Civil Monuments is a collection of images of certain residential high rises in New York city that present a strong aesthetic interest, which I hope to capture and accentuate. While New York City is filled with impressive skyscrapers that stand as monuments to the city’s history and progression, I find the monumentality of the civil architecture, namely residential architecture, perhaps even more of an intriguing topic, as the exterior aesthetics are not often the first thing considered by the designers, and certainly not the residents.
Each building photographed is accompanied by a short essay detailing its history: How it was designed, how it was built, how it was received, and how it stands today. The essays examine the buildings from the perspective of city planning, working in conjunction with the photographs which examine the buildings from an aesthetics point of view, in an attempt to provide a comprehensive overlook of these civil monuments.