Different from landscape we saw in Manhattan, it’s a day focuses on industrial landscapes reclaimed. It recalls me of a painting in Whitney Museum’s new building:
MACHINE ORNAMENT
“Every age manifests itself by some external evidence,” wrote Charles Sheeler in1937. In the years following World War I, industry and mechanization came to define life in the United States no less than religion had Medieval Europe. Now, Sheeler mused, “It may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.”
Elsie Driggs was inspired to make this painting by a childhood memory of Pittsburgh’s steel mills … As much as the painting may seem to viewers today to be a warning about the dangers of industrial pollution, Driggs had no oppositional agenda. She ended up basing the work on drawings she made from a hill above her boardinghouse, later writing that she stared at the mills and told herself: “’This shouldn’t be beautiful. But it is.’ And it was all I had, so I drew it.”
“Every age manifests itself by some external evidence,” wrote Charles Sheeler in1937. In the years following World War I, industry and mechanization came to define life in the United States no less than religion had Medieval Europe. Now, Sheeler mused, “It may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.”
Elsie Driggs was inspired to make this painting by a childhood memory of Pittsburgh’s steel mills … As much as the painting may seem to viewers today to be a warning about the dangers of industrial pollution, Driggs had no oppositional agenda. She ended up basing the work on drawings she made from a hill above her boardinghouse, later writing that she stared at the mills and told herself: “’This shouldn’t be beautiful. But it is.’ And it was all I had, so I drew it.”
------ Whitney Museum's New Building 8th Floor
Although the design concept starts from industrial context, human activity is still one of the crucial consideration, listen to the sound of kids playing in parks and the noise of excavators that replaces human activity.
Kids playing in Hunter’s Point South Park
Kids playing on Brooklyn Grange Organic Range Rooftop Farm
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