A fortnight before America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq I spent a week inside the Pentagon. Granted wide-ranging access, I wandered the corridors, offices, war rooms and media centres with my 5x4 camera in tow.

The deliberate and painstaking photographs I produced show a building designed to configure and distribute power. Look at them long enough and they also reveal the hyper-functionalist mindset that devised this, the largest office building on earth. Yet, as the work also attests, behind this dream of machine-like efficiency lurks a fear of and even longing for disorder and death. In the empty folders discarded in one of the endless corridors. In the curtains only partially drawn across the ‘Top Secret’ invasion plans for Iraq. And in the photograph of a painting of a fighter-jet plunging towards a polished table, the very spot where, only 18 months before I took this picture, American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon.

In a curious mise en abyme two of these pictures were acquired by the US Department of State’s Art in Embassies programme and now hang in the American Mission to NATO in Brussels.