cities -- urbanity -- design
The Hand of Man: Urban Powerpointing
Installed for juried show at the
Thompson Gallery, Weston, MA
Feb-Mar 2016
Over the years I have collected a large cache of photographs related to the history of city planning. For this collage, I selected 12 images that distill a story of the planner's relationship to the urban landscape during a period of rapid transformation. Titled "The Hand of Man," the piece finds planners and architects in the act of pointing to maps, models, and other renderings of the cities they hope to remake through their arts. This gestural impulse emerged as kind of ideographic demonstration of the urban planners' power--or desire for power--in the long twentieth century. -- (Click on the image below for a high resolution PDF.)