Jan Staller’s Manhattan Project depicts a city under construction

The cover of Manhattan Project by Jan Staller — The cover of *Manhattan Project* by Jan Staller

(Image credit: Simon & Schuster)

Photographer Jan Staller’s new monograph, Manhattan Project, is a sideways examination of the city’s relentless pace of change. Staller’s focus is not on the physical structures that give the New York skyline its ever-shifting dynamism, but on the materials that are being hoisted, poured, and extracted in the pursuit of new architecture.

An image from Manhattan Project — An image from *Manhattan Project*

Staller has been photographing the city for nearly half a century, focusing specially on the idiosyncrasies of Manhattan’s West Side, as infrastructure comes and goes and parts of the city fall by the wayside or remain forever unseen. The subject matter of Manhattan Project is there for all to see, yet most of us look right through it.

By turning his camera on the construction process and abstracting the results through canny framing, Staller has turned New York into an open-air art gallery, alive with ephemeral sculptural objects en route to decades or centuries of entombment within contemporary architecture. Rebar, cables, steel, glass and pipes are rendered as if they were bold pieces of contemporary art.

With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and an essay by Brett Littman, Manhattan Project is a worthy addition to the canon of New York chronologies. This is the Staller’s third monograph. Examples of his work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, while his editorial work has been seen in Fortune, Conde Nast Traveler, The New York Times and many others.

5 Continents Editions

Manhattan Project: Photographs by Jan Staller

Manhattan Project, Jan Staller, $54, Simon & Schuster, SimonandSchuster.com, Amazon.co.uk, JanStaller.net, @JanStaller

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Jonathan Bell has written for Wallpaper* magazine since 1999, covering everything from architecture and transport design to books, tech and graphic design. He is now the magazine’s Transport and Technology Editor. Jonathan has written and edited 15 books, including Concept Car Design, 21st Century House, and The New Modern House. He is also the host of Wallpaper’s first podcast.