Pre-war Architecture, Obsession, and Imitation
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Pratt 2024
New York has a lot to explore on its own, and its streets make great subjects for artist books. According to social media, some people do wonder about the architectural style of Google’s New York headquarters—formerly the Port Authority’s St. John’s Terminal. In the end, it is only a brick building.
Yet it is precisely its brickwork that makes this building an icon of the 20th century. Examine New Yorkers’ relationship with pre-war architecture through the lens of photography, and I discover that, in the collective imagination, brick buildings evoke a sense of New York’s so-called “golden era,” and that there remains a persistent fascination with this material. Brick architecture continues to be preserved, referenced, and even recreated to hold onto that nostalgic vision.
The physical construction of the book extends this material investigation: housed in a hollowed-out brick and finished with bronze covers, the form itself challenges conventional book structures. These choices introduce a sense of play, while grounding the content in the physical and architectural realities it reflects—blurring the line between book and building, image and object.