Art and Random Thoughts - June 17, 2023
This week’s new piece…
Back in the beginning of the year I did a series of pieces called “Industrial Dreams” where I had riffed on some of the old “cities of the future” that were envisioned in the early 1900’s, such as in the film, Metropolis, and the works of Harvey Wiley Corbett, Hugh Ferriss, Harry M. Pettit, William Robinson Leigh, and others. Back in those days there were all sorts of wild imaginative visions of the future. The skyscraper was new (and wasn’t yet just a boring rectangle), Zeppelins and other airships were the hot new technology allowing us to travel the skies. At the time I expect people were very grumpy about these things, but here in 2023 we can stare back at that stuff with a subtle grunt of appreciation.
Anyway, I had fun making “Industrial Dreams” and wanted to riff on those ideas some more, so this will (hopefully) be the first of a new set focusing on the richness of the city from above in all its messy details and glorious complexity. This one took about 2 weeks to complete, which is on the longer side for me. And to make things worse (for me) I decided I’m going to make a bigger version of it soon too...
Weekly thoughts: Inspiring Art Deco
I love weird buildings, especially ones that make great fodder for fantastic cities or surreal structures, and Art Deco architecture from a century ago gave us a lot of them.
Take the Paramount building here, sitting in the middle of Times Square, (and thankfully still standing today). Its top half is a weird uneven ziggurat, there’s a grand entryway stuck off to the side, a clock tower that you can’t see at all from the street below, plus some extra clocks on each side for good measure that also nobody can see from anywhere reasonable, and it’s topped off with a tiny globe. Who even thinks of putting tiny little globes on top of skyscrapers anymore?
New York City has a ton of Art Deco like this. If you throw a stone in any direction it’ll ricochet off three of them (then you’ll get fined for property damage and likely be punched by the nearest person you hit). Thanks to 1916 zoning laws requiring “setbacks” to let sunlight through, we have a city of weird ziggurats, and thanks to many others from back in those days we get all sorts of cool ornamentation and other quirks (there’s buildings with literal pyramids on their roofs too).
At the other end of Manhattan, sitting in the shadow of One World Trade Center, we have the Barclay-Vesey building, which almost feels like a medieval fortress among the other buildings in the neighborhood. Did the architects go and build a perfectly normal building here? Of course not, they had to do some weird s&!t too. The whole building’s shaped like a rhombus, because that’s what the block was shaped like, which gave that big tower in the middle that little off-kilter angle. Prime location for an evil lair, I’d say. (Spoiler: it’s luxury apartments now)
At the other end of New York State, in the city of Buffalo (a city that was booming in the earlier 20th century when building this great architecture was all the rage) we have one of the largest city hall buildings in the entire country. The entrance looks like a greek temple, and that tower probably could hold a super-villain or two. The west side of the building has vents to catch the wind coming off Lake Erie to power it’s “non-powered” air-conditioning system. This building’s full of all sorts of clever stuff that could give the average steampunk tower a run for it’s money (130+ clocks in the building regulated by a master clock in the basement? Seriously!)
So that’s just a small sample of the weird quirks that Art Deco buildings from the early 20th century gave us. Some of these make me think maybe we weren’t that far off from building those old “cities of the future”. Here’s to hoping the city of our future will bring more intrigue and inspiration. Or maybe we’ll all be living underwater by then…
Looking for Art Deco architecture inspiration? Checkout my Art Deco Pinterest board.