Beautiful City — Empty City
Leonid Furmanksy
March 19 – May 14, 2026
Opening Reception: March 26, 2026 | 6-8pm
About the Exhibition
Beautiful City—Empty City showcases photographs made by the Austin-based photographer Leonid Furmansky. Selected images largely depict the glassy, gridded surfaces of high-rises in downtown Houston.
Most of the photographs do not capture the entirety of their subjects. Instead, the frames are cropped into bottoms, middles, and tops and focus on repetitious facade elements. A handful are full-building portraits or collapse the facades of three adjacent towers together.
Except for two photographs of towers further west along Buffalo Bayou, the images showcase buildings in downtown, ringed (for now) by highways. Furmansky’s subjects were mostly designed by leading architects and built in the quarter century between 1962 and 1987, with two outliers. This work documents the remnants of Houston’s boomiest decades, where oil and gas returns prompted the commissioning of dedicated structures for Shell, Pennzoil, and Humble Oil (later Exxon and ExxonMobil), though there are also buildings named for financial companies along with generic office towers.
These images feel forlorn, brooding, illicit, even sublime, which is intentional: Furmansky often worked at night, shooting from parking garages or elevated vantages accessed with varying degrees of legality. He also made the most of the city’s fog, most powerfully seen in a shot of the Humble-Exxon Building wrapped in mist.
These images invite viewers to see the city in a new way. They prompt appreciation for the quality of Houston’s architecture while raising questions about the systems and economies that finance and maintain it. What operations generated the money to build these monuments? Every new building requires matter mined elsewhere on the planet; what does downtown Houston’s carbon footprint look like?
Nearly all of Furmansky’s photographs were made during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. With its central business district further hollowed out by remote work, the city became an empty, evocative canvas for exploration. The vacant, frozen shots are infused with feeling of isolation. Some people can be discovered, but they disappear within the city’s canyons. Still, there are signs of life. The lights are on; is anybody home?
The exhibition is curated by Jack Murphy, Editor in Chief of The Architect’s Newspaper.
Leonid Furmanksy (American, born 1989 in Odessa, Ukraine, based in Austin, Texas) is an architectural photographer who explores the built environment and the ways architecture shapes how we live. His work spans commissioned projects and editorial assignments, combining clear visual storytelling with a strong sense of place. Furmansky was named one of ArchDaily’s Top 25 Emerging Photographers representing the United States and was featured in AN Interior’s Future of Vision. He earned a degree in Photography from the Photography + Visual Media Program at ACC.
His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Divisare, Houston Cite, Glasstire, Architects Newspaper, AN Interior, Texas Architect, Dwell, Architectural Record, Dezeen, Apalmanac, East Side Magazine, Austin Home, PaperCity, Tribeza, and ArchDaily. Outside of commissioned work, Leonid enjoys documenting rural landscapes and densely populated cities, and can often be found riding BMX with friends.
