Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
The subway doors slide open, commuters shuffle in and out, and swarm the platform. Philip Ashforth Coppola doesn’t seem to notice the bustle at all. He stays put, feet planted, close to the wall, flicking his eyes between the tiles and his notebook.
He inches a blue pen across the page, making hundreds of precise vertical lines. He’s copying every single tile and other details that all those commuters barely register. There are a lot of them.Coppola has spent four decades documenting and annotating the architectural features of the New York City subway system in a series of exacting pen-and-paper sketches. While the drawings are black and white, Coppola jots down the colors, from cobalt to peach, and orange ochre to viridian.
It’s work of great attention, and chronicling the art and architecture of each and every station has taken a lot longer than he thought it would. “I’ve spent a lot of years on it, but I haven’t accomplished that much,” he says in a 2005 documentary. That, of course, depends on how you look at it. Coppola has made his way through 110 of the city’s 472 stations. His 2,000 sketches have consumed 41 notebooks.
Jeremy Workman, who directed the documentary, and his coeditor Ezra Bookstein sifted through all of those notebooks to select 120 sketches for a slimmer, curated volume, which will be published by Princeton Architectural Press next month.
An exhibition of Coppola’s work is also on view at the New York Transit Museum’s gallery at Grand Central Terminal. Both have the feel of a mid-career retrospective of an artist…The post The Man Sketching the Surprising Details of Every New York City Subway Station appeared first on FeedBox.