Belgium
Vaults and Vacancies
A decade of short crossings into Belgium, and two ways a building can fall quiet. Antwerp Central under its iron-and-glass vault, a Mechelen nave, a belfry above a market square with one figure crossing it — and then the rooms the country stopped using: a stairwell buried in paper, an armchair left to its teddy bears, a shuttered institution still holding its brick arches behind the graffiti.
Cathedral gold and Beaux-Arts grandeur against damp plaster and rust; ordered, then unravelling.
