Architecture photography

Architecture photography

An old friend of mine from high school, David Lamb, does architectural photographer. I'm sure he could teach me a lot about the rules of that genre. I've noticed that buildings have been catching my eye more and more lately: the patterns, the light, the reflections in the windows, the size and shapes relative to the surroundings, etc.
Well, this post about this one picture is to form a segue between my street photography and a few posts about architecture photography as I now understand it. Here is a picture right out of the camera.

Why did I take it? Because I could; the two women were not looking my way but added an interesting contrast of curves to this cubist backdrop. Click!
I immediately picked up on the potential of the converging lines: sunlight dropping down in the top right corner and dark railing rising up at the bottom right. And I liked how the brownish-grays seemed to match. Now what was I going to do with my two unsuspecting models?

I decided to simplify things and make it only one. Single girl in the city. I blurred the background, gave her some clarity and saturation, and tried to maintain the converging lines.
"But she's walking out of the picture," you say.
Right. Don't want to break that rule (because there's no good reason to)!

So I positioned her vertically at the back-end of the picture, saving the converging lines. Looks better, don't you think? Then as a last version, I tried a square crop to see what that would look like.

In this one she is still walking out of the picture, so let's zoom in a bit and get her back where she belongs.

No more converging lines, but I think the rising railing works well to hold her up in the picture. What do you think? How important is a crop?