Architecture & Design &Books Entropy | 07 Dec 2009
Manhattan Unfurled
In continuation to my previous post about the book, New York – Line by Line by Robinson, I wish to introduce the work of an architect, illustrator and author, Matteo Pericoli.. who wrote its foreword ..
Matteo Pericoli's Sketches of NYC.
NEW YORK: LINE BY LINE by Robinson
Foreword by Matteo Pericoli..
A line isn’t just a line. Lines do not exist in reality. And out of a world of millions of options (the horizon, the skyline, the edge of a building, the edge of a series of buildings, a window frame, the edge of a sidewalk, a wave on the water, the smoke coming out of a manhole, etc.), a line is ultimately placed where the artist chooses. It’s a creative process, one that doesn’t aim at representing reality per se, but one that wants to tell it.
As a writer who has to select each word he will use, Robinson’s lines are not randomly placed; the one at the center of the com-position, right where the eye falls first, has gone through the same decision proc-ess as the one that lies at the edge of the image, where — most probably — one’s eye might rarely land. And lines have to begin somewhere and end some-where else, which is not as easy as it sounds. They all need the same kind of care. They can’t lie and you can’t place them where you are unsure of their ulti-mate purpose and meaning — it would show up.
If you have ever been to the top of the Empire State Building and looked down, you were presented with a manmade landscape like no other: thousands of build-ings looking back at you, together with hundreds of thousands of windows. Den-sity, masses, alignments, streets, avenues, building tops, antennas, water tow-ers, and so on. It’s hard to take it all in and it’s even harder to imagine that one could think, “I am going to draw it all.” And it’s astounding to think that someone has accomplished just that. “Drawing it all” means that out of all the possible bil-lions of lines that one could draw, you have to choose only the right ones. And those that Robinson drew tell us of a New York City at a particular time; they show us how the city is organized and how it works as an organism; they tell us about its character and its life, about its people and their habits.
New York is the most generous of any artistic subject: it gives itself wholly with-out hesitation, and is ultimately morbidly curious about your opinion. Robinson’s work is a most courageous act of love. He gives the city back to us, line by line, after an obsessively successful and exhilarating journey of discovery….
Explore Matteo Pericoli’s wonderful Books and website here..
“It is connected to what I do as an architect, the beauty of drawing a line,” Pericoli said. “Every building has character; to draw it is like drawing a face, the things that give it soul. If you draw something, it is fixed in your mind forever, it is a miracle.”
Pericoli began working on the original, pen and ink drawings in 1998. More than two years, fifteen hundred buildings, and nineteen bridges later, the two 37-foot-long scrolls of the East and West Sides of the Manhattan skyline were completed. In this book version, an elegant slipcase contains a 24-panel, 22-foot-long accordion fold-out, with the entire East and West Side drawings, one on each side.
An essay about the drawings by Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker magazine’s architecture critic, accompanies the book in a separate pamphlet.
“Pericoli’s lines have the delicacy of Mozart, but his masses have the suave rhythms of Ellington.”
— from the introductory essay by Paul Goldberger
on 07 Dec 2009 at 4:23 pm 1.Nimesh Dadia said …
These line drawing are dazzlingly beautiful.. No one could have put more succinctly than Paul Goldberg.