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"City on the Precipice", drawing by Manhattan based architect, James Rossant. (courtesy James Rossant) |
| Rossant's meticulously structured utopian visions serve as metaphors
for the modern city. by Laurie Attias Fantastic and cartoon-like, the watercolor City on the Precipice depicts a cluster of modern buildings on the edge of a cliff that is threatening to collapse. The image might represent New York, explains its creator, Manhattan-based architect and urban planner James Rossant, "connected to the rest of the world by tenuous lines, yet miraculously holding on." Rossant is known for his master plans for Dodoma, the capital of Tanzania, and Reston, Virginia, but for some years, he has also expressed his fascination with cities in fanciful, visionary drawings. In his series "Cities of the Plain," walled-in cities of the future take on an odd medieval flavor. Like ultramodern renderings of Piranesi's visions, his intricate "Cities of the Sky" present gravity-defying structures in which "streets are buildings, buildings are streets, towers are built upside down, and monuments are built before the events they commemorate happen," he says. Rossant's meticulously structured utopian visions serve as metaphors for the modern city. His most recent show, held at the Galerie Mantoux-Gignac in Paris last spring, featured imaginative watercolors in which jumbled fragments of structures--towers, columns, bridges, ladders, sidewalks, TV antennae, and windows--reflected the exhilaration and chaotic frenzy of urban life, creating a distorted reflection of the postmodern aesthetic. Some images, such as City on the Precipice, describe the city's fragility, while others, like one that portrays flower forms sprouting buildings instead of buds, speak of hope and regeneration. The show's central image, Godzilla, left--which Rossant describes as "a large, new city growing out of the old, unfinished state of decay"--looks like a cross between the sci-fi monster, a Rube Goldberg contraption, and a giant caterpillar with its belly waving in the air. Under a sky dotted with airplanes that resemble giant insects, the city comes to life--the buildings' staid geometric shapes become entangled with writhing, organic tubular forms. "A city's strength is its power to devour itself," says Rossant, "its continuous renewal out of destruction." |
Keywords:
watercolor, James Rossant, visionary, drawings
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