Artist Statement

"Urban Layers: The Architectural Identity of New York City" is an examination of how city buildings create their own distinctive identity through architectural discourse. Utilizing a street documentary style, I sought to capture buildings not as isolated structures in a city environment but as active participants in urban living — experienced through pedestrian movement, changing light, weather, and urban rhythm.

I have a multi-generational connection to the architecture of New York. My great-grandparents made their home on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx around 1905 as Italian immigrants. They came to a neighborhood whose cultural roots are maintained through their buildings. My grandmother went to high school just two blocks from my home, and I lived in an 1855 Greek Revival brownstone for my first 22 years. It is this connection across generations to the built environment of the city — that shapes my vision and photographs of these buildings. I come to this work knowing that architecture is not merely historical artifact; it's where communities are formed, where families built their lives and where personal and collective memory converge.

This project records the continuing conversation between preservation and contemporary development throughout New York's neighborhoods, with special emphasis on Manhattan and a sampling of representative neighborhoods that best illustrate this struggle of architecture. In close observation and detailed composition, my photographs show how buildings of various periods — Greek Revival brownstones of the 1850s, Beaux-Arts townhouses of 1900, mid-century modernist buildings, and silver glass skyscrapers of today — coexist and communicate within the cityscape.

The project asks questions that have shaped my family's experience of the city for more than a century: How do cultures balance heritage with growth and development? How do buildings express demographic transformation and cultural evolution? How can structures be simultaneously personal memory and collective historical record? Through juxtaposing similar building types in different neighborhoods and eras, the project demonstrates how New York maintains a cohesive architectural language while allowing room for distinctive expression out of the character of each neighborhood — a tension my family has witnessed across four generations.