La manufactura de la muerte

In 1896, at age thirty-five, Henry Howard Holmes, America's first serial killer, pleaded guilty to dozens of crimes (historians think there were hundreds, nearly all of them perpetrated against women). To carry them out, he built a hotel in Chicago equipped with the latest technological innovations. That colossal building, adjoining one of the most sophisticated slaughterhouses in the world, was inspired by it, but notably improving it. It was a factory of death, a great architectural machine that managed the entire process: the preparation of the slaughter, the isolation of the victim, the murder itself, and the disposal of the corpse. That hotel was a masterpiece of "domestic design", a system that, although it is hard to admit, fits perfectly into the functionalist project of modern art and the productivist destiny to which our society adheres.