The Dakota, 72nd Street, New York City

This is an original drawing in pencil. The paper is not white, it has been tinted with watercolor to a light tan similar to the trim color of the building. This style of drawing is considered an architectural rendering. The drawing measures 9.125" x 12.25"

The subject is famous Dakota apartment building in upper Manhattan, this is the 72nd street entrance. It has been rendered with an hb pencil on hot press watercolor paper. Under the tint are two coats of white gesso for luminosity. This drawing is signed and dated across the bottom, Richard Britell March 2012

Some information about this famous building:

The Dakota, constructed from October 25, 1880 to October 27, 1884, is a co-op apartment building located on the northwest corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, at 1 West 72nd Street, New York, NY 10023.

The architectural firm of Henry Janeway Hardenbergh was commissioned to create the design for Edward Clark, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. The firm also designed the Plaza Hotel.

The building's high gables and deep roofs with a profusion of dormers, terracotta spandrels and panels, niches, balconies, and balustrades give it a North German Renaissance character, an echo of a Hanseatic townhall. Nevertheless, its layout and floor plan betray a strong influence of French architectural trends in housing design that had become known in New York in the 1870s.

According to often repeated stories, the Dakota was so named because at the time it was built, the Upper West Side of Manhattan was sparsely inhabited and considered as remote as the Dakota Territory. However, the earliest recorded appearance of this account is in a 1933 newspaper story. It is more likely that the building was named "The Dakota" because of Clark's fondness for the names of the new western states and territories. High above the 72nd Street entrance, the figure of a Dakota Indian keeps watch. The Dakota was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976.

Theory of the Leasure Class

The “Theory of the Leisure Class,” is the title of a book written by a sociologist named Thorstein Veblen. I’m not going to attempt to summarize the book in any way. I tried to read it on more than one occasion but was never able to finish it. Perhaps I felt that it was a series of very cogent observations which would lead me to the conclusion the my life and work was all a complete waste of time.

At one point in the book he talks about architecture, here is what he has to say in 1899:

“The endless variety of fronts presented by the better
class of tenements and apartment houses in our cities is an
endless variety of architectural distress with a suggestion
of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of beauty, the
dead walls of the sides and back of these structures, left
untouched by the hands of the artists, are commonly the best
feature of the building.”

This is very radical thinking for 1899, and the history of architecture from then until now looks as though it has strained every nerve just to please Mr. Veblen. But personally I think that such thinking leads to the Stalinist style of architecture we can see, throughout the world, starting in the thirties, and ending in the late seventies.

But I love the fact that he contrasts the fronts and sides of buildings in his writing, and it is true that in the architecture of his time the buildings exhibited these two radically different sensibilities. The fronts are ornate and decorative, and the backs and sides are utilitarian and devoid of decoration. I often develop the same observation in my drawings and this one is a very good example.

This drawing measures 5.75” x 8.”. It is drawn on gessoed cold press watercolor paper with a black wax pencil, with highlights put in with white paint and a brush.