The -L- and Trinity Building 1904

Curator: Ah, look at this Joseph Pennell etching from 1904, entitled "The -L- and Trinity Building." What’s your initial impression? Editor: It feels incredibly skeletal. Like a city bared to its bones, or a phoenix in the very early stages of rising. There’s something profoundly honest about the bare construction. Curator: Absolutely. Pennell was deeply interested in the energy of the city, the spectacle of its relentless growth. He really focuses on the framework, emphasizing process. Look how the light catches those scaffolding elements; you can almost feel the scale, and understand the work of each anonymous laborer that constructed that. Editor: Exactly! It's easy to romanticize these buildings when they are finished monuments of capitalism, but here, we’re looking at material being physically built – think about the sweat equity it cost to construct those skeletal frames. Where do the materials even originate? The conditions they're extracted from? The labor isn’t absent; it's the focal point. Curator: Yes, he's presenting urban architecture as an industrial phenomenon. Consider how different this is from Beaux-Arts renderings. It gives one pause. He's interested in more than the beautiful facade – more than just architectural plans. Editor: I find myself considering the very conscious decisions of the artist too: The deliberate choice of etching… what impact does this more traditionally "artisanal" technique, applied to a deeply industrial subject, generate? Is it a sort of collision of values? High and low art clashing in a visual moment. Curator: An interesting point, juxtaposing the modern construction boom with older methods of artistic rendering… He certainly blurs the line, forcing you to question where value truly lies – in the grand building, or in the painstaking process of both construction, and art. Thank you for that insight! Editor: It has me re-evaluating my concept of monumentality entirely. Curator: Well, I for one can’t wait to go and excavate his other cityscapes after this.