Tag Archive for: Drawing

Rizzoli Lizard (November 30, 2021)

I am really excited! On November 30th, twenty years since the publication of Manhattan Unfurled and almost 26 years to the day from when I left Milan to move to New York, a journey of sorts is coming full circle: Rizzoli Lizard will publish the accordion-format book of Milan’s skyline titled Ecco Milano: Ritratto di una città che cambia (Here Is Milan: A Portrait of a Changing City), an homage to my hometown.

https://rizzolilizard.rizzolilibri.it/libri/ecco-milano/

Il nostro punto di contatto col mondo svuotato dal virus

di Matteo Pericoli

La Stampa, 10 maggio 2020

 

La mia prima finestra, New York, 2004

È tutto iniziato nel 2004 a New York quando, a pochi giorni dal trasloco, preso dallo sgomento di abbandonarla dopo setti anni passati con lei, silenziosa e trasparente, sempre al mio fianco decido di disegnarla in fretta e furia, per portarmela via, per non lasciarla indietro, per mantenere vivo quel rapporto così intenso. Mentre la disegno mi accorgo però che, sebbene l’avessi vista per anni, non l’avevo mai osservata a fondo. Noto, infatti, una moltitudine di dettagli che mi erano sfuggiti. Mi rendo conto che avevo dato per scontato la vista dalla mia finestra.

Da allora si potrebbe dire che disegno quasi solo finestre, cerco cioè di restituire in un disegno quello che altre persone vedono dalle loro finestre per poi “raccontarle”. Nella maggior parte dei casi disegno viste di luoghi che non ho avuto la fortuna di visitare e di persone che ho a malapena conosciuto.

È così che ho scoperto Torino quando ci trasferimmo qui dodici anni fa. È così che ho “viaggiato” per il mondo e disegnato finestre di scrittori e scrittrici che vivono in India, Giappone, Islanda, Nigeria o Argentina. È così che, da poco più di un anno, grazie un progetto per Amnesty International, sto imparando a vedere anche quello che vedono i rifugiati quando guardano fuori dalle loro nuove finestre.

In fondo, in tutti questi anni sono stato alla ricerca della conferma, o forse della spiegazione, di quel profondo legame che mi aveva spinto a disegnare la mia, di vista, nel 2004.

Poi, circa due mesi fa, succede l’inimmaginabile: improvvisamente, impreparati, impauriti e senza un attimo di preavviso ci troviamo tutti in casa ad attendere e a sperare. Di colpo lo sguardo dalle nostre finestre si trasforma. Questo strano “oggetto” che io avevo osservato, disegnato, ascoltato per 14 anni diventa la nostra principale inquadratura su un mondo svuotato: il nostro punto di contatto, di separazione, di protezione, e di speranza e unione.

Da questo semplice riquadro, in fondo null’altro che un buco nel muro che avevamo forse trascurato in passato, ora migliaia, milioni di sguardi si intrecciano l’uno con l’altro per ricostruire quella densa trama che era la vita precedente alla quarantena. Di slancio chiedo sulla mia pagina Facebook di approfittare di questo periodo bloccati dietro alle nostre finestre per provare a disegnarle e a raccontarle.

Ho ricevuto una moltitudine di lavori, e tra quelli che ho condiviso è venuto fuori quello che in tutti questi anni avevo sospettato, ovvero che le finestre offrono più livelli di lettura: collocando il nostro sguardo in un preciso punto della nostra vita, possiamo muoverci liberamente nello spazio e nel tempo; il confine tra passato e futuro sembra confondersi; come in uno specchio, la nostalgia e la speranza si riflettono verso di noi. Tutto sembra fondersi in un grande e illimitato potenziale narrativo del quale per anni avevo avuto solo il sentore.

In questa pagina potete vedere solo alcuni esempi tra gli intensi e commoventi lavori che ho ricevuto. Sono grato a tutti coloro che mi hanno mandato le loro finestre. D’ora in poi, ogni mio disegno di una qualsiasi vista da una qualsiasi finestra sarà arricchito da ciò che ho imparato e sentito in questo periodo. Guardare dalla finestre non sarà più come prima, e mi auguro che sia così per tutti.


La Stampa, 10 maggio 2020

The New Yorker, September 12, 2011 issue

In one of my rarely-opened drawers, I stumbled across this September 12, 2011 issue of The New Yorker magazine with a portion of my original, 2001 West Side drawing from Manhattan Unfurled (top) and a 2011 drawing of the same section of the skyline (from Canal St. to the Battery).

