Photograph by Euclides Santiago

It took a few Circle Line tours, hundreds of photographs and sketches, and two long rolls of trace paper to get there, but Matteo Pericoli’s debut book, a foldout illustration of New York’s West and East Side skyliness called Manhattan Unfurled, became an instant classic when it was released in October 2001. He followed up with Manhattan Within and See the City, a children’s book based on Unfurled, which got an exposure boost when the rap group The Beastie Boys used its drawings as cover art for To the 5 Boroughs, their album dedicated to New York. Pericoli earned a degree in architecture from the Polytechnic Institute of Milan and moved to New York in 1995, working for a time for Richard Meier on the Jubilee Church in Rome.

Q: Why did you turn Manhattan Unfurled into a children’s book?

When I began drawing the West Side—I didn’t know yet that it was going to become a book—I thought to myself, if I can make a drawing out of this apparent or stereotyped chaos of New York that is clear and understandable even to children, then I will have achieved something. So I gave myself a simple rule to handle the complexity of the skyline: to draw everything I saw, not to leave anything behind, that every building is worth drawing because it’s Manhattan. I wanted the drawing to appeal to children, too, that’s why the waves in the rivers are drawn playfully, like monsters almost. The idea would be that, for children, the skyline is an image, an image that you can change, by adding buildings, or coloring it perhaps.

 

Manhattan Within (above) shows Pericoli’s color renderings of the buildings that ring Central Park, and includes a journal he wrote while he worked on the book. Below, a portion of the east side from Manhattan Unfurled.

How have your drawings influenced your relationship with the city?

We as Europeans have a view of New York that’s informed mostly by movies, commercials, magazines, things like that. When I moved here I was expecting to feel detachment, massive buildings pushing me away. But in reality this place is very different from what anyone can see from far away. I found it to be as difficult as I expected, but at the same time there are neighborhoods and sights not in the guidebooks that make it very livable and humane. And it’s antiquated in a way I didn’t expect. Going into the subway was like going into the ruins of an ancient city. So, I felt a sense of injustice that much of what I’d been led to believe about New York, and by extension about America, was not true. And I felt a real warmth for the city because of that. That’s why I began the first drawing—to understand New York, and to appreciate it.

Do you have a favorite building in Manhattan?

I always liked how the U.N. is rotated off the grid. It’s the only building that looks out toward the east in a very clear manner. I had nausea while I was working on it because I had to draw all the windows, and then out of curiosity, when I was done, I counted the lines and I found out I had drawn 3,000 lines for that building. Three thousand lines! I probably absorbed it better than I did any other building I drew because of its orientation—it gave me the whole of itself.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m writing and illustrating another children’s book, and I’m also thinking about a new drawing project for New York. My wife and I moved recently from the Upper West Side to Jackson Heights, in Queens, and when everything was ready to go, I realized that the view from the window next to where I worked was stuck there, and I wouldn’t be able to see it again. Imagine spending seven years working at the same table and glancing up every minute or so through the window; it must have been months of staring. I realized how much my view of the city affected my work and my well-being. So I drew first a sketch and then a larger, more realistic drawing of the view, as if I had been able to peel from the glass what I could see. I took it with me so that I could enjoy this view even from the new place. In New York, the view from the window is incredibly important. It belongs to the interior, not the city. So I’m imagining a book of drawings that would be an encyclopedia of these window views, invisible to everyone else but the people who use and enjoy the view. The drawings would have to include the people, of course, and the window frames themselves, to be complete.

What do you enjoy most about drawing?

Each line has an invisible weight of fear and pleasure. In Manhattan Within, those big lines that go from bottom to top—like the bridge crossings, zoom!—those were tough, choosing the angle, the orientation. But you have to start somewhere. The thing that can never be taken away from drawing by hand is the fear, the fear of doing something that’s real and committed to paper. It’s the fear that makes it worth doing.