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Midtown Manhattan Wouldn’t Be the Same ‘Times Square, 1984,’ at the Skyscraper Museum By Joseph Giovannini, New York Times, Aug.. 21, 2014 (Weekend Arts Section, page 22) “One of the most beautiful entries, by Lee Dunnette, envisioned a restored Times Tower with a spectral, hooped tube driving through the body and shooting beyond the roof, a ghostly hologram vanishing into the night.” The column by Mr. Giovannini is a concise and entertaining review of the Times Square redevelopment in the mid 1980s, and the parallel shifting of architectural design thought in the same time period. The online version includes a slide show of images from the time.  Paul Goldberg of the Times wrote a contemporary (1984) review of the original competition, which announces  an understandably begrudging acceptance of the stylistic chaos, His note on my proposal: " The jury also selected Lee Alan Dunnette's proposal for a re-creation of the original tower with a cylindrical light shaft shooting ...

John C. Wenrich (1894 – 1970) is one of the more obscure greats in architectural rendering. There is no book covering his life, and his rendering work is limited and scattered. In spite of this, the sense of atmosphere that he imbued into pencil and watercolor is unsurpassed. No survey of early 20 th century architecture is complete without noting his contribution. He was born in Maryland, the son of a locomotive engineer (Whistler had similar parentage), and worked for a local architect before enrolling at the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute (RAMI) in Rochester, New York. Being drawn to art, he went to New York City to study at the Art Students League, and after serving in France during World War I, spent 5 months at the University of Toulouse. Returning from Europe, he joined the firm of Gordon and Kaelber Architects as an illustrator, staying there until 1931.  Oddly, it was during the Great Depression that his career took off. In 1930 he did renderings for the Cen...

The oldest pictures made by humans are primitive stick figures with no attempt to represent three dimensions.  But over time, cave paintings became more realistic, suggesting different materials, and modeling forms with shading.  Over the centuries artists have tried to capture three dimensional realities on a flat surface (Carl Larsson’s Autumn ) The gold standard of art was to fool the viewer into thinking that what he was looking at was 3D reality; a standard achieved by Rembrandt Peale in this self portrait . Seeing reality emerging from a plain sheet of paper is one aspect of artistic magic. It is what makes figure drawing so gratifying for me. …But I really want to talk about Architecture and Architectural drawing. A building plan has no need to aspire to illusion. It is a diagram which anyone can understand; like a map or the squares on a child’s game board. But, the actual building is often much more complicated. At the very least, architects try to distinguish materi...