Click here to watch a New Yorker video about the making of the drawing:
https://matteopericoli.com/2014/07/22/the-new-yorker-video-matteo-pericoli/

Italo Calvino
As cidades invisíveis com ilustrações de Matteo Pericoli Companhia Das Letras

 

 

Matteo Pericoli
On Invisible Cities

 

In Italy, if you study architecture (but not only), sooner or later you’ll end up having to read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It is usually among most design courses’ required readings — and rightly so.

When I had to read it, I felt what probably most architecture students feel: a sense of relief; the kind you breathe in when you walk out the door after spending hours in a crowded restaurant. Ah, some air, finally!

Finally architecture and cities that are alive, free from formal constraints, from styles or trends. And finally architecture that, although “only” told with words, conveys the energy and the idea that physical places need a narrative essence of their own.

As far as I was concerned, after that sense of relief, a sadness of sorts followed. Why — I wondered during my studies — do I feel the discipline of architecture so distant? So cerebral, rigid, and especially so hard to “understand”?

It took me a long time to come close to an answer. Or, rather than an answer, to a clarification of that very sense of relief that had struck me upon first reading the book. It’s now eight years since I’ve begun holding a workshop, the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, during which I work with students to give a tangible, architectural form to the intrinsic structure of novels, poems, and stories. They are all literary texts and there’s never anything explicitly “architectural” in them. We do not try to represent the locations described in the texts, but rather we try to understand — by actually building them with cardboard — the perceived reasons why a story works, why and how it stands, and the emotions it makes us feel.

For architecture students, it is a chance to get closer to narrative. If the participants are instead not architects — but writers, literary scholars, high-school students or simply readers — once the initial fear of the “for-experts-only” discipline (i.e. architecture) fades away, their spatial and design ideas evolve in a surprisingly rich and free way revealing how accustomed we all are to perceiving and understanding the structure of a novel and how expert — in the sense of experience (experiri) — we are at “reading” the space around us.

It was during the first workshop’s final student presentations that I again noticed that sense of freshness and pureness I hadn’t felt since my first reading of Invisible Cities. In translating a story into space, architecture comes to life. At some point of their creative process, spatial and literary narrative share a similar forma mentis, which isn’t made of bricks and concrete or words and syntax, but of essential compositional ideas.

When assigned to architecture students, Invisible Cities is mostly read, studied and used in a literal way, i.e. from an architectural point of view. Wouldn’t it be great if this wonderful book could also serve as inspiration to dive into narrative and discover how the effort of constructing a story closely resembles that of designing a building? What does a threshold, a step or a window represent from a narrative point of view? How do we “read” or anticipate space? What gives us a sense of continuity? And of ephemerality? How can I control the pace of revelations?

Alice Munro said that “a story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house” to explore. A house that, according to its proportions, room arrangement, and openings will alter both the reader/visitor as well as how we view the world outside. She adds that every time you return, the house “always contains more than you saw the last time. … It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity.”

Writing has been used forever to describe and analyze architecture. Architecture, too, can in turn be used as an analytic tool to explore narrative and discover those aspects that are unreachable only with words.


Leggi l’articolo originale in italiano su La Stampa:
https://www.lastampa.it/cultura/2017/06/07/news/costruire-una-storia-come-una-casa-ecco-la-lezione-delle-span-class-corsivo-citta-invisibili-span-1.34608333

By Joey Garfield

MATTEO PERICOLI HAD A ROUTINE. WHEN HE MOVED FROM MILAN TO NEW YORK CITY IN THE 1990s, HE RODE EACH DAY TO THE OFFICES OF HIS ARCHITECTURAL JOB, INSPIRED BY THE IDEA OF DRAWING THE ENTIRETY OF THE MANHATTAN SKYLINE AS ONE CONTINUOUS LANDSCAPE. A RESULTING TWO-YEAR ODYSSEY BECAME A 37-FOOT LONG SCROLL, AN INTIMATE PORTRAYAL OF THE CITY AND ITS INDUSTRIAL BEAUTY: MANHATTAN UNFURLED. PERICOLI RECEIVED THE FIRST COPIES OF HIS FINISHED PIECE IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 2001, AND A FEW DAYS LATER THE PIECE WAS NO LONGER PERSONAL. LIKE ANY GREAT STORYTELLER, PERICOLI’S UNFURLED PROJECT LIVES BEYOND ITS CREATOR WITH A PURPOSE THAT GOES BEYOND AUTHORSHIP. IT BELONGS TO EVERYONE NOW. —JUXTAPOZ

Detail of Manhattan Unfurled – The East Side (used as the cover of the Beastie Boys’ 2004 LP “To the 5 Boroughs”)

Joey Garfield: Where did you grow up?

