goodbye, Kell Hall

Kell Hall. I do not have the words to describe the fever dream that was one of GSU’s earliest buildings downtown. Some confusion between a parking garage and a collection of classrooms. I came to GSU as a freshman in 2016 and can still distinctly remember my first time ever finding myself trapped in Kell Hall, lost somewhere between endless ramps and claustrophobic hallways. Sometime in 2017, I began taking pictures of Kell Hall. I had no explicit reason behind it at the time. Perhaps the fear of letting such perverse geometry go unrecorded was enough to compel my interest.

In the years that followed, the upcoming plans for the destruction of Kell Hall slowly manifested themselves in its empty, barren laboratories and the loss of most power in the permanently darkened uppermost floor (save for the glowing exit lights). As the destruction neared, my tempo of documentation got more and more feverish. I remember many times walking the halls alone after hours, and I remember the times I brought friends to see inside, who couldn’t before quite seem to believe the stories I had told them about the winding ramps and inkblack uppermost floor.

Presented here are selections from across the entirety of my documentation of the final three years in the life of Kell Hall (2016-2019). In the pursuit of putting together this digital exhibition I am indebted massively to my colleagues at Underground Journal, Cayce Tiedeman and Rebecca Bates, who helped me share more than a handful of these shots in a section of our Fall 2019 issue.   

Alternate titles: Burn in Kell, Kell to Pay, and See You in Kell.

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the final months of Kell Hall captured in the reflections of the all-seeing mirror streetside on the science annex across the street.

if you got to experience wandering through Kell Hall and want to reminisce more, I highly recommend the Kell Hall Digital Preservation Project. 

Their site can be found here: https://exhibits.library.gsu.edu/kell/