James Gulliver Hancock has, in his own words, “an interest in obsession and recording of places.” He’s an illustrator, so when he was in Berlin, that meant drawing all the bikes. In L.A., he tried drawing all the cars. Those were short projects, though; he was only passing through. But now he’s based in New York, and in New York he’s drawing buildings. All of the buildings in New York. All of them.
He’s looking for “the thing that the city was about in some way,” he told 99% Invisible, a popular design podcast that spent some time with Hancock recently.
There are maybe 500 drawings on Hancock’s blog — a small slice of hundreds of thousands of buildings in the city. Some of them are the weird buildings, the ones that stick out, like Cooper Union’s straight glass box building:
And some of them are buildings you might never notice:
You could spend all day scrolling through this site. It feels like walking through the city and learning the feel of different neighborhoods. And in a way, it does real life one better — you can get all of that without dealing with weather, crowds, or any of New York’s famous smells.