Matteo Pericoli: I was born and grew up in Milan, Italy. In my family, drawing was like a second language. My father was a painter and satirical cartoonist in the 1970s. That became an extra language I knew how to use, but it remained complex because of my relationship to my father. I ended up going to study architecture and when finished, in 1995, I decided I wanted to move to a place where the architecture tradition was different and I could learn a new approach to what I studied in Milan. I came to New York after graduation and worked as an architect for Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier.

Because I was in New York, drawing just started to resurface out of me like a bubble. The fact is, it was always there within, but in Italy it was never something I considered using. In New York I started to draw everything I could.

What is your approach to traditional drawing versus architectural lines?

Before the written word was invented, there had to be a drawing. A line drawing, say, of an animal, before the word for it was invented, carried the necessary information. Line drawings are at the doorstep of language. A line can turn into a word much faster then a painting; it is somewhat magical. Drawing is a way to absorb the largest amount of information at one time. With a sketch there is a “maybe,” but not when you draw. You must know all of the lines in order to choose the one line. The strange thing about hard line drawings is they are very readable and look simple because all the work has been synthesized down to what elements will be included. It’s an immense amount of work that disappears before it’s done and people think, “Oh well, it’s just a drawing.”

When did you decide the city would be your subject?

The infatuation with New York, which is instantaneous for anybody who comes here from somewhere else, has to take some kind of shape in order to make it your own. People will write about it, they will photograph it, eat at all the restaurants. Mine was an obsession of “What is it?” The maps were misleading because they all ended at midtown. I wanted to see where I was—from one step back. It was kind of an instinct. I took the Circle Line tour boat that goes all around Manhattan and figured, “This is the viewpoint. I can finally see everything and study the city as one!”

When I was on the boat I saw this big thing that began all the way north at The Bronx and went all the way to the Financial District and thought, “If I can see the whole thing maybe I can draw it.” So I took hundreds of photographs, I took several boat tours, I bought a motorcycle, and went to New Jersey and everywhere I could to photograph. You can’t really make out just one entity of a hundred photographs. It will still be fragmented. But drawing allows you to modify and change perspectives, and make it one simple thing.

How did you begin the project?

In 1998, I started the obsessive drawings of the city. When I started, I thought it would go just from the Bronx bridge to my house. If someone would have told me I was to draw the whole city, I would not have even started. Luckily, I am right-handed so I could start in Inwood and the Cloisters. Had I been left-handed, I wouldn’t have done it because the idea of starting at the Financial District was too much.

I took a roll of sketch paper from the office and began at the northern tip of the island and came all the way down. It took me a year. Because it was a roll of paper and I was in a small apartment, I could only complete a tiny section and then roll it up, start a new section, and roll it up. It may have been ten or eleven feet, but it was invisible because I couldn’t extend it all the way. Over time, your hand changes, but I couldn’t see back. It was all by instinct.

Was it hard to work, for a year on just one thing?

Yes. After I worked on it, every time I closed my eyes at night, I saw New York. You turn mad in a good way.

Do you have a ritual for when you finish a project of this length? Like break your pencil?

The city is a donut

No, but I should. There is closure. I did go back to some places after I was done to look at them again: when a circle has been completed, it’s calming. But this was just the beginning, because I realized there was another hole right in the center of Manhattan: Central Park. The typical thing in a European city is a dense center with less at the edges. But when you are in Central Park, you are not inside anything, you are actually outside. It’s the reverse. You go inward to go out. The city is a donut!

Do you prefer a pencil or a pen?

Actually, the drawings are in pen. The pencil is the tool I use to think. The pen is the tool I use to archive or fix the one item that is my intention. Also, with the pen you cannot erase. The first line on a blank piece of paper is terrifying, if you make a mistake twenty feet into the drawing, there is nothing you can do. You can’t erase it. There are some lines I was doing with the bridges that are filled with terror.

