There’s a peculiar kind of clarity that only reveals itself when a building is caught mid-transformation, stripped to its core, paused between memory and intent. Photographing The Post Building during construction was to engage with that rarest of architectural conditions: a moment where time, structure, and form are uncoupled from function, and the building speaks solely in its own language of geometry and material.
The retained frame, massive, unrepentant, stubbornly present, the exoskeleton of a machine long since silenced. But this wasn’t ruin; it was progress. The intersection between a past and a present. Every collision of beam and column created a cadence, a visual syncopation that brought to mind not the heroic steel frames of Manhattan, but something more abstracted. I found myself instinctively reaching for compositional strategies not drawn from architecture at all, but from the visual disciplines of early 20th-century abstraction.
At times, I could swear the scaffolding and shored-up concrete slabs were channeling Theo van Doesburg or Bart van der Leck, not through direct reference, but through an underlying affinity: a mutual interest in composition and harmony. The structural grid became a composition of interrupted horizontals and skewed verticals, often offset by sudden voids and shafts of white light that made the exposed concrete glow, momentarily, like brushed chalk.
The visual complexity of the site, its scaffolding, its cranes, its exposed systems, wasn’t a hindrance. It was liberation. I approached it the way I imagine Georges Vantongerloo might have approached space, as a matrix of relational tensions. This is not photography of architecture as object, they were observations of tensions in alignment, edge, mass, and void.
Think of Josef Albers’s early Homage to the Square works, where perception is shaped not by colour alone but by proximity, by the hard-edged confrontation of tone and form. Concrete floorplates floated above steel like overlapping planes in a Ilya Bolotowsky painting, where spatial logic is a matter of opposition and rhythm and geometry.
Even in this incomplete state, the building refused to be static. There was always something shifting: a change in tone, a gesture of reflected light. This transience generates tones that shift, never entirely sure, never fixed and whose quiet complexities reveal themselves only through careful, prolonged observation. The Post Building, stripped of signage, uninhabited, unresolved, offered a universe of variation.
In this way, the act of photographing it became not documentation, but interpretation. To find abstraction in the real, and order in the seemingly incidental. These frames were not images of a building becoming itself. They were images of a building that, for a fleeting moment, was nothing but structure, space, and potential.
