The Blue Kettle Room. The name alone evokes industrial archaeology—the massive kettles where Procter & Gamble manufactured soap for generations, the blue of the vessels or the sky reflected through industrial windows, the room where workers tended the processes that produced household products consumed across America.

By 1999, the Baltimore P&G plant was being transformed. The manufacturing had stopped; the building was becoming something else. Struevers Bros., Eccles & Rouse, a development firm pioneering the adaptive reuse of industrial buildings, was converting the complex into lofts, offices, and commercial space. The Blue Kettle Room would soon house residents or businesses, its industrial purpose preserved only in memory and photographs.

Masumi documented the space at this precise moment of transition—after manufacturing ended but before conversion was complete. Her photograph serves as industrial archaeology, preserving the physical evidence of what happened in this room for decades before it becomes unrecognizable.

This is one of three related commissions from the P&G conversion project. Together they document a building caught between identities: no longer a factory, not yet apartments. The developers understood that adaptive reuse involved cultural preservation as well as physical renovation. Masumi’s work ensures that even as the building gains new life, its history remains visible.