So if you mess up…

It stays. We used to have a bird, a little wild finch that my wife saved so it thought we were its family. While I would draw, the bird would be flying all around me. Some time just after the Brooklyn Bridge she landed on top of my pen and pecked at it, the pen; and so there is a little mistake somewhere in there.

The West and Side drawings

When I finished the West Side I wrote to many folks, journalists and architecture critics, and explained that I had a drawing of the entire city that was 37 feet long, all done on one piece of paper. It had never been done before. The only person who wrote back was Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker. So for the first time, I unrolled the drawing on the floor of The New Yorker offices. Paul knew much more about the city than I did, even after drawing this whole thing. Knowledge can take many shapes. Unfurling it was like a street fair; everyone came out of his or her office to watch.

The West Side was published in The New Yorker in 1999 and then I was commissioned to complete the East Side for the book in 2001. I went to my architecture firm and asked if we could make an arrangement for me not to work on this only on weekends and nights because there were exhibitions, and Random House wanted to make it into a book. The firm declined; so I left. I turned the corner and went back up the other side of the island for the next year.

The quality of the drawing for the East Side is dramatically different to me because it was now my “day job” and I took it more seriously. I was done in 2000. By 2001, we worked on the book and I received the first copies the weekend before September 11, 2001. When the towers fell I took the books, hid them and couldn’t bear to look at them for six months. It took time to realize that this was an act of love given to a place where I lived. It was just all so strange because the drawings included the Twin Towers.

It was hard to know when to return to normal… officially.

You realize the place, as a physical organism, was not the same anymore. Looking was painful. The years spent drawing every single line of the city were very intense, and it hurt because it was not the same. It hurt because the purpose was now from a previous era.

And the door slammed shut pretty hard.

After six months, I brought the book back out. I realized it was actually the last picture drawn of this place as a whole, “whole” meaning with the two towers. I realized that there was nothing negative about having drawn the city. I remembered the energy I had put into it, as it turned out not to be something that I was trying to understand but was rather a kind of gift. The final image of an era, and I felt lighter.

And then you did it again in 2011?

For the ten-year anniversary of September 11th, The New Yorker asked if I could draw just a section of the city.

Was it weird to come back and do it again?

Yes, apart from the fact that it was fantastic to have another opportunity, the reality was that so many things had changed. We can actually see the city progressing. All the efforts to rebuild with the cranes attached to the sky, trying to draw again a new identity. It still feels like reconstructive surgery now, but maybe in a while it will be the total, perfect identity of a place. But the efforts felt heartwarming, not “We are going to make it,” but more “I am going to be myself again.” But it takes time. New York is often misunderstood. It’s two words that don’t fit together but somehow work in unison: Pragmatism and Love.

The project you worked on after, the City Out My Window series, became a book. Can you talk about that?

In 2004, we had to move from our small apartment in Manhattan to Queens. When everything was packed to go, I was in the empty bedroom where I had my desk and worked by the window. When you work, every so often you relax and look out the window. Everybody does it. I estimated I obsessively looked out that window for seven years, 28 days straight. More than any other image of New York, I saw this view. So I thought to myself, “This view has to go with me.” With a photograph you never get the exact viewpoint that really makes the view yours. So I took a large piece of paper, drew what I saw, and took it with me. Then I realized that many people share this same compulsion. When I started to ask other artists and creatives around me, everybody had a great story, love or hate, of their window view. The view was always a character in their life.

We are not animals anymore. We are stuck inside boxes and the hole in the wall is our only separation from the world. I asked everybody about their window views, and Adam Yauch as well because we had worked on the album cover for To the 5 Boroughs together.

How did you connect with The Beastie Boys?

They just wrote me. I think it was Adam’s wife Dechen. I have the note somewhere. She said they knew of the book and were making an album dedicated to the city. They said my drawing was a heartfelt dedication to the city and they would love to use it for the cover. When the goal is simple and shared, there is not much to talk about.


Cover of the June 2013 Beastie Boys issue of JUXTAPOZ

Matteo-Pericoli-Torino Unfurled

Turin Unfurled (detail)

Fu nel 1998, mentre guardavo Manhattan da un battello che la circumnavigava, che mi venne l’idea di “disegnare tutto”. Erano ormai tre anni che mi ero trasferito a New York e, più o meno consapevolmente, era da altrettanto tempo che andavo cercando quella chiave di lettura che in qualche modo mi aiutasse a impadronirmi della città dove vivevo e della quale ero chiaramente infatuato. Tornai così a casa, presi della carta da schizzo e iniziai, quasi per gioco, un’avventura che mi portò a disegnare su due rotoli di quasi dodici metri ciascuno tutto ciò che si vede di Manhattan dai fiumi che la circondano.

