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Drawing Cities and Places 
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Matteo Pericoli’s drawings of London and New York have been featured worldwide. Arriving with little previous knowledge of London, Matteo made an intensive 20-mile journey along the river, from Hammersmith Bridge to the Millennium Dome and back again, producing two 37-foot-long pen-and-ink drawings depicting the city’s north and south banks. He talks about his new book London Unfurled, what he learned about cities in general, and shows how he would start to look at a city like Bristol.
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Matteo Pericoli’s drawings have been published in various newspapers and magazines, both in the US and in Europe. He is a regular contributor of Gardenia and Bell’Italia and has also written for the Italian newspapers L’Unità and La Stampa. In 2007 he completed ‘Skyline of the World’, a 397-foot-long panoramic mural for American Airlines’ new International Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He currently lives in Turin where he is working on projects at the Polytechnic of Turin, Faculty of Architecture. He also teaches architecture to creative writing students at the Scuola Holden. Pericoli’s books include The City Out My Window: 63 views on New York, Tommaso and the Missing Line, World Unfurled (with Paul Goldberger), The True Story of Stellina and, most recently, London Unfurled. www.matteopericoli.com
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November 30th, 2011 at 3:17 pm
Matteo Pericoli proved to be as engaging as his fascinating hand-drawn cityscapes, and I spent a very enjoyable hour listening to how his astonishingly detailed illustrations are created.
It appears that after arriving in New York from his native Milan, Pericoli focused his attention on Manhattan, a place he understandably saw as the very embodiment of that city. Soon he was involved in an exhaustive – and exhausting – circumnavigation of the island, taking endless photographs which he then used as a basis for the production of his painstaking miniature linear skylines.
A similar process was carried out during his recent London project. Pericoli told us that he felt driven to both understand and develop a relationship with a city he had little previous knowledge of, and judging by the results one can only say that he was very sucessful in these aims.
As Pericoli explained how he created his art on a continuous sheet of delicate architect’s sketch paper, from which errors are “completely un-erasable”, I could only marvel at the levels of concentration and commitment involved in the process. The word “obsessive”, which Pericoli used more than once, seemed entirely appropriate.
This was a rewarding event, and Pericoli described both his inspiration and the technical background to his work with a captivating self-depreciatory humour. He told us that he felt that as an “outsider” in New York it had been necessary for him to “learn” the city from scratch. We should be grateful that Pericoli has not only become adept in his readings, but that he has a remarkable gift for translating them for the benefit of a wider audience.
I only wish that there had been more time to hear Pericoli’s thoughts on the wider world of architecture. In response to a late question, he said that he felt that architects had lost the ability to “tell a story” when designing the built environment, leading to a lack of engagement with society and the creation of “banalities”.
This seems very much in keeping with both Hal Foster’s criticism of the “banal cosmopolitanism” of current global styles, and Miles Glendinning’s dim view of a “global Empire of alienated architecture” – views that I find myself in agreement with.
However, Pericoli provided a silver lining by pointing out that cities, like successful languages, are ever-growing, ever-changing entities. I was reminded that the endlessly complex and interlocking societal, political and economic influences that they are subject to means that they are to a great degree profoundly deaf to the entreaties of Canutes and visionaries alike. Fashions come and fashions go and the juggernaut rolls on.
Pericoli’s response to those who moan about the ruination of a particular skyline is to ask which was the first building that started to ruin it. Indeed. Perhaps the only rational course of action is to buckle up and enjoy the ride.