A white balcony band runs across Metro Tower, stops against the dark facade, then begins again higher up. I followed that interruption up the building and found the same move repeating in different forms. The tower is built from repetition, but it refuses the comfort of a normal stacked grid. Horizontal lines wrap around the cylindrical body, vertical strips cut through them, and the pattern changes just before it becomes predictable. What begins as a simple black-and-white system keeps breaking its own rhythm.
Exposure: 1/250 sec | ISO: 160 | Aperture: f/13 | Focal Length: 44 mm | © amir2000.nl
Against Ramat Gan around it, that refusal becomes more interesting. The surrounding blocks are compact and rectilinear, with flat rooflines and familiar window grids. Metro Tower follows a different geometry. Its height is obvious, but height is not the part that holds the building together. The stronger contrast is between the city's mostly straight forms and a tower whose surface keeps bending the grid around a curved body. A horizontal band can run for several bays, disappear, then return at a different level. A vertical line may connect floors that the neighbouring bands seem determined to keep separate.
Exposure: 1/250 sec | ISO: 160 | Aperture: f/13 | Focal Length: 24 mm | © amir2000.nl
Exposure: 1/250 sec | ISO: 160 | Aperture: f/13 | Focal Length: 26 mm | © amir2000.nl
I tried to follow the facade as if it were a diagram. That worked for a few floors, then one line ended while another picked up somewhere above or beside it. The dark cladding keeps the windows in a quieter layer, while the projecting white balcony edges do most of the movement. From the lower blocks around it, Metro Tower feels less like a tower divided neatly into storeys and more like one continuous surface being drawn upward. The city gives me familiar reference points, rooflines, windows and horizontal slabs, but the tower keeps refusing to line up with them for long.
That refusal kept changing the task. Each band seems close to completing a simple route around the building, yet the next interruption sends me somewhere else. The repetition is controlled enough to establish a system, but irregular enough that I could not reduce it to one rule. I stopped trying to count floors and started tracing connections instead: where a horizontal run becomes vertical, where a strip dies against the dark facade, where another takes over. A normal high-rise question about levels had become a question about how those levels could be made deliberately difficult to separate.
Exposure: 1/5000 sec | ISO: 125 | Aperture: F2.8 | Focal Length: 35 mm | © amir2000.nl
At the top, the broken bands finally stop. They give way to a clean circular crown around the roof. After a full height of interrupted lines, that ring is almost severe in its clarity. One uninterrupted circle sits above a facade built from stops, turns and reconnecting bands.
Architecture gallery | Architecture Photography posts
Amir
Photographer, Builder, Dreamer
amir2000.nl
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!