Saint Louis

On a 1955 trip to St. Louis, John Szarkowski encountered this 19th-century building on the downtown corner of St. Charles Street and Memorial Drive. He was attracted to its large expanses of floor-to-ceiling glass made possible by its cast-iron facade. Few such examples remain in the St. Louis waterfront area, and the building in Szarkowski’s photograph was demolished during highway construction in the 1960s.

The understated elegance of the building’s design was matched by the quiet descriptiveness of this photograph. Szarkowski took the unusual step of framing the plane of the facade slightly off parallel with the camera, opening up space on the left, which pulls the viewer’s eye around the corner. He captured the subtle modulation of light—the shift in the glass bays from reflection to transparency that reveals the emptiness within. This emptiness foretold its imminent doom, which Szarkowski seemed to recognize in his sensitive portrayal.