This artwork comes with a Certificate of Authenticity signed and numbered by the Artists. The framing has been custom designed to complement its unique qualities and best exhibit the fine details and texture of the stainless steel. Only premium non-reflective glass is used for enhanced visual clarity and optimum presentation.

Current and former residents of Berlin, Sydney and Tokyo, Chauntelle Trinh and Eckard Buscher are global citizens with a long held fascination for cities and the urban milieu. Working as Architects and Designers they dealt with the minutiae of the city but yearned to explore the macrocosm of metropolitan life. They thus shifted their focus to conceptual, cross-disciplinary projects via the Metropolitan Cityscapes platform.

Sydney

Melbourne

Designer’s Statement

Our work deals with the physical and emotional relationship between humans and the urban environment. Designed to invoke memory, curiosity and reflection, our projects are invitations for a user-contributed response to the notion of identity – of the individual and of the metropolis.

The knowledge and skills we garnered through our experiences as Architects and Designers, continues to influence our creative process, intellectual perspective and the execution of our work. We use software programs, physical models and industrial technology to develop and give form to our ideas. It is a highly intensive process comprising of much research, digital rendering and experimentation with manufacturing techniques and materials.

The Urban Topography Collection is an ongoing effort and the first stage to the Metropolitan Cityscapes platform. Topographic abstractions of the urban anatomy, the series explores the re-imagining of space through spatial memory and comparison. World cities, each captured within a 3x3km horizontal cross-section, are presented as negatives where existing urban mass is removed and the structure purified to its basic core. Detail and accuracy are vital to reveal the city’s intrinsic form to appreciate the similarity and difference between cities. By establishing a common visual language to incite a cross-metropolitan dialogue we are able to observe the personal narratives and collective sentiments of viewers.

The level of intricacy and the precision of our work as well as the choice of materials and processes used, directly correlates to the complex, artificial and technologically governed nature of our urbanised world. Our style, subject matter and method of dissemination aspires to reach a wide audience for cross-cultural participation in the hopes of furthering our understanding of the urban (human) experience.

The Urban Topography Collection is a compelling insight into the contemporary city and a bold fusion of Art, Design and Architecture.

Merging image with sculpture, intricately etched into stainless steel, the works are visual translations of a 3x3km horizontal cross-section of selected world cities from across Asia, Europe and America.

As topographic abstractions, the cityscapes allow the viewer to (re)imagine the spaces dictating movement and life in the 21st century city, revealing the rich, intangible layers often mired in the myopia of quotidian life.

Borne of arduous research and intuitive interpretations of place and identity, the concept developed as the duo surveyed and documented the entire central streetscapes of cities like Sydney and Paris. In Tokyo, Buscher spent three weeks on a bicycle marking out every building within the chosen locale. More than 3000 onsite images were taken in Beijing, a difficult city to illustrate due to the restricted access to urban and historic records.

The cityscapes are drawn digitally, and painstakingly, from multiple angles using aerial photography, cartography and onsite measurements. Detail and accuracy are essential for comparison, to reveal the city’s intrinsic form and to appreciate similarity and difference between cities.

Comprising hundreds of thousands of lines, each drawing takes months to complete before it is transferred onto stainless steel and etched in a process similar to Lithography.

The technique utilizes German industrial technology used to produce fine components for wristwatches.

The results are beautiful, and often surprising. The Tokyo cityscape invokes a chaotic, meandering metropolis: and boundless possibility. By contrast, New York’s highly circumscribed grid is more linear and contained, has the feeling of moving people and traffic up, down and sideways. When comparing these topographies, the viewer gains new insights, entering a kind of cross-metropolitan dialogue.

“By subjecting ourselves to the monotonous task of inspecting every street within a given area, we experienced the city in another way. We became observers rather than participators. Despite this personal detachment, it is process of endless discovery. Cities are full of invisible boundaries, contrasting moods and magical details,” say TrinhBuscher.

Try and pick the major cities represented below !!!