The Pyramids Project (WIP)

2024 - Ongoing

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Photographed across Britain, The Pyramids Project explores postmodern pyramidal buildings as monuments to a utopian vision. Constructed during the 1980s and 1990s, these structures now reveal their latent mythology, exposing how echoes of ideology, mysticism, and imperialism became embedded in retail parks, finance zones, and leisure spaces.

The pyramid — a form long associated with permanence, transcendence, and civilisational power — was imported from Egypt into British imperial culture, where it became a tool of ideological projection. Once sacred geometry, it was reconfigured into a signifier of dominance. In late twentieth-century Britain, this symbolism was revived and flattened within a neoliberal landscape, materialising as cinemas, shopping centres, bingo halls, and banks. Though privately constructed, these buildings served as totems to the promises of trickle-down economics in a post-industrial landscape. Severed from their historical origins yet saturated with mythic resonance, they offer the illusion of progress — bridging fantasy with consumer spectacle.

This series assembles a constellation of architectural fragments in an effort to make sense of the recent past and the abstract present. These structures are not visual curiosities; they are silent markers of a broader cultural condition in which dormant ideologies reassert themselves under new guises. By isolating and recontextualising these forms, the work uses photography and architecture as tools of inquiry — mapping how empire, fantasy, and economic myth are preserved, revived, and reanimated in everyday built environments.

JJ Helliker