Plan to Street Elevations
Overview
In 1965, the artist Ed Ruscha photographed a 1.2 mile long section of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood known as the Sunset Strip. (Sunset Boulevard is nearly 22 miles long). He essentially archived the contents of the street as it appeared in 1965. In a subsequent work, Then & Now (2005), one can compare two shoots, one undertaken in 1973 and another in 2004.
Titled Every Buliding on the Sunset Strip (below) he spliced the images together and devised a novel book format. Consisting of a long offset print onto white paper, the sheet was folded like an accordion. When folded it appears like a normal book, and slides into a slip case. When unfolded, it is 299.5 inches long.
Instructions
Week 1:
From a measured plan you can project the width of buildings to an elevation. Many of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps include a number inside each building outline to estimate the number of stories. If the ground floor storey is typically 12-14 feet and upper floors tend toward 10-12 feet, one can estimate the outline of the building elevation that faces the street.
Week 2:
Using outlines of building elevations as a framework, replace them with photographic or drawing documenation of the facade. Note the year this information was captured or created. Since this is an open framework, it might be filled over the course of the quarter -- or by a subsequent team with access to additional archival material. To facilitate, create footnotes or endnotes of sources.
Note: If you find a photographs taken from an oblique angle, you can rectified it for display using Adobe Photoshop’s image transformation or perspective warp tools.