You know what, it’s been too long since we had a good, old-fashioned photomuralin’ around these parts.
And one that combines a bit of Google Maps-ready, roof-as-facade architecture? And camo? Even better.
I only go to the Museum of the City of New York for their gala, and I’m the loser for it: because I missed “Shaping the Future,” curator Donald Albrecht’s Fall 2009 exhibition of Eero Saarinen.
The show included the 1939 model for the unrealized Smithsonian Gallery of Art, which he designed with his father Eliel, and which would have sat across the Mall from John Russell Pope’s just-finished neo-classical National Gallery.
But it also included some sweet, giant photos, as the NY Times’ slideshow shows. Check out the big CBS-eye view of Saarinen’s model for Black Rock:
The Google Maps reality is, alas, not so clean. Saarinen’s CBS HQ has the usual skyscraper cruft on the roof.
But fortunately, it’s right across the street from MoMA, where landscape architect Ken Smith’s 2005 Roof Garden is clearly visible. As the American Society of Landscape Architects noted when it gave Smith an award in 2009, the design is rooted in historic concepts of camouflage and the abstracted simulation of natural forms.
And speaking of simulation, check out this giant color photomural from the MCNY exhibition, which almost makes you feel like you’re right there in the living room of Saarinen’s 1953-7 Miller House [which the family recently donated to the Indianapolis Museum of Art].
Weird, the angle of the Times photo really exaggerates the sense of perspectival space in ways that a straight-on shot like the one arthag took does not.
Review | Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future [nytimes, for full-size images: Librado Romero/NYT]
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the making of, by greg allen