From Nuclear Power to Brutal Silence: Reginald Van de Velde’s Haunting Photographs of Abandoned Cooling Towers

In his strik­ing series Land­scapes With­in, Bel­gian pho­tog­ra­ph­er and urban explor­er Regi­nald Van de Velde turns his lens toward a sel­dom-seen side of post-indus­tri­al Europe: the mon­u­men­tal, cylin­dri­cal inte­ri­ors of aban­doned cool­ing tow­ers. Where oth­ers see dere­lic­tion, Van de Velde finds med­i­ta­tive beau­ty, archi­tec­tur­al poet­ry, and a chill­ing still­ness.

Each image in Land­scapes With­in cap­tures a sense of vast­ness that bor­ders on the sub­lime. Shot from the inside out, these tow­ers become mon­u­ments of entropy, struc­tures shaped by util­i­ty, now hol­lowed out by time. Stark lines and per­fect curves form bru­tal­ist com­po­si­tions that verge on the abstract. The ver­ti­cal flut­ing, the con­cen­tric plat­forms, the cen­tral drains, all are bathed in nat­ur­al light fil­ter­ing from above, giv­ing the images an almost spir­i­tu­al atmos­phere. There is no arti­fi­cial light­ing, no dig­i­tal enhance­ment; what you see is what remains.

“In a world that’s too chaot­ic and fast-paced I try to find soli­tude and peace­ful­ness,” Van de Velde explains. “For­got­ten places and remote loca­tions prove to be the per­fect oasis for such reflec­tion. I’m a chron­i­cler of for­got­ten mag­nif­i­cence, cap­tur­ing the beau­ty of bygone places.”

Modern Megaliths of a Forgotten Age

Cool­ing tow­ers are one of the most rec­og­niz­able yet mis­un­der­stood forms in the indus­tri­al land­scape. They were orig­i­nal­ly designed to cool water used in ther­mal ener­gy pro­duc­tion, often nuclear or coal-pow­ered, by expos­ing it to air in a tow­er­ing hyper­boloid shape. Iron­i­cal­ly, the very form designed for func­tion now appears as pure sculp­ture once stripped of pur­pose.

The loca­tions pho­tographed by Van de Velde span sev­er­al coun­tries, includ­ing Bel­gium, Ger­many, France, and the UK, many of them decom­mis­sioned in response to the Euro­pean Union’s shift­ing ener­gy poli­cies, which increas­ing­ly favor renew­ables over nuclear and fos­sil fuels. Some tow­ers have already been demol­ished; oth­ers await their fate. What’s strik­ing is how sim­i­lar many of them look, built on a stan­dard of bru­tal­ist effi­cien­cy but now unique in their decay, moss creep­ing up the bases, rust spread­ing across the grates, cracks and water stains reveal­ing time’s slow vio­lence. Mod­ern-day cas­tle tow­ers among the forests of Europe, await­ing a sim­i­lar­ly ruinous fate.

Indeed, Van de Velde ele­vates these rem­nants to the sta­tus of mod­ern ruins, akin to ancient Roman aque­ducts or Mayan tem­ples, except here, the ghosts are not of gods or lords of old, but of progress and pow­er. He treats these spaces with rev­er­ence, let­ting their silence speak vol­umes.

The Aesthetics of Stillness

Orig­i­nal­ly a trained graph­ic design­er, Van de Velde brings a pre­ci­sion and sym­me­try to his com­po­si­tions that feels almost math­e­mat­i­cal. His pho­tos are often tak­en from the tower’s cen­tral drain point, often look­ing upward toward the open vent, result­ing in an image that spi­rals upward like the eye of a cyclone. But while the visu­al impact is strong, it’s the emo­tion­al res­o­nance that lingers: each pho­to sug­gests a frozen moment in time, a place once roar­ing with heat and ener­gy, now reduced to qui­et breath and crum­bling skin.

There’s a psy­cho­log­i­cal dimen­sion as well. These inte­ri­ors become metaphors for inter­nal states: soli­tude, iso­la­tion, endurance. The silence inside them is not emp­ty but charged, like the after­math of a storm. In this way, Van de Velde’s work aligns with broad­er move­ments in urban explo­ration pho­tog­ra­phy, yet it stands apart for its restraint.

An Unlikely Beauty

Van de Velde’s career as an urban explor­er has tak­en him to hun­dreds of aban­doned loca­tions: hos­pi­tals, hotels, mil­i­tary bunkers, even defunct theme parks. But few struc­tures match the mon­u­men­tal­i­ty of cool­ing tow­ers. They are nei­ther quite archi­tec­ture nor land­scape, but some­thing in between: arti­fi­cial moun­tains with no sum­mit, no rooms, and no clear human scale.

And yet, despite their inac­ces­si­bil­i­ty and appar­ent monot­o­ny, Van de Velde’s lens trans­forms these sites into some­thing arrest­ing. The rep­e­ti­tion becomes rhythm. The con­crete becomes can­vas. The absence of life becomes the very thing that breathes.

For any­one inter­est­ed in indus­tri­al archae­ol­o­gy, bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture, envi­ron­men­tal com­men­tary, or pho­tog­ra­phy as a con­tem­pla­tive act, Land­scapes With­in offers more than images, it offers a por­tal. A way to think dif­fer­ent­ly about what we leave behind, and how silence can speak as pow­er­ful­ly as noise.