Tempelhof was conceived as an instrument of awe, a structure of such monumental scale that the individual within it would feel the full weight of their own insignificance; an effect which has proved more durable than any of the ideologies the building has since housed. These photographs address that persistence: human figures set against inhuman architecture, domestic detail within grandiose space and the contradictory layers of oppression, liberation and abandonment that have accumulated.

Built by Ernst Sagebiel between 1936 and 1941 to embody the monumental ambition of National Socialism, Tempelhof soon became a symbol of freedom during the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. The place through which Allied planes delivered supplies to a blockaded city, having served as a forced-labour weapons production site only years before. The series moves through its vacant spaces without conclusion; an intact palimpsest with the question of what freedom means in an empty space left open.