Da allora, quell’idea e quell’avventura mi hanno portato a ritrarre il profilo di Manhattan com’è vista dal suo centro vuoto (Central Park), la riva nord e quella sud di Londra vista dal Tamigi, e ora Torino, la città dove vivo da qualche anno con la mia famiglia, vista dal Po.

E porto sempre con me, insieme a quell’idea originaria apparentemente tanto chiara e intuitiva quanto vaga, “disegnare tutto”, una domanda la cui risposta si fa in realtà sempre meno chiara: cos’è quel tutto?

Il disegno al tratto, cioè quello fatto di linee il più possibile chiare, non schizzate o affrettate per intendersi, è un tipo di rappresentazione le cui decisioni – sostanzialmente quali linee fare – si basano su un filtro che elimina ciò che non serve. Un filtro che sceglie ciò che finirà per aiutare la narrazione invece di confonderla. È un po’ come il nostro cervello che, per difendersi dalla cacofonia e dal bombardamento della realtà (quella “vera” che raramente percepiamo), lavora per proporci un’immagine il più possibile lineare e comprensibile di continuità, di chiarezza, di narrazione. Si finisce, sintetizzandola, per idealizzare la realtà e ridurla, nel caso di questi disegni, a delle strisce di carta dove quel tutto di cui sopra è lì, raccontato, si spera, in modo chiaro e comprensibile e con il minimo numero di linee necessarie.

Per riuscire a ricostruire il disegno di Torino ho scattato più di 400 foto e camminato, dal Ponte Isabella a Corso San Maurizio, tra i vari avanti, indietro e su e giù per la collina alla ricerca delle prospettive più chiare, tra i dodici e i quindici chilometri. Tutto ciò tra febbraio e giugno di quest’anno. Non sembreranno forse dei grandi numeri, soprattutto rispetto, per esempio, ai quasi cento chilometri camminati e le più di seimila foto scattate per il progetto di Londra al quale ho lavorato per due anni. Ma, date le ovvie proporzioni, sono invece indicativi del fatto che l’unico modo con cui percepiamo una città è attraverso frammenti difficilmente ricomponibili se non con delle invenzioni, prospettiche o di scala, nel mio caso, o narrative in altri.

Tra la città vera (quella che realmente c’è) e la nostra città (quella che percepiamo o che raccontiamo) si nasconde un fertile e invisibile spazio infinito dove raccogliere tutte quelle storie, racconti, sogni e progetti senza i quali le città, organismi viventi a sé stanti, finiscono nel tempo per spegnersi e morire.

 

Preface

An agglomeration of buildings is not sufficient to constitute a city. And it does not matter how big it is, nor what the architectural quality of the individual buildings or the urban organization of the whole is. What matters is how the agglomeration is perceived by those who live there, how it is told to those who visit it, and how those who visit it in turn will tell the outside world about it. Physical cities exist, of course, but they are cities only insofar as they are perceived. The agglomerations of buildings we call cities are living organisms that feed on perceptions and in return give back stories, emotions, and dreams.

Before coming to Turin, I lived for thirteen years in New York City. I absorbed it and tried to draw it all as one thing. I drew its profile as seen from the rivers surrounding it, then its profile from Central Park. Then, as I was about to move and with the boxes almost ready, I looked out of my window and realized that there was not one city, but millions, as many as the number of its inhabitants. And so I visited a multitude of windows to draw its views and find out how those who live there see the city. When I arrived, I did not know Turin at all. And perhaps I still don’t know it: not a day goes by that I don’t encounter a new glimpse, a corner or a building I have never seen. But after “a year at the window” I feel I have begun to discover it. Instead of approaching it from the outside and slowly trying to get to know it – as normally happens – I dove straight into its heart. I saw how it is perceived by those who live there; from its windows I heard the stories of those who live there and were born there, or those who, like me, came from elsewhere. From the windows I was able to notice time, you can see it in the architecture, and how in recent years it has changed this city.

To those I asked to show me their windows I said that this will be the tale of a Turin as seen from its openings, of the most intimate and truest of cities.

– Matteo Pericoli
May 2011

Tag Archive for: Drawing