The end of 2023 and time to take an audit of what’s been published on Seen.Today over the past twelve months. So here’s the numbers. A grand total of 2,540 photos were posted spread across 36 stories. The majority of those posts were from the NYC area, but travel increased this year to include visits to South Korea, South Florida and Connecticut. I’ve already got a few events on the wish list for 2024 and I hope I can make some of those happen.
Here’s a selection of ten on my favorite images from the past year and some behind the scenes commentary about when they were taken.
Photos and Text: Dave Pinter
Attack of the Racks III | CCC
Classic Car