Matteo Pericoli trained as an architect in Milan and then came to work in New York in 1995. His arrival preceded by just a few days the arrival of the biggest snowstorm of the decade, and the sense of the city in its wake–especially its silence–remained in his mind. He experienced similar feeling taking photographs of Riverside Drive from the Circle Line ferry, and decided to transpose them into a line drawing. It was then that he felt compelled to photograph the whole of New York’s shoreline profile–from Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and New Jersey (which he reached by motorcycle) — and make two continuous and continuously enchanting pen-and-ink drawing of Manhattan’s skyline.
Manhattan Unfurled is published in an elegant slipcase, and the drawings fold out, accordion-style, with the West on one side and the East on the other. An introduction by distinguished New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who first wrote bout Matteo’s project in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” will accompany the drawing in a separate pamphlet. This book is both a wonderful New York City memento, perfect for gift giving, and an entirely unique work of art.
Pericoli began working on the original, pen and ink drawings in 1998. More than two years, fifteen hundred buildings, and nineteen bridges later, the two 37-foot-long scrolls of the East and West Sides of the Manhattan skyline were completed. In this book version, an elegant slipcase contains a 24-panel, 22-foot-long accordion fold-out, with the entire East and West Side drawings, one on each side. An essay about the drawings by architecture critic Paul Goldberger accompanies the book in a separate pamphlet.