in the music industry there is no such thing as ‘final,’ not even death. Final in its classic composition.