Massive steel cylinders, twenty to fifty feet tall, designed to hold tens of thousands of gallons of the raw materials and processed substances that became household soap. Coconut oil from the Pacific. Palm oil from Southeast Asia. Animal fats from rendering plants. Caustic soda. Fragrances. The industrial chemistry of cleanliness, scaled to serve millions of American consumers.

This is the largest of Masumi’s three P&G Baltimore commissions—over seven feet across—matching the monumental scale of its subject. The tanks dominated the facility’s skyline, the most visible evidence of industrial processes happening inside. Their sheer bulk announced what this place was: not delicate manufacturing but heavy industry, built to move materials by the ton.

By 1999, the tanks stood empty. The manufacturing had stopped; the building was becoming something else. But before conversion could proceed, these monuments to industrial capacity needed to be documented. They would likely be demolished—too bulky, too specialized for adaptive reuse—but their image would survive.

Masumi’s panorama preserves the visual impact of this infrastructure at the moment before it disappears. Industrial archaeology, capturing the physical evidence of how Americans made and consumed soap for generations, before the tanks come down and the lofts go up.