Civic · Downtown, Richmond
Richmond City Hall
Exterior and interior photography of Richmond City Hall, the 1971 tower that held the title of Virginia's tallest building for four years.
City Hall is a grid, and the only way to photograph a grid honestly is to respect it. The tower is a deep white concrete lattice — every window set back inside its own square hood, hundreds of them stacked into a facade that changes completely as the sun moves across it. I framed it as a one-point composition looking straight up the face, so the pattern reads as pure rhythm: warm light on one plane, cool shadow in the recesses.
This was a December morning downtown, and there were red and green ornaments set out on the entrance steps for the holidays — a small human note at the base of something so relentlessly geometric. Above the doors, the round city seal is carved into the dark polished stone; “CITY HALL” sits quiet above it.
I also worked the corner as an abstract, where the concrete grid meets a hard blue sky and the cantilevered hoods throw a sawtooth of shadow down the building. That range — bright precast against deep sky, sunlit face against shaded reveals — is exactly what HDR is for, so I bracketed to keep both the crisp edges and the shadowed depth.
It was one of three downtown civic buildings I photographed that same December day.
More architectural photography, and the rest of the office work.