A Global City Mash-Up

Deck Two’s Global City is a towering mural that, as its name suggests, aims to encompass the world, or at least, its architecture. The work, entirely hand drawn and spanning full height studio walls and kitchen cabinets, collects architectural (and infrastructural) landmarks from around the globe and sets them in a vaguely urban configuration. The Eiffel Tower is a stone’s throw away from both Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and the Empire State Building, while the Taj Mahal and the Colosseum occupy prime riverside real estate. In the distance stand a dense group of mostly contemporary Asian skyscrapers, with the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Oriental Pearl Tower to the south (left), the Jin Mao Tower and Tokyo Tower to the north (right). Industrial frigates pass under the Brooklyn and Tower bridges, abutting large winding, high-way bearing infrastructures.

The mural bears some conceptual resemblance to OMA’s “skyscraper city” in the UAE, which similarly amasses a (desert) metropolis entirely composed of the last decade’s worth of skyscraper designs, both unbuilt and built alike, and in so doing, illustrates the fatuous and doomed “race to the top” and the very ugly, even destructive, work it engenders. Deck Two’s city isn’t nearly as critical, nor is it supposed to be. It’s more a fun formal exercise, something to liven up a depressing office kitchen and offer a visual respite from the backlit laptop screen.

This post originally appeared on Architizer, an Atlantic partner site.