Buildings

at Night

Buildings

at Night

Frankfurt 2024

Harmonizing
Poetry & Structure‭

A Site-Specific Mural at The Union Complex‭ ‬Inspired by Debora Vogel's Poetic legacy

A mural at the Union Complex in Frankfurt built from Debora Vogel's Yiddish poem "Buildings at Night" (1926), painted across the building's vertical surface in nine languages: Yiddish, German, English, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Punjabi, Hindi, and Somali.

At the Union Complex in Frankfurt, a site-specific mural built from Debora Vogel's Yiddish poem "Buildings and Streets" (1926). Vogel wrote about buildings at night as bodies standing in the street, waiting. Some still longing, some having given up. Her words, fragmentary and geometric, are woven across the vertical surface of the wall in nine languages, the languages of the communities that move through this city: Yiddish, German, English, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Punjabi, Hindi, and Somali. The mural was made in dialogue with Michael Landes's architectural vision for the complex, its form growing directly from the building's surface, the poem woven into the structure itself.

Buildings at Night

Debora Vogel, Day Figures, Buildings and Streets, 1926
Translation from Yiddish: Anastasiya Lyubas

Night streets would be lost
and we would be abandoned
if not for the buildings.

They stand on the streets.
And, like us, perhaps wait
for a second body.

So you can compare them to bodies,
a gray building with red light inside
and the second gray building. With yellow light.

The first building is like
a transparent light body,
which can still long for something
that could have come but didn’t.

And the second building is
a robust body with sweet light kernels of longing
of thirty evenings a month filled with waiting,
a building, which has given up waiting.

And you still have someone to go to
in the bodiless glass city sphere.