Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Do you know who Christo and Jeanne-Claude are?
They are the artists who have made their reputation by covering sculptures, fountains, buildings and shorelines with drapes. Their silk has covered buildings all over Europe and the United States.

The work of the companions has evolved over the years so that they no longer seem to be covering things. Their “Gates” sculpture seemed to have taken New York by storm a couple of years ago. They set up hundreds of flag-like orange gates throughout Central Park, and everyone went. The park became a free and open exhibition.

However, though they may have abandoned covering buildings, I think the idea has caught on in New York City.
I’m here to present evidence that there are many a draped building in NY.
Art has overtaken the City.

(click any image to enlarge.)

I came to realize this while taking my daily walk from home to studio.
I walked past what is becoming my favorite building in the City – the Flatiron Building.

The building, from a bit of a distance, looks flat, but when you come right up on it you realize that it’s a triangular shaped building that angles off as it reaches the cross streets of Broadway/5th Ave and 23rd Street.

As you look down the building, coming to its base, you notice the scaffold.
Scaffolds are everywhere in the City. They’re built to allow building owners to repair, clean or alter the edifice of their building. This way if anything falls off the buildings they won’t be sued.
(I remember a friend who had just bought a cherry-red sports car. His first drive into Manhattan, he parked in front of my old alma-mater, NY Institute of Technology. Their ornate building had an Egyptian-esque decor. When the friend returned to his car, there was a gargoyle looking up from his trunk. It had fallen off the building, smashed through the trunk and smiled up through the bright red metal.)

These scaffolds are everywhere. Across 5th Ave from the Flatiron Building, Bank America is covered in wood and steel.

To the casual pedestrian, these coverings can protect you from rain, but they also block out the sun. However, it isn’t just the scaffolding. As you look up from the scaffolding, you’ll see that the building has been wrapped – à la Christo.

The scaffolds are a mesh of piping. They contain infrequent openings to get in and out of the structures, and they often block up pedestrian traffic.
Stores have to create new signs for themselves so that people can locate the stores buried under the scaffolds.

Naturally, this makes for some wacky signage that seems incongruous with the new ediface over the building’s ediface.

Nothing seems “Juicy” anymore, It’s more like “cagey.”

The wraps come in different colors, designed to beautify the ugly buildings underneath, no doubt. Here’s a blue cover.

This one is white.

Some scaffolds have to be long to cover the extremely wide sidewalks at some points. However, since this building isn’t very wide, the wide scaffold is narrow from the front.

The monument in Washington Square Park was covered in mesh last summer as workers cleaned it. (I don’t have a photo of that, but here’s what it looks without the wrap.)

A block away from my studio is the little but attractive Italian church, Our Lady of Pompeii. They have been wrapped for the past few months. It’s not a high water mark for the church.

However, better for them to be covered than MY building. I get shivers just thinking about that idea.

With all these impersonators, it’s no wonder that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have moved from “wrapping” buildings to “gates.”

By the way, all of the images in this post (up to the Washington Square monument & Our Lady of Pompeii Church) were taken between 23rd and 19th Street on fancy Fifth Avenue. However, this is indicative of the City as a whole, not just that area.

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