Posts Tagged ‘model’
“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”*…
Hannah Frishberg, in Gothamist, on a labor of love…
Reno may be “the biggest little city in the world,” but it’s got some serious competition from the miniature New York City that hobbyist Joseph Macken built in his upstate New York basement over two decades.
“I sat down in my basement, turned the camera on on my phone and just started talking about my first section, which was Downtown Manhattan,” the Clifton Park resident said on a recent Thursday about his viral TikToks on his roughly 50-by-30-foot scale model of the city. “It just took off.”
The intricate model features what Macken says are hundreds of thousands buildings, landmarks and geographic elements across the five boroughs and their surroundings, including bridges, airports, the Hudson and East rivers, New York Harbor, Central Park, One World Trade Center and the original World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building. The work consists of 350 handmade sections that are pieced together and can be taken apart and moved…
… Macken, a 63-year-old truck driver who grew up in Middle Village and has no formal carpentry or engineering training, said he dreamed of replicating the Queens Museum’s famous “Panorama” after an elementary school trip when he was a kid. He embarked on the endeavor in 2004, armed with little more than balsa wood, Elmer’s glue and Styrofoam. His first building was “the RCA building at Rockefeller Center,” he said, referring to 30 Rock, which was formerly named for its longtime tenant, the Radio Corporation of America.
Macken said it took him about 10 years to build Manhattan alone and 11 years for the rest of the boroughs. He completed his opus in April, and said he’s confident every building in the city is represented. (Gothamist could not independently verify this claim; the city has more than 1 million buildings, according to the Department of Buildings.)…
… Macken is now working on a mini Minneapolis: “‘Mary Tyler Moore’ was one of my favorite shows growing up,” he said, adding that he plans to eventually do Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Chicago as well.
Macken said he’s still figuring out what he’ll do next with the model, but he’s in talks with the Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan about an exhibit there. A museum spokesperson confirmed this, praising his “ingenuity, creativity and skill.”
“ I don’t wanna put it back in storage,” Macken said. “That’s for damn sure.”…
More– and more photos– at: “This trucker built a scale model of NYC over 21 years. It’s drawing museums’ attention” from @gothamist.com.
* “Theme from New York, New York” composed by John Kander, with lyrics by Fred Ebb; performed in the film by Liza Minnelli and famously covered by Frank Sinatra
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As we get small, we might recall that on this date in 1776– in the early days of the military occupation of the city by British forces during the Revolutionary War– the “Great Fire of New York” raged on the West Side of what then constituted New York City at the southern end of the island of Manhattan.
The fire destroyed from 10 to 25 percent of the buildings in the city, and some unaffected parts of the city were plundered. Many believed or assumed that the fire was deliberately set; British leaders accused revolutionaries– and used the pretext to declare martial law, to confiscate surviving uninhabited homes of known Patriots and assign them to British officers; to convert chuches (other than Church of England sanctuaries), into prisons, infirmaries, or barracks; and to billet regular soldiers with civilian families… all of which continued until the British evacuated the city on November 25, 1783.
“Artifacts of our oldest cultures give evidence that the human race has always made things in miniature”*…
1/12th scale model of CBGB, 315 Bowery
Drawn to the often-overlooked beauty of aging structures, [artist Randy] Hage began photographing the cast iron facades in the SoHo area of New York. He has photographed over 450 storefronts over the past 14 years, 60% of which have since closed or been torn down. Hage’s models are not only acts of preservation but a way of calling attention to what has been lost as urban renewal and gentrification displace the storeowners and residents of these communities…
Hage then works from his photos to create exquisitely-detailed miniatures…
See more of Hage’s marvelous work at “NYC Storefronts in Miniature,” and visit his website.
* Dorothy B. Thompson, Miniature Sculpture from the Athenian Agora
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As we get small, we might spare a thought for miniaturist of a different sort, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne; he died on this date in 1592. Best known during his lifetime as a statesman, Montaigne is remembered for popularizing the essay as a literary form. His effortless merger of serious intellectual exercises with casual anecdotes and autobiography– and his massive volume Essais (translated literally as “Attempts” or “Trials”)– contain what are, to this day, some of the most widely-influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a powerful impact on writers ever after, from Descartes, Pascal, and Rousseau, through Hazlitt, Emerson, and Nietzsche, to Zweig, Hoffer, and Asimov. Indeed, he’s believed to have been an influence on the later works of Shakespeare.
“The map is not the territory”*…
With the advent of GPS systems and cell-phone-based mapping guidance…
…many of us have stopped paying attention to the world around us because we are too intent on following directions. Some observers worry that this represents a new and dangerous shift in our style of navigation. Scientists since the 1940s have argued we normally possess an internal compass, “a map-like representation within the ‘black box’ of the nervous system,” as geographer Rob Kitchin puts it. It’s how we know where we are in our neighborhoods, our cities, the world.
Is it possible that today’s global positioning systems and smartphones are affecting our basic ability to navigate? Will technology alter forever how we get around?
Most certainly—because it already has. Three thousand years ago, our ancestors began a long experiment in figuring out how they fit into the world, by inventing a bold new tool: the map…
Get your bearings at: “From Ptolemy to GPS, the Brief History of Maps”
* Alfred Korzybski
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As we follow the directions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1595 that Johann Kepler (and here) published Mysterium cosmographicum (Mystery of the Cosmos), in which he described an invisible underlying structure determining the six known planets in their orbits. Kepler thought as a mathematician, devising a structure based on only five convex regular solids; the path of each planet lay on a sphere separated from its neighbors by touching an inscribed polyhedron.
It was an elegant model– and one that fit the orbital data available at the time. It was, nonetheless, wrong.
Detailed view of Kepler’s inner sphere
“The solar system is off center and consequently man is too”*…
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On a dry lake bed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe…
* Harlow Shapley, Through Rugged Ways to the Stars
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As we reach for the stars, we might recall that it was on this date in 1988 that NASA launched the space shuttle Discovery, marking America’s resumption of manned space flight following the 1986 Challenger disaster. It was the first of Discovery‘s two “Return To Flight” assignments; it flew the “twin” missions in 2005 and 2006 that followed the Columbia disaster in 2003.
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