This may be stating the obvious, but the buildings of New York City are pretty amazing. We all love looking at themheck, we'll even pay $32 to get a better viewand artists can't stop drawing them. This new batch of drawings comes courtesy Farago Design, a firm that was commissioned by the Downtown Alliance to capture the rooftops of landmarks in Lower Manhattan. Peter Farago worked with Linda Dienst, the VP of Marketing and Communications at the Alliance, to choose 30 buildings worthy of depiction, and he set out to draw them all. He explains the process in a recent blog post, and for most of his research, he "rode elevators as high as they would go, climbed stairways to rooftops, and leaned over parapets making sketches or shooting photos while Linda or my wife, Victoria, held onto [his] belt."
But to photograph the tallest buildings, Farago took to the skies in a helicopter: "Before long we were hovering dangerously close to the parapets of the world's first skyscraper, designed by Cass Gilbert, one of America's first celebrity architects—and one of my heroes. They got us close enough (scary close in fact) to get absolutely crystal clear detail of the marvelous structure we wanted to preserve in our drawings."
Ultimately, the Alliance chose the seven loveliest rooftops to highlight, and Farago's drawings were sent to master lithographer Leonid Misakov and turned into prints. Farago would love for the prints to be featured in some sort of pop-up art museum, and he says they are "actively pursuing" the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the mayor's office.
The prints are not currently for sale (though interest parties should definitely reach out"Will be happy to run another batch if someone wants them," says Farago), so for now, we'll just have to ogle these images.
Click through for more drawings:
· Icons of Wall Street [Farago Design]
· NYC Illustrations [Behance]
· A Man on A Mission to Draw All The Buildings In New York [Curbed]
· An Artist Has Hand-Painted 200 New York City Buildings So Far [Curbed]
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