Ways of Seeing the City

Throughout history artists and designers have utilized a variety of methods to capture the urban landscape, from etching, drawing, painting, photography, film, sound, and model-making, to more recent explorations using digital media and animation. These techniques of “seeing the city” are a means to represent, to interpret, to construct, to make present, to hear, to write, to touch, and to feel the city. They are employed for a multiplicity of purposes—to convince people to visit or relocate to the city, to convey the artist’s or designer’s understanding of the city, to interpret and reveal the city to oneself, and to promote a vision of the city. For architects and urban designers, the act of representing the city is exploratory and reflective, and is as much a way to generate thoughts and approaches to making the city as it is a means to communicate ideas to others. The Teaching Gallery exhibition Ways of Seeing the City presents a diverse selection of works in various media from the Museum’s permanent collection by such artists and architects as Le Corbusier, Howard French, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Edward Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, among others.