Lived In

Everything else in this journal is empty. This one is the opposite, and I think it’s the more interesting building for it.

It stands at the end of a street, and “stands at the end” is doing some work — it closes the street the way a ridge closes a valley. The largest residential building in the city, too long to photograph from the front, so from the road you get a slab running away from you in perspective until the trees cut it off.

Then you get underneath it and look up, and the thing that makes it isn’t the size at all.

Fifty years of unauthorised repairs

The design gave everybody a balcony. Nobody kept one.

They have been glazed in with whatever glass was going that decade — clear, frosted, brown, green — or bricked up, or wrapped in corrugated sheet, or pushed out past the line of the facade on brackets, or grilled over and turned into a store cupboard. Air-conditioning boxes fill the gaps between. The result is a grid that’s still completely legible — the module is dead regular, the tuff and the concrete are exactly where the drawing put them — with fifty years of improvisation laid over the top of it, cell by cell, no two the same.

Planners hate this. I stood underneath it for a long time thinking it is the best thing about the building.

The plan is still there underneath. It just lost the argument, one balcony at a time.

Because the block is doing its job. There is washing out. There are plants on the ledges. There are shops in the ground floor and traffic at both ends and, at noon in August, the sound of a full building. Nobody is going to write about it, nobody is going to preserve it, and it is more successful than almost everything else I photographed on this trip.

I stayed outside and pointed the camera at the architecture. People live here. The facade is public and the rest of it isn’t.