My best guess was that the building was an early Brutalist design, probably from the immediate postwar era of the 1950s. It was all concrete and rebar, right angles and no ornamentation, from an era when form followed function for expediency as much as ideology.

It was also being destroyed from within by a growing tree, one that looked to be about 50 years old itself. The tree, which had sprouted through a shattered window, had also broken through three walls and had sent runners or shoots in nearly every direction, seemingly dead-set on replacing every last vestige of the ugly concrete structure with its own wood.

“That tree has opinions,” I said. “Architectural opinions.”

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