Timelines of Concrete

Brutalist architecture often carries an inherent tension within contemporary cities. Built for function, yet charged with emotion; monumental in scale, yet perceived as heavy; stripped down to reduce cost, yet exposing raw surfaces that make people uneasy. Timelines of Concrete documents these structures through photography, seeing them not only as visual forms but also as vessels that hold the passage of urban time. Their exposed concrete, weathered marks, and sharp geometric lines record the rise of ideals, their decline, and the city’s continuous process of renewal. Through long-exposure photography, I allow the sky to move while the buildings remain still. The drifting sky and the settled concrete reveal two different speeds of time that coexist within a single frame. Although Brutalism is often viewed as cold or oppressive, the camera reveals a restrained sense of poetry within it. Cantilevered volumes appear to float against logic, stair towers rise like sculptural forms, and the textures on their surfaces carry decades of weather, use, and abandonment. Each structure becomes a living relic, holding traces of those who built it, lived with it, and eventually forgot it. This series captures these buildings in the moment between past and future. They come from a generation shaped by utopian ideals that once imagined cities as more open, accessible, and democratic. Today many of these structures face demolition or transformation, and photography becomes an act of witnessing, not nostalgia. It is a way to acknowledge their place in urban history. These buildings are not ruins but containers of time, allowing the city’s history to continue flowing across their surfaces.