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Manchester — Arndale Glass and a Collapsed Ceiling, 2019

Three frames from a single Manchester day — the glass arch of the Corporation Street Bridge and the barrel-vaulted roof inside the Arndale, set against a collapsed ceiling in a hostel room. The rebuilt city's polished public glass and a private bit of falling-apart, kept together for the contrast.

A semicircular arch frames the entrance to a geodesic glass tunnel in Manchester, the triangulated steel structure stretching overhead as visitors and a stroller move through the covered walkway. The warm wooden boardwalk runs the full length of the frame, pulling the eye toward the group gathered at the far end. Architecture this precise doesn't ask to be decorated — the geometry does the work, and the people inside give it honest scale.

Decades of moisture have worked their way into the timber at this door frame junction — the wood split apart, the plaster crumbling away in layers, paint peeling back to reveal each era of repair underneath. The ornate pressed-ceiling moulding overhead sits intact and freshly white, indifferent to the collapse happening just below it. Structural failure and decorative persistence in one frame.

A curved steel-and-glass roof fills the frame from below, its concentric ribs radiating outward in tight geometric progression. Pendant spot-lamp clusters hang at intervals across the grid, pulling the eye toward the overcast sky diffused through the glazing above. The structure carries the geometry of engineering as much as architecture — every rib and cable junction a visible decision, not a decorative flourish.