Railway Sheds, Marseilles

Muirhead Bone, a Scot who trained as an architect before he discovered printmaking, often showed buildings hidden under scaffoldings of construction or demolition. Bone’s city is continually changing: buildings rise and fall, their facades covered by structural skeletons, while railroads curve around and under the settled picturesque of the older European city. In his Railway Sheds, Marseilles, shed roofs and the receding bulk of a high retaining wall echo and oppose the exaggerated swing of tracks past older tenements. The striking curvilinear design suggests a new aesthetic of unadorned structure in motion.