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appreciate the splendid starkness of its design and the desolation that it contained.
    I had always been an outsider in the profession. I worked alongside qualified architects who were university trained, but I was a mere technician. The fact that I did a comparable job meant nothing in terms of status or pay. Nevertheless, I had risen through the firm’s ranks and was now entrusted with overall control of some projects, although I was never given anything with any real scope for design. The moment I realised that the tower had become finally empty I began to neglect my proper work. But because I was considered such a useful employee it took quite some time before it was noticed that I was behind schedule and questions were asked.
     
    ***
     
    One afternoon a colleague who knew of my interest in the tower passed me a newspaper containing an advertisement for an art installation. I did not see the significance at first, but he pointed out that it was housed on the uppermost floors of my tower. The installation was temporarily closed but apparently due to reopen on the Friday of the following week. I had not been aware of its existence, although the installation, by the artist Eleazer Golmi, appeared to have been exhibited there for some undefined period. I recognised the name of the artist, of course, for he had also been the architect of the building that housed his installation.  
    On several occasions I had attempted to track the man down in order to express my interest in his designs, but he seemed no longer to work in the profession and had, effectively, ‘gone underground’ after some unspecified crisis many years ago. The few that knew of him had told me that he had been disillusioned by attacks on his work from both inside and outside the profession. Other architects of the 1960s had been thick-skinned enough to ignore criticism, but not Golmi.
    The advertised details of the installation left me with mixed feelings. The show was entitled ‘Mannequins in Aspects of Terror’ and promised, it was claimed, an audio-visual experience of an unsettling nature in which one would encounter ‘a universe of fear’. This didn’t sound like the Golmi that I had imagined. Some saw horror, it was true, in what his buildings had been allowed to become: grimy, decaying concrete hulks. But I saw them as they were first built: tall, proud visions of a noble future, reaching up to the heavens with pure, dynamic lines. Golmi was not to blame if the owners of his buildings had refused to maintain them and let them crumble.
    But why was he interested in terror, and unsettling people, and exploring fear? I came up with many theories in the long days before I was able to see the installation for myself. It seemed probable that Golmi would be exploring the horror of what other people had done to his glorious work.
    I kept a close eye on the top floor of the building, and hung around the padlocked doors for many hours in the hope of detecting the work that would, no doubt, be required for the reopening. But I saw nothing.
    At last the designated night came and I found that the tower’s foyer had indeed been reopened. The padlocks and the boards were gone, exposing the dark green windows on the ground floor. A single poster advertised the installation: it was rather gaudy, with a purple gothic script on a yellow background. At its centre was a grainy photograph of the architect and artist.
    At the time the photograph was taken Golmi must have been in his fifties. He had brylcreemed grey hair, a high forehead and dark eyes, one of which, the right, was considerably larger than the other. It gave the face an unfortunate, lop-sided appearance. His expression reminded me of the rigidity common to those early photographs where the subject had to sit perfectly still for several minutes while the camera shutter was left open.
    I stood back and once again gazed up at Golmi’s monolith. Was it possible to reconcile the utopian vision of his