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Universal City, project, Sectional perspective

Universal City, project, Sectional perspective

Raimund Abraham
American, born Austria. 1933–2010
1966
A photomontage with ink and graphite in which Raimund Abraham imagines a hulking, infrastructural 'Universal City,' using sectional drawing and collage to present architecture as a monumental, engineered machine.
Seen head-on, the work hits you with tunnel-like foreshortening: a flat deck of repeating cutaways and deep shadows recedes to a vanishing point while exposed pipes and structural members thrust forward toward the viewer.
Rooted in 1960s visionary architecture, the piece fuses drawing and photomontage to make section an expressive tool for thinking about megastructures, infrastructure, and the city-as-machine—an approach that influenced later speculative and infrastructural design.
Medium
Photomontage, ink and graphite on paper
Dimensions
19 1/2 x 22 1/4" (49.5 x 56.5 cm)
Classification
Credit
Gift of the architect
Accession
1290.1968
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
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