Originally Published: 2010-02-14

Abandonment and decay are not the happiest subjects but they are nonetheless recurring themes in a new exhibit of architectural photography currently showing at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel.
Building Storeys 2010: A Photo Exhibit of Toronto’s Industrial Past is a document of the city’s vast array of factory and facility buildings constructed as far back as a century ago. Though the show’s more than 70 photos contain not a single person, they do hint at lives lived in local industrial spaces now abandoned.
The feelings that the show’s images evoke aren’t all bleak however; the seven Toronto and area photographers whose work comprises Building Storeys 2010 manage to also highlight industrial spaces still in use – some of which could even be described as majestic. The show is a presentation of Heritage Toronto and local photography groups The Shadow Collective and DK Photo Group.
In the third and fourth floor hallways of the Gladstone that are currently doubling as exhibit space for the photography show, visitors will see striking images of formerly used Toronto buildings such as the Hearn Generating Station and the ominously named Wellington Destructor. The Hearn, still situated in the Port Lands, was half a century ago Canada’s largest thermal electric station and its original construction included structural steel, reinforced concrete slab floors and brick infill walls. Closed in 1994 over air pollution concerns, photographers Rob Dyke, Sean Galbraith, Mathew Merrett, Olena Sullivan, and Toni Wallachy capture the Hearn in a complex and ghostly former glory.
Despite its purpose as a municipal incinerator, Building Storeys 2010 points out that the Wellington Destructor, designed by architect G.W.F. Price in 1925, has a “classical grace,” with features such as parapets and arched and flat-headed windows. Currently listed in an inventory of heritage properties, the exhibit presents mostly forlorn images of the Destructor as detritus fills echoing empty spaces.

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