New York at Japan’s Tobu World Square theme park
If you’re heading to the Canadian Centre for Architecture anytime soon to check out their latest headlining exhibition, 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas, don’t overlook the Octagonal Gallery, where another, captivating exhibition is running until February 3rd, 2008. Back in 2003, the CCA commissioned Naoya Hatakeyama to take photos of three scale models of New York and Japan. The result is Scales, which explores the tension between representation and reality, pausing along the way to ponder the meaning of scale.
I wrote about Scales for Maisonneuve, so here’s a quick overview of what you can expect:
Two of the models depict New York. One, found in the Windows of the World theme park in Shenzhen, China, is a strange, cartoonish vision of the city, a dilapidated landscape of crooked, colourful buildings. The model seems haphazardly constructed, like the set of a cheap disaster movie. In one photo, an approach to the Brooklyn Bridge abruptly ends in mid-air. The bridge itself is cracked and disjointed, cars scattered across it as if there had been a massive earthquake.
In sharp contrast to this is the model of New York found in Japan’s Tobu World Square—as detailed and realistic as Windows of the World is abstract. If you didn’t look too closely, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was the real New York. Hatakeyama, shooting in black and white, has created the illusion of reality, evoking the strongly-shadowed, iconic Manhattan of the imagination, or at least in the famous early twentieth century photos of Alfred Stieglitz.
The point here, however, is not to fool us, but to give us subtle hints that we are, in fact, looking at a model, an idealized vision of New York. Despite the cars and pedestrians on the streets, even the graffiti painstakingly drawn on the walls, there is a strange lifelessness about these buildings, their windows empty like dead eyes. In one shot, the side wall of the Plaza Hotel is inexplicably blank. In another, we see a ballcap-wearing man looming between skyscrapers like some bizarrely mundane giant.
Hatakeyama’s photos of the third model, an aerial view of a huge and incredibly detailed rendition of Tokyo, are presented as a black-and-white triptych. It’s hard to tell that the city depicted is not, in fact, the real thing.
New York at Shenzhen’s Windows of the World theme park
In addition to presenting his own photos, Hatakeyama has selected five photographs of architectural models from the CCA’s large collection of images. Hatakeyama’s favourite is a shot of Montreal architect Ernest Cormier’s model of his 1925 courthouse annex on Notre Dame St. Inside its neoclassical columns, a nude woman crouches, playing with one of the model’s figurines. “It’s so fascinating, the form of her body, the soft lines and the smile,” Hatakeyama last month. I can certainly see why it appeals to him, capturing in one frame, with its playful interpretation of scale, the essence of his exhibition.