During the summers of 2017 and 2018, Karen Knorr was given carte blanche to photograph the building site of the disused Art-Deco department store in Paris, La Samaritaine. The resulting photographs, infused with playful fantasy and surrealism, were taken with a large format camera and transformed with solarization. They are accompanied by lines from Brecht's poem 'Questions from a Worker Who Reads'. These photographs record and document a labour in progress, yet the construction workers have exited and the building is built as if by magic. The work raises questions about architectural space and the reification of labour during the redesign of La Samaritaine by the Japanese architecture group Sanaa.