Houses that are no longer there...

I went back to the demolition work at the former McEwan's brewery just along the canal. I'm still fascinated by the great 'pincer' machines picking away at the building and slowly but surely bringing it down to the ground, leaving in their wake neat piles of rubble, metal and other materials.

The tiles on the right hand side remind me of a passage in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke:
"They were houses that no longer existed. Houses that were torn down from top to bottom. What was there was the other houses, the ones that had stood along side them, tall neighboring houses. They were obviously in danger of collapsing after everything next to them had been removed, for a whole framework of long tarred poles was rammed aslant between the ground of the rubble-strewn lot and the exposed wall [...] But most unforgettable of all were the walls themselves. The stubborn life of these rooms had not let itself be trampled out. It was still there; it clung to the nails that had been left, it stood on the remaining handsbreadth of flooring, it crouched under the corner joints where there was still a little bit of interior. One could see that it was in the paint, which, year by year, it has slowly altered: blue into moldy green, green into grey, and yellow into an old, stale rotting white. But it was also in the spots that had kept fresher, behind mirrors, pictures, and wardrobes; for it had drawn and redrawn their contours, and had been with spiders and dust even in these hidden places that now lay bared. It was in every flayed strip, it was in the samp blisters at the lower edges of the wallpapers; it wavered in the torn-off shreds, and sweated out the foul parches that had come into being long ago. And from these walls once blue and green and yellow, which were framed by the fracture-tracks of the demolished partitions, the breath of these lives stood out - the clammy, sluggish, musty breath, which no wind had yet scattered."
(Rainer Maria Rilke, THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE, trans M.D. Herter Norton, New York: Capricorn, 1958: 46-47)

The quote is a bit long and doesn't apply to a brewery and I'm yet to find the perfect blip to illustrate this quote but I've always been fascinated by the way we can see a bit of what happened in people's houses when they are demolished, the different colours on the walls, a half mantlepiece still clinging to the former joining now outside wall. If I come across the perfect blip for this quote I'll quote again. My project is to then superimpose the quote onto a more successful blip of inhabited/now demolished houses and to hang it on the wall.