What happens when a city spends so much time becoming something else that construction itself becomes part of its identity? And when we photograph that transformation, are we documenting a temporary moment or the actual image of the city we now live in?
I was photographing KING Toronto while it was still under construction when this view caught my attention.
The CN Tower stands almost exactly as we expect it to. It is one of those structures that no longer needs an introduction. For many of us, it has become less a building than a coordinate a quick visual confirmation that this is Toronto.
But almost everything around it is changing.
In the foreground, an unfinished residential structure rises into the frame. Above it hangs the hook of a tower crane, disproportionately large against the distant skyline. Another crane cuts across the top of the photograph. For a moment, the familiar city seems surrounded by the machinery of the city replacing it.
Looking through the camera, I felt as though I was photographing two Torontos at the same time.
One is the city we have already memorized.
The other hasn’t completely arrived yet.
When the temporary becomes permanent
We usually think about construction as an interruption.
Fences go up. Streets become narrower. Cranes appear. Concrete structures remain exposed for months or years. Then eventually the hoarding disappears, landscaping goes in, people move in, and the building becomes part of the city.
Photography often participates in the same separation. There are photographs of architecture, and there are photographs of architecture under construction. One describes the finished object; the other documents the process.
But that distinction becomes less obvious when an entire city is continuously being rebuilt.
Toronto has been experiencing intense high-rise development and densification for years. Seen from above, cranes are no longer exceptional objects in the landscape. They have become part of its visual vocabulary.
That changes the way I think about a construction photograph.
Perhaps these images aren’t simply records of buildings waiting to be completed. Perhaps they are portraits of the city in its present condition.
The unfinished city may actually be the city we know.
Photographing forward
Architecture photography usually asks me to understand what is already there.
Where does the light move? How do different spaces connect? What did the architect intend to reveal or conceal?Where should the camera stand so the relationships between materials, volumes and circulation become readable? Construction photography creates another question.
What am I actually looking at before the life of the building has begun?
An unfinished residential building contains evidence of a future that hasn’t happened yet. Floors exist before apartments. Openings exist before windows are occupied. Terraces exist before someone puts a chair on them.
You can see the physical framework of future routines without seeing the routines themselves.
Someone will eventually wake up behind one of those openings. Someone will know exactly how the afternoon sun moves through a room that, in my photograph, doesn’t fully exist yet. Someone will look toward the same CN Tower from a perspective that currently belongs to construction workers, cranes and photographers.
This is where photographing architecture under construction becomes strangely close to photographing time.
The camera records what is physically in front of it, but the photograph keeps pointing toward something that isn’t there yet.
Buildings change the people between them
The future of a city isn’t only about what its skyline will look like.
Every new residential development introduces another set of relationships: between private space and public space, between density and privacy, between the building and the street, and between thousands of individual routines occurring close to one another.
Those relationships eventually become ordinary.
We adapt remarkably quickly to architecture.
A new tower may initially feel enormous. A few years later, we use it to give directions. A new development changes a street; eventually we struggle to remember what occupied the site before it. Views disappear, new ones open, shadows move, pedestrian patterns change, businesses arrive and the mental map of the neighbourhood adjusts.
Architecture becomes memory almost without announcing when the transition happened.
That is what makes this particular stage of a building interesting to me.
Nothing has settled yet.
The crane and the tower
When I look back at this photograph, my attention keeps moving between two objects.
The CN Tower is distant, complete and recognizable.
The crane hook is close, temporary and slightly absurd in scale.
One belongs to Toronto’s established image. The other exists specifically because that image is still being constructed.
I like that tension.
The photograph doesn’t tell us whether the Toronto being built will be better or worse than the Toronto already here. I don’t think a photograph can answer that, and I don’t think that’s the question I’m interested in asking.
What interests me is the much quieter realization that cities are never really finished.
We photograph landmarks as though they represent permanence. We memorize skylines. We associate certain buildings with home. But around those fixed points, another city is constantly being assembled.
Years from now, some of the unfinished structures in this photograph may feel completely ordinary. People may have memories attached to buildings that, at the moment I pressed the shutter, were still concrete slabs and exposed floors.
And perhaps another crane will be hanging somewhere beyond them.
The future city rarely arrives all at once.
We watch it being built until one day we realize we have already started calling it home.