What happens when a building designed to contain thousands of ordinary human moments doesn’t look human at all?
And why can architecture intended for living, at a certain stage of its construction, begin to resemble a city built for something [or someone] else?
While photographing KING Toronto under construction, I had a thought that stayed with me long after I landed the drone:
It looked less like a building being constructed for humans and more like one being constructed for robots.
It wasn’t meant as criticism of the architecture.
It was simply what the photograph made me feel.
Hundreds of future homes were in front of me, yet almost none of the visual evidence we associate with a home existed.
No curtains. No furniture. No plants on balconies. No warm windows. No people moving behind glass.
Instead, there were repetitive volumes, dark glass blocks, exposed concrete, empty openings and two enormous tower cranes standing above everything.
The building was intended for human life.
But at that moment, humanity hadn’t arrived yet.
A strange kind of Brutalism
There was something about the image that reminded me emotionally of Brutalism.
Not because KING is a Brutalist building. It isn’t.
Brutalism belongs to a specific architectural history, strongly associated with the mid-twentieth century and with an expressive use of structure, mass and materials—particularly exposed concrete. Applying that label casually to any large or severe-looking building would flatten what Brutalism actually was.
What I was responding to was something else.
It was the feeling of monumentality, repetition and uncompromising geometry.
Except here, that feeling wasn’t being produced by enormous masses of exposed concrete.
It was coming through glass.
That contradiction interested me.
The material is translucent, yet the building feels heavy.
The individual modules are relatively small, yet together they become monumental.
The facade can catch and transmit light, yet from this distance it appears almost black.
It felt simultaneously primitive and technologically advanced.
So while editing the photograph, I started giving this visual condition a name:
Post-Neo-Brutalism.
Not an architectural movement.
Not an academic category.
Just an invented photographic term for something I was struggling to describe: architecture that carries some of the visual force, repetition and monumentality I associate with Brutalism, but translated through contemporary materials, modular construction and a much more technological image of the city.
Maybe the term is wrong.
But sometimes naming a feeling is a useful way to begin looking at it.
From the individual home to the megastructure
There is another architectural memory hiding behind this photograph.
Looking at the stacking and stepping of residential volumes inevitably brings to mind a much earlier experiment in collective housing: Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 in Montreal.
The comparison shouldn’t be taken literally. KING and Habitat 67 were conceived in different periods, through different construction systems and in response to different urban, economic and architectural conditions.
But visually, there is an interesting conversation between them.
Both challenge the simple idea of the residential tower as a repetitive vertical extrusion. Instead, individual dwelling volumes participate in a larger three-dimensional composition.
Habitat 67 made that idea extraordinarily legible.
You could look at the whole complex and still imagine the individual home.
A concrete box remained a box someone inhabited.
King W residential produces a different visual experience for me, particularly from the air and particularly in this unfinished state.
The individual units begin to disappear into a much larger organism.
From this distance, I don’t immediately read apartments.
I read a system.
The architecture of a machine
That may be where the feeling of alienation enters.
The photograph contains an enormous amount of human effort, but almost no visible human presence.
The cranes are positioned above the structure like mechanical limbs. The repetitive facade behaves almost like pixels. Openings multiply according to a logic that is understandable architecturally but, from far away, becomes abstract.
Scale becomes difficult to judge.
You know intellectually that these openings correspond to rooms, terraces, corridors and future homes.
But the eye sees something else first.
A machine.
Or perhaps a motherboard.
A piece of infrastructure whose purpose hasn’t yet been explained.
Photography is particularly capable of producing this transformation because the camera can remove the clues that normally tell us how architecture should be understood.
Take away the person standing beside a wall and the wall loses its scale.
Take away furniture and a room loses part of its function.
Take away vegetation, movement, signage, belongings and light from occupied windows, and residential architecture can become pure geometry.
The building hasn’t become less human.
The photograph has temporarily removed the evidence of humanity.
Before life softens architecture
And this is where my first reaction to the building starts to become complicated.
KING is not supposed to remain the way it appears in this photograph.
The completed development incorporates extensive planted terraces and landscaping into its architecture. People will occupy these spaces. Furniture will appear behind windows. Balconies will acquire objects that were never included in an architectural drawing.
A perfectly controlled facade will slowly collect evidence of uncontrolled life.
A chair will be left in the wrong place.
Plants will grow unevenly.
One apartment will have warm light while the one beside it is dark.
Someone will leave something on a balcony that visually ruins the repetition I found so fascinating from the drone.
And all of this will probably make the architecture feel more human.
That raises a possibility I hadn’t considered while shooting it.
Maybe I wasn’t photographing an inhuman future at all.
Maybe I was photographing architecture before humanity gets inserted into it.
The unfinished building as an alien object
Finished architecture usually explains itself to us through use.
A door opens and someone walks through it.
A terrace contains a table.
A lobby contains people waiting.
A window glows at night.
Construction removes that layer of explanation.
What remains is structure, material and intention.
Perhaps that is why unfinished buildings can feel so alien. They occupy human scale without yet containing human behaviour.
They are designed around bodies that haven’t arrived.
In that sense, construction photography allows us to see architecture in a condition most people will never experience again once the project is completed.
There is a short period when a residential building physically exists but socially does not.
It has space, but no memories.
It has addresses, but no residents.
It has windows, but nobody looking out of them.
Future, memory, alienation
In the first photograph of this series, I found myself looking toward Toronto’s future.
In the second, I started thinking about how architecture enters our memory and eventually becomes part of the image we carry of a city.
This photograph seems to sit somewhere uncomfortable between those two ideas.
Before the future becomes familiar enough to become memory, there is a period when it can feel completely foreign.
Perhaps that is what alienation means here.
Not that the architecture rejects us.
Simply that we haven’t learned how to belong to it yet.
Every generation has probably looked at some version of its future city and wondered whether it had become too large, too dense, too mechanical or too different from the city it remembered.
Then people arrive.
They occupy it.
They modify it.
They complain about it.
They love parts of it.
They build memories inside it.
And eventually the strange building becomes the building beside the grocery store, the place where a friend lives, or the silhouette that tells someone they are almost home.
Maybe my invented Post-Neo-Brutalism exists only in this brief moment before that happens.
A visual condition where contemporary residential architecture is stripped of inhabitants and reduced to repetition, material, infrastructure and scale.
For now, the cranes remain above it.
The windows are mostly empty.
The greenery has not yet softened the geometry.
And from where I was photographing it, the future looked strangely complete before human life had even begun.