There is no one in the corridor. Shaded lamps hanging from the ceiling are lit at even intervals, and the gray concrete of the floor returns that light dimly. The right-hand wall is built of black frames and glass, and the lower half is covered with a translucent film that turns the inside a hazy blue. Only the exit sign at the end of the corridor remains red.
In the meeting room beyond the glass sit a long wooden table and mesh chairs. Through the window the windows of the brick building across the way are visible, and a few lights are on over there as well. The chairs have not been pushed back in toward the table. They are stopped in the position left by someone who sat down and then rose just as they were.
A space like this demands the same price whether people are in it or not. Lease contracts are bound by the year, and the air handling and the lighting run by the floor. The speed at which working patterns shift to a few days a week and the speed at which a building takes in that change are different. That gap makes offices something to keep up even while they stand empty.
On the floor concrete, grinding marks remain turning in circles, and near the baseboard a stain has spread faintly. On the aluminum rail beneath the glass wall a thin layer of dust has settled. In a corridor people walk through every day the surface would be worn down by footsteps and its sheen scattered unevenly, but here only the grain left by the vacuum runs straight and intact. Upkeep continues and only the wear has stopped.
The glass partition was originally a design meant to obtain openness and concentration at the same time. When the inside empties, the glass keeps only its dividing function, and the clouded film, in place of hiding the interior, softly covers the fact that there is nothing there. The clearest thing in the photograph is neither the desk nor the chairs, it is the light of a corridor no one has walked through.
