 "Sixteen Tons", the name of a popular song written in the late 1940s, referred to the amount of coal a miner was expected to load in a day, but in this context may refer to the amount of glass broken out through the installation, or de-installation, process.80,000 tons is the approximate weight of the entire building, and the debris that the demolition produced.On a basic level, the demolition of the prison, contracted out by the city government of Buenos Aires to the Argentine military, was the seed for the artwork.