Industry was supposed to be temporary.

A machine built for a purpose long forgotten, still standing in the afternoon light like a monument to someone's certainty.

I have always liked places like this.

Factories, docks, rail yards, warehouses.

Not because they are beautiful.

Because they remind me that entire worlds can disappear while the walls remain.

Someone once knew exactly what this did.

Someone worried about deadlines, maintenance, production targets, budgets.

Now it sits here, rusting into abstraction.

A giant orange question mark left behind by history.

Błękitny Wieżowiec (the Blue Skyscraper), Warsaw. This massive, mirrored tower is on a prominent intersection called Plac Bankowy (Bank Place), and on the other side of its bulky, stepped-pyramid base is the single-block long Tłomackie (to the left of the building in the second photo). It was this little street, once a large formal square, that was the address of the site’s previous structure, the magnificently palatial Great Synagogue of Warsaw, one of the largest and grandest Jewish temples in the world. As a final act of annihilation at the conclusion of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, the SS dynamited the building. I saw this tower earlier in the day, the MetLife sign in the distance, and as I was researching the sites and contours of the Ghetto, I was haunted to discover this history, even more so when later I passed by this reflective office building which seems to have no reference to, or acknowledgment of, its sacred predecessor. And I was particularly awed to learn that I just happened to be walking around this glossy, oblivious commercial successor on the 76th anniversary of the spring morning that the Nazis detonated the charges. It seemed to be an almost Sebaldian coincidence.