At first glance, Gary Jensen's photographs could show an ice cave. Then a column, doorway or ceiling gives away the setting: these extraordinary frozen rooms were inside Chicago's former Fulton Market Cold Storage building. The ice softens the outlines of an industrial structure until familiar architectural features seem to belong to a different landscape altogether.
Refrigeration transformed an industrial interior
The building served refrigerated storage rather than exploration or tourism. Its freezing interiors were part of the city's commercial food trade, and Jensen photographed the accumulated ice before thawing and redevelopment. That history makes the images more interesting than an unexplained collection of strange white forms. A working purpose had created conditions that transformed the surfaces of otherwise recognisable rooms.
The exterior view brings the scale back into focus. Behind those walls was a very different environment from the surrounding streets. The archive’s interior time-lapse uploaded by Rick Kintigh records another part of the building’s transition.
Different origins can produce similar-looking ice
The photographs belong to the redevelopment period; they are not a claim that visitors can find these rooms still frozen today. Compare Mendenhall’s natural glacier interiors, or deliberately carved ice artworks. Similar-looking surfaces can have very different origins.
Gary Jensen's record before the thaw
The former facility was described in the contemporary account as a ten-storey building with decades of cold-storage use behind it. The proposed conversion introduced a very different occupation of the space, with bicycle-component company SRAM associated with new offices. The photographs belong to the transition before the thaw. They preserve an interior that would disappear as the building was prepared for another chapter, rather than advertise a frozen attraction that can still be visited.
Follow the straight lines in each image. The underlying columns and ceiling establish the building's geometry; the ice interrupts that order with rounded, hanging and uneven forms. An exterior photograph is useful alongside the interiors because it restores the ordinary city-building scale. The contrast is the story: an urban warehouse on the outside, an almost geological world within. Jensen's still photographs and the linked time-lapse offer complementary records, one giving time to examine the surfaces and the other showing the space through change. Neither requires calling the rooms a natural cavern to convey how unusual they were.
Sources, photography and further reading
Original feature and image attributions:
- Fulton Market Cold Storage Company
- Perkins + Will
- Gary Jensen
- Gary Jensen’s Frozen Scapes gallery
- Warehouse video on YouTube
- gapers block
- This is Colossal
- Firefighters Turn Massive Warehouse Blaze Into Ice!
- You Won’t Believe What This Videographer Captured Above The Chicago Skyline. It’s Electrifying.
- Lake Michigan’s Famous Frozen Lighthouses
- interior time-lapse uploaded by Rick Kintigh
- Mendenhall’s natural glacier interiors
- deliberately carved ice artworks
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