Rooftops: The Facade Nobody Designed for Us
The one side of a building that was never meant to be looked at.
A building has four faces made for the street and a fifth one made for the rain. Nobody chose its colour with a passerby in mind, which is why it ends up honest: tar and gravel, water tanks on legs, ventilation drums, a satellite dish aimed at a sky it cannot see. The tiles that do look composed are composed for drainage, and the pattern is a by-product of keeping water moving in one direction.
Seen from above, this becomes a kind of city inventory. Laundry lines mark where somebody lives rather than works; a painted number belongs to a helicopter, not a tenant; the rectangles of newer insulation sit on old roofs like patches on a coat. Drones made this layer visible in the last decade, and it has kept the awkward charm of a room photographed before anyone tidied it.
On a screen the appeal is the grid. Roofs read as flat shapes with clean edges and a limited palette, so icons land on them without a fight, each one looking like another small unit installed up there. It is a view that stays calm because nothing in it is facing you.
In this collection
