There's a view expressed by the eminent Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, which I take to be a fairly standard ideal in documentary architectural photography: namely, "to make a building understandable to someone who has not been to visit it." In the example Wall discusses – his photograph of the Dominus Winery in California, by Herzog & de Meuron – he sought to convey the relationship of the building's form, materials and colour to those of the land and the highly structured layout of the vineyard. (See An interview with Jeff Wall by Philip Ursprung in Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History Lars Müller, 2005)

Sometimes I may aim at such an outcome in my photography. However, in this series my interest is in seeing a character – an emotional mood, feeling, or posture – in the building, possibly one which may not be readily apparent to those who visit it. The specific character in question is unique to the photograph: some buildings conveying a markedly different mood or posture when seen from different angles and in different lighting conditions. Such character that interests me ranges from the sublime to the spiky, from the serene to the erotic.