Exhibition showcases Frank Costantino's hand-drawn designs that bring buildings to life

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: For more than 50 years, architectural illustrator Frank Costantino has been bringing buildings to life with his meticulously hand-drawn project designs.

Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston takes us through a new exhibition of Costantino’s work at one of Boston’s most storied institutions.

It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jared Bowen: From afar, city buildings can stand as hulking towers of glass, steel and stone. But, up close, they pulse with daily life. And for decades in Boston, artist Frank Costantino has been the man to give them the look of life.

Frank Costantino, Artist: So these were freehand sketches done right on the spot.

Jared Bowen: Costantino has long been a man architects of commission to transform their clinical architectural designs into colorful, humming, atmospheric visions. And in an era when most of these illustrations are rendered on computers, his have always been done by hand.

Frank Costantino: Hand-drawing is a discipline that derives from the early Renaissance and the early Renaissance development of perspective and the obsession that they had in developing these systems.

Lauren Graves, Associate Curator, Boston Athenaeum: You see graphite pencil. And, incredibly, he’s able to show glass and sort of translucency through graphite pencil, which is — it like, blows my mind, really.

Jared Bowen: Lauren Graves is the curator of the exhibition Visionary Projects, highlighting Costantino’s projects throughout Boston and New England. From hotel plans to parks, convention centers to concert halls, his drawings in graphite watercolor and colored pencil imagine new buildings and ways to revive old ones.

Lauren Graves: The old statehouse, you really are able to see the flags really blowing in the wind. You can imagine it to be this kind of blustering day.

So this is a sort of classic New England summertime day, and all of these small little traits, schoolchildren reenacting the Boston Massacre here, and then also British troops dressed in the sort of 18th century garb, intermixing with people in contemporary dress.

Jared Bowen: Graves says the works can read as portraits. They teem with life and light and movement.

Lauren Graves: He absolutely approaches each building as a person and uses little and big tools to kind of make that personality shine, signs of seasons, signs of time, such as shadow, so all of these kind of additional characteristics that surround the building, almost like a person in an old master’s painting that has a book by them.

Jared Bowen: Costantino says his work is deeply rooted in art history. His greatest influences are also some of the most moody landscape painters of the last few centuries, JMW Turner, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent.

Frank Costantino: In studying their techniques of watercolor, that in turn informed my handling of the watercolor, how I would apply it with a freshness, with a confidence, lucidity, transparency.

Then there’s the poetic side of it that comes with an evening view or a certain type of architecture.

Jared Bowen: History courses through Costantino’s work, not to mention its surroundings. This exhibition about buildings is in one of the city’s most historic, the Boston Athenaeum. Founded in 1807, it houses a vast collection of the nation’s literary and artistic treasures, including George Washington’s private library.

Both the Athenaeum and Costantino are mindful of their place creating the new amid the old, says Lauren Graves.

Lauren Graves: I don’t think that any image or any work in this exhibition, except for maybe a few, don’t have people. So he shows Boston as extremely activated, a city that is for the people and a city that is continuing on to hope for a future.

I don’t know if the Esplanade ever really looks like this necessarily, but you’re able to kind of remember and dream for a better future that you’re a part of.

Jared Bowen: You have spent so much time looking at this city. In decades of work, how do you describe the Boston you know?

Frank Costantino: It’s an evolving city. It’s an evolving city. It’s an evolving city that’s come about with a lot of care.

Jared Bowen: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jared Bowen in Boston.