From my talk:
Elinor Fuchs encourages us to “see this entire world, do this literally: Mold the play into a medium-sized ball, set it before you in the middle distance, and squint your eyes.” This seems like precisely the sort of squinting process architect Neal Gaskin applied to the real five boroughs to create his distillation in the desert. The proportions of Gaskin’s postwar Gotham skyline are remarkably consistent, with the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Statue of Liberty all presented at close to exactly 50% scale (I did the math). The spatial relationships between the well-imitated icons and landmarks, however, are where the New York-New York becomes harder to disambiguate.
