JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 994

[This post part of a long and continuing series on Blank, Missing and Empty Things, #54]

If Edward Hopper was a practicing member of the American Institute of Steel Construction and was a civil engineer, he may have rendered his creations much in the same curious way as  those seen below.  I found these designs in an obscure publication, Prize Designs Submitted in the Elevated Highway Competition for 1938, and I found them to be utterly fantastic, lost bits of artistic expression and strong emotion sucked into a vortex of automotive steel and concrete.  They are just superb examples of found art that seems to play utterly against the purpose of the object, and do seem masterpieces in an unusual (and instantly-created) genre of “Unintentionally Cross-Expressive Art”.  They have a feel of Outsidery-Edwardy-Hoppery to them–they feel cold, a wet chill, with a coppery audio quality to them…images that make you want to go home and sit in a comfortable chair.

And not only are they lonesome; they are also foreboding:

Magnificent! And all once hidden away, but no longer.