Rob Carter's Metropolis is a video pop-up book for urban history nerds. Or a history lesson for pop-up book nerds.
Rob Carter's Metropolis is a trend trifecta: cartography, cut and folded paper, and urban history. Architecture videos--when they're good--can be jaw-dropping. But that's usually because they look so fantastic: realer than real, whether renderings or film, they turn buildings and cities into exaggerations easier to love or hate.
Carter (British-born, Brooklyn-based) took a different approach. Metropolis is an animated history of Charlotte, North Carolina made from a sequence of aerial pictures layered on top of each other. It's Manahatta as pop-up book, transforming Charlotte from Native American trading post to cotton-age boom town to tower-spiked banking hub in just a few folds.
The paper conceit ultimately works because of how well it represents the way cities feel, if not how they actually evolve: buildings pop up out of nowhere,...
Rob Carter's Metropolis is a trend trifecta: cartography, cut and folded paper, and urban history. Architecture videos--when they're good--can be jaw-dropping. But that's usually because they look so fantastic: realer than real, whether renderings or film, they turn buildings and cities into exaggerations easier to love or hate.
Carter (British-born, Brooklyn-based) took a different approach. Metropolis is an animated history of Charlotte, North Carolina made from a sequence of aerial pictures layered on top of each other. It's Manahatta as pop-up book, transforming Charlotte from Native American trading post to cotton-age boom town to tower-spiked banking hub in just a few folds.
The paper conceit ultimately works because of how well it represents the way cities feel, if not how they actually evolve: buildings pop up out of nowhere,...
- 2/16/2010
- by William Bostwick
- Fast Company
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