Gevel van de Lakenhalle te Ieper before 1881

Curator: Immediately striking, isn't it? The composition directs the eye upward, held together by these rigorous diagonals meeting the verticality of the adjacent buildings and the central chimney stack. Editor: Yes, it's oppressive. I feel closed in, surrounded by labour, by materials accumulated through… who knows what processes. You can practically smell the coal smoke. Curator: I see you are experiencing that contrast, too. Well, what you are observing is a photographic print entitled "Gevel van de Lakenhalle te Ieper", or "Facade of the Cloth Hall in Ypres," created anonymously, sometime before 1881. Editor: "Anonymous," of course. These monumental buildings rise from the hands of countless forgotten workers. I wonder about their wages, their safety... The unseen people who quarried and raised those stones. What of their lives spent under this dominating facade? Curator: An excellent question. What dominates here are the planes, the starkness, punctuated by small regular windows, offset by the intricacy of the great peaked window design. The repetitive rectangles ground the overall romantic impression of the spire-like quality of the architecture. Editor: Romantic for whom? Consider the cloth hall's function: a center of trade, power, wealth accumulated through the wool industry, the cloth woven by other anonymous hands in cramped workshops, no doubt. This is architecture that materially represents class and social structures. Curator: Materially, perhaps. But also symbolically. Notice how the photographer uses light and shadow to articulate the building’s components, transforming base materiality into soaring transcendence. It is an apotheosis rendered in stone, wood, and glass. Editor: While I admire the architectural ingenuity of the hall, the sheer scale evokes the hierarchies embedded within its construction and ongoing upkeep. Curator: I find it remarkable how a mere facade encapsulates such diverging viewpoints—formal structure, material conditions, history, ideology! Editor: Indeed, it reveals how differently we value and interpret the labor ingrained in such structures. An intriguing meditation, ultimately, on seeing and believing.