Pancho Saula Spanish, b. 3/10/1972

A small building stands alone on flat pale sand. It is made entirely of sticks: uprights driven into the ground, horizontals lashed across them, and a run of diagonal bracing along the top that leaves a row of open triangles where a roof should be. There are no walls. There is no roof. Loose reeds are heaped along the base and scattered out across the sand around it. Two or three pale stones sit at one side. The sky is empty and the sun is high enough that almost nothing casts a shadow.

Everything about it is the sign of a house without being one. It has a footprint, a ridge, a doorway, an inside and an outside. It provides nothing whatever. You could stand in the middle of it at midday and be exactly as hot as you were before you went in. The frame is the entire argument, and the argument is that a shape can be complete and still be of no use at all.

It is called My Dream, which turns the joke around. Not the finished thing but the frame of it. Not the shelter but the drawing of a shelter, left standing in the open where the wind can get at it. Somebody built this and then either ran out of reeds or ran out of reasons and walked away. The photograph is very calm about that. It gives the structure the middle of the square, the full light of the day and nothing at all to compete with, and lets it be what it is, which is a good idea that stopped.