Office Kabbalah
Photography & design: paula roush
Styling: Rebecca Davies
Model: Eleanor Turnbull
Hair: Hirokazu Endoo
Commissioned by: carpark magazine #13
Format: Photozine
Pages: 32
Dimensions: 20 × 14 cm
Printing: Black & white laser print
Paper: Corona Offset 120 gsm
Binding: Unbound with colophon insert
Publisher: msdm publications
Office Kabbalah was photographed inside Electric House, a Grade II listed building in the heart of East Croydon (London), during the period when it stood empty awaiting redevelopment.
The series traces the overlapping histories of a building shaped by two very different public functions. Designed by British architect Robert Atkinson between 1939 and 1942 as the Electricity Showrooms for the County Borough of Croydon, the building carries traces of an architectural language informed by symbolism, alchemy and metaphysical thinking. Decades later, the same interiors were remodelled into offices and interview rooms for the UK Border Agency, becoming associated with systems of migration control and bureaucratic administration.
Moving through abandoned offices, suspended furniture and emptied waiting rooms, the photographs explore how architecture accumulates political memory. Rather than documenting a building in transition, the photozine observes the residual presence of successive institutional lives, where modernist civic optimism and contemporary state bureaucracy briefly coexist before demolition and redevelopment.
