When Brian McGrath decided to liberate a New York City map from the x-y plane, he chose an unusual third dimension: time. The professor of urban design at Columbia University culled construction dates and square footage for 726 of the city's largest skyscrapers from real estate directories and entered the data into formZ modeling software, with each year representing 1,000 feet. Manhattan Timeformations - the culmination of 24 months of research and 6 months of digital manipulation - is an interactive history of NYC building booms and busts. The Flash-generated fly-through travels south to north up Madison Avenue. Color-coded icons represent constructions in each location over time, starting in 1893. White buildings went up between 1917 and 1940, for instance, while orange represents 1980 to 1989. The 2-D lines, also colored by time period, signify additions to Manhattan's street grid. An exhibit of the project (www.skyscraper.org/timeformations) - a slim 8 Mbytes in size - will be shown in the permanent gallery of New York's Skyscraper Museum in December.
ELECTRIC WORD
Timescrapers
High-Performance Design
Solar Powerhouse
Peripheral Vision
Cape Crusaders
Skeleton Key
