When Up-Close Means Far Away

James Gulliver Hancock wants to draw all the buildings in New York.All the Buildings in New York is James Gulliver Hancock’s attempt to draw, naturally, all the buildings in New York City. There’s the book, All the Buildings in New York That I’ve Drawn So Far, and the work-in-progress blog. The blog is updated semi-frequently now that Hancock, an Australian, is based out of Brooklyn. With approximately 700,000 buildings in a city of 8 million people, it’s not a project that will likely be finished in Hancock’s lifetime. Scale is only one of Hancock’s many challenges, though. As developed as NYC is already, things burn down, buildings get demolished and developers put up new ones. Cities are never finished, and are themselves as much works in progress as Hancock’s project.The drawings and sketches usually isolate one NYC address, mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and you can search them by borough, neighbourhood, and building type. There are some streetscapes where Hancock draws a row of houses. Queens and the Bronx are both portrayed from afar, as buildings crowded around each other. The elevated view is a trope of urban representation, especially as a panorama from a skyscraper or looking aslant, as if from a balcony, at a row of Brooklyn brownstones. Portraying New York building by building takes away the city’s enormity. In “My Lost City,” F. Scott Fitzgerald looks out at Manhattan from the rooftop of the Plaza Hotel and mistakes the city for a universe. But when Fitzgerald sees past the edge of town and realizes that even New York ends somewhere, the illusion that Manhattan extends infinitely comes crashing down.The cover of Hancock’s book features a midtown panorama—but once inside, his representations of the city takes away the glamour of New York's sheer size, focussing on architectural details by taking the buildings out of context. Today aerial shots of New York City prove you practically need to be in space to see where the city ends. Now that Fitzgerald’s old perspective is impossible, Hancock manages to shrink New York by viewing it close up.Hancock also leaves out most commercial tenants, signs, and street activity from his drawings. Unlike Jerry Waese’s street scenes of Toronto, which focus on pedestrians and passing automobiles or streetcars, ATNYB eliminates movement and the human element from the city. They’re playful drawings, so rather than coming out like real estate photos, the buildings seem more like individuals in cartoon portraits.Hancock says that he chose buildings because they seemed to be the thing that most defined New York, the way automobiles represent LA, or bicycles do Berlin. Even without the title, it would be difficult to mistake his streetscapes and rooftop panoramas, but the stand-alone buildings could belong in many older American cities. Like “My Lost City,” ATBNY’s isolated buildings refuse the romance of the Big Apple: that all you need is the five boroughs to have a successful life and career. Hancock describes his blog as coming from “obsession and recording of places.” Cataloguing individual examples of architecture, Hancock insists that New York is a collection of buildings, not a dream or a fiction or a universe.There is a proliferation of print and online publications featuring “art about the city.” In Canada, Montreal and Toronto feature prominently in Jack Dylan’s illustrations and posters, while Guy Delisle’s graphic travelogues are based on cities like Pyongyang and Jerusalem, and Sam Javanrouh’s photos of Toronto are showing up prolifically in print.From a statistical standpoint, suburbanization is at a standstill, and the romance of the city has started to percolate beyond art. Among all the loving art about our urban cores, ATBNY insists on the city’s most basic elements. These portrayals come from a place of affection, but it’s an important portrayal that undoes the city’s enchantment.