United Nations Secretariat Building, NYC, 2021.
All the pixels, with simultaneous translation into multiple languages, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51381729335
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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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Captured with the Phase One Achromatic back and the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR-Digaron lens, with the back shifted down 8.5mm to maintain the building's geometry. I brought out contrast in the sky with a polarizer, but otherwise used no color contrast filtration. The camera was positioned across the avenue about 10 meters up from the plaza level (at the bottom of the "canyon" of the skyline reflected in the bottom center of the building).
Love them or hate them, mid-century rectangular glass curtain buildings like this are easy to dismiss as being "boring", but I think that misses something.
Reflections of the surroundings become part of the facade, which changes at different angles and throughout the day. I visited several times and made dozens of photos, all quite different, before I settled on this one, and there are infinitely many photos others could make, all unique. (Similar to the new World Trade Center in this regard).
The UN Secretariat building was designed by an international team of architects (most notably Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer) and completed in 1950. It was the first important "International Style" modernist skyscraper in New York - exemplified here here by a simple, unadorned rectangle with reflective glass curtain walls on either side.
Glass box office buildings became almost cliche in mid-century NYC, but the UN remains unusual in being set apart in the skyline, uncrowded by neighbors.
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there's a wonderful critique by Robert Hughes in "Shock of The New" of these.
I think it's this one:
(Trouble in Utopia)
https://ia903405.us.archive.org/31/items/the-shock-of-the-new/The%20Shock%20of%20the%20New/The%20Shock%20of%20the%20New%20-%2004%20Trouble%20in%20Utopia.mp4