“Sometimes incredible buildings get lost in all the noise. They disappear behind the cars on the street or the branded coffee shops around the corner. I wanted to showcase them as the architect had intended.”Misplaced design by the American designer Anton Repponen is a wonderful mind game. He has taken some of New York’s most iconic buildings and placed them in different landscapes.
This type of photomanipulation not only makes you look at the design of the buildings in a different way, it somehow transforms your ideas about the buildings, the people who visit the buildings, and work there. If you ever have visited or seen these building in New York, think about how the manipulations and the placing of them in different landscapes change your feelings and conceptions about the buildings.
- Can you imagine hundreds of people from all over the world walking into the Metropolitan Opera placed in a natural landscape?
- Visiting the Guggenheim Musem in a rocky landscape?
- Or walking into the UN buildings placed in the desert?
Do the new settings change the underlying purpose of a building like the UN? The idea is that the UN building should be a meeting place where people from all over the world meet to discuss ways to make the world a better place. Is it better to place such a building in a city or in a desert? Why? Can we do things to ensure that the same purpose is achieved regardless of where a builing is placed? How? Can we use photos and art inside a building to change our ideas and feelings about the purpose of our visit?
Detached from the familiar Manhattan cityscape and the hustle and bustle of cars and people, you can understand the design better. The form and the architectural shape becomes clearer. But also, other dreams and goals with a specific building become revealed or at least more open to exploring ideas and embarking a think dive into new possibilities. Possibility to create and shape the environment that reflects the underlying purpose of the building.
Can you misplace other things? Play a game and misplace everyday objects from your home and place them in an extraordinary environment? Play with the sizes of the objects and the game becomes even more interesting like a giant toothbrush on the roof or hundreds of plates placed as road markings.
You can read more about the project here.
