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crawling with people, like insects in a hive, this tower was vacant: a void.
    The building had a profound effect upon my own work. The architectural designs upon which I was working for my firm gave me little satisfaction. My realised projects had consisted only of nondescript houses, public utilities and the updating of an unremarkable bus depot in the north of the country. I longed for the opportunity to work on a larger, grander scale, on some construction that would be appreciated, that would be seen from far away, my own pinnacle amongst the office towers scattered across the city. In idle moments I would sketch designs for the tower that I would build and invariably its lines echoed the empty building that dominated the view from my drawing board.
    I wanted so badly to wander around inside the building and I told myself that it was for the purposes of my pet architectural project. Yet perhaps it was really a fascination for solitude that drew me to it. Certainly I had been conscious of its appeal becoming stronger as fewer and fewer windows had been left lit in the evenings. So completely abandoned, it seemed to me a consummation of a terrible beauty. For what was it now but a vacuum, an oasis of nothing, where all else around it was but the maddening whirl of asinine human activity? I viewed it as a vertical desert, closed off from the outside, a region without the distractions of the commonplace. I did wonder for a while whether it would be feasible to employ the designs for my own tower in a radical refurbishment of the existing building, but in the end I resisted this idea. It was not just that my ego preferred the potential of an entirely new project; I also did not want to see the building changed. I was fascinated by the tower because of its very abandonment.
    Yet if it was my ambition to be the designer of a similar tower with the same starkness of design, a construction looming high above the teeming streets and framed by the sky, one whose very presence caused men’s views to be drawn upwards by its smooth lines and uncluttered simplicity, then it would make sense for me to see the original from the inside, to study it fully.
    A few days after the lights on that last occupied floor were extinguished, I attempted to gain entry. I finished at work and walked through the few streets that lay between my place of employment and the tower. It was a dark winter’s afternoon, even though it wasn’t late, and although I knew that my expedition was likely to end in failure, I needed to at least try to get into the building, if only for my own peace of mind.
    I finally stood at its base. The gigantic monolith seemed almost to blot out the sky. It was immediately obvious that I was not going to be able to get inside. The foyer had been boarded up and padlocked and the first two floors were protected by corrugated iron sheets. Higher up, the windows were completely dark. For a brief moment I fancied that I saw a pale, white face at one of them, but quickly realised that it must have been a trick of the early evening light. The whole building was obviously deserted.
    For a time I wandered aimlessly around its circumference and across the abandoned square in which it stood, with its concrete loggias and unused car park. In the end I gave up and made my way home to my apartment on the other side of the city.
    Almost every night for weeks afterwards I would dream of treading the lost corridors and empty offices of the tower, the canteens, stairways, storage rooms and lavatories. During my lunch hours at work I would make sketches of the tower, drawing its planes and angles and noting its few stark details. My interest in it was the cause of some curiosity in my work colleagues and several of them even asked to view the structure through the field glasses that I had bought in order to examine the building more closely. I felt some resentment at their interest: I had begun to regard the tower as my sole preserve. I alone could