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An eighty-foot scroll depicts Syracuse’s cityscape next to a table filled with 75 miniaturized local structures at the Everson Museum of Art. The pieces, from the former Moyer factory with its famous rooftop house to a Byrne Dairy and Deli, make up “A Little Bit of Syracuse,” an exhibit featuring small-scale models of city buildings.

“Visitors will enjoy picking out buildings they know and love from the cityscape of models in the gallery, but I think they will also enjoy seeing buildings they may have seen countless times, but never gave another thought to, in a whole new light,” said Steffi Chappell, assistant curator at the Everson. “The hand-built models help show that each building, commercial or residential, is unique in its own way.”

The exhibit was created in collaboration with Li Han and Hu Yan, visiting professors from Drawing Architecture Studio in Beijing, along with 10 Syracuse University School of Architecture students. Han and Yan’s work primarily consists of designing buildings, murals and retail stores.

Their work combines scroll drawing, an art style originating from China that captures cityscapes in massive landscape paintings, and multi-point perspectives that pay close attention to even the most minute of details, said Michael Speaks, dean of the School of Architecture.

“(Han and Yan) wanted the students to make these models out of very simple materials like the buildings themselves,” Speaks said. “So the idea of this was we’re going to make a big scroll, like a Song Dynasty landscape painting, of Syracuse with all the activities and that’s going to be precise, but we’re going to have a counter-balance, which are these models.”

Students explored Syracuse and each chose eight buildings that became the inspiration for their models. In the process, they used colored construction paper, glue and other simple materials.

The exhibit is placed in a long, rectangular room in the Everson. The scroll drawing spans the perimeter of the space and, by the use of foam core, appears to float 1 inch off of the wall at each corner, giving the piece a curved effect. The table in the middle of the space also appears to float as it stands from its center rather than its corners.

“Visitors to the exhibition that are unfamiliar with Syracuse will still be able to connect with the exhibition, because while it portrays buildings in this city, they are buildings that exist in some form in cities and towns all over the country: convenience stores, theaters, warehouses, and single-family homes,” Chappell said. “These are structures we are all familiar with, regardless of where we live.”

Sanskruti Kakadiya, a graduate student in the School of Architecture and one of the students who constructed “A Little Bit of Syracuse,” said the exhibition influenced her experience in Syracuse as an international student unfamiliar with the city.

Kakadiya said the painting is a continuous narrative. Visitors can view the scroll as a progression through time and space — space in the context of each image’s placement, and the literal time it takes to observe the entire piece.

“Walking around in Syracuse opened a lot of different perspectives for me,” Kakadiya said. “Most of the buildings have different stories to tell, and also (are) not designed by any famous architects, but rather the people from the communities adapted and turned it into something beautiful.”

Published on October 3, 2023 at 10:50 pm