Mosaic: The Building

The building was a long-forgotten memory, clinging to an otherwise quiet, modern street filled with structures of steel, glass, concrete and ambition. A single block from the bustling central boulevard, where people came and go, it had stood, immutable.

Immune to the changing fashions and architectural trends, its unknown custodians bothered not to concern themselves with displayed Christmas lights. No acknowledgement of the changing seasons. For a century, or more; it watched.

Unlike its contemporaries, adorned with plaques, ceremony, and pomp – no inscription was found about long dead dignitaries laying a founding stone. It didn’t have a grand opening, or a ribbon cutting ceremony. No evidence of such events could be found. Had its history been erased, or did it simply not exist? Did it even matter at all?

It was just a building – and that was perhaps the most unsettling thing about it. Unrecognised. It was entirely unremarkable, to the point of being unseen, so unnoticed by the generations who had loved and lost in the city. It seemed lost to time. People passed without a second glance.

There were no signs, no tours, no opening hours – not even a street number to mark it a place in the world. It possessed an aura of mystery, and a thick veneer of dust, muting the once gleaming stone that made up its walls.

The stone walls, laid by hands long turned to dust, sat below a layer of filth. Metal bars caged the filthy windows, obscuring whatever lay within. Faint tracings of fingerprints eager to leave a mark upon the surface waited for a new layer of grime to settle and erase their presence.

Almost swallowed by the unrelenting tide of progress, it defied the invasion of steel and glass. On the left, dwarfed by a towering, multi-tenanted office building housing corporate up starts that no one had heard of or would hear of; the structure didn’t care about their quarterly reports, or when they would file for bankruptcy in the coming years. The building sat beyond these mundane, cycles. It belonged to long history.

On the right, the infrastructure of the city, hidden behind a concrete façade made to look like something other than a multi-level car park. Power lines, surveillance, sewer vents, a small electrical substation encased in metal on a slab of concrete beside the commerce actuated boom gates. They sat closed.

The unremarkable building sat in the in between. It wasn’t even bothered by the nests of birds. Even they didn’t seem to see it as they flew about the streets, looking for scraps of discarded food.

Closer inspections of its stones revealed intricate, natural textures, patterns that the eye manufactured, and masterful craftsmanship. Two things suggested that the building had any presence in the today, the only vestige of technology: A tiny hole, behind which the sensor of a camera sat, and the muted glow of a LED, embedded in the flush, vertical paneling of the door, waiting for an access pass no one seemed to hold.

To the community, the building had no known purpose. Several curious art students had once set up a camera to observe the only visible entrance of the structure. They captured no comings, no goings. They were asked to leave by unknown authorities.

There was no visible water meter, no electrical box to evidence the building’s consumption. There was no external hum of an electrical substation, or the whining of a pump. The building sat, apparently purposeless. Stone, after all, made no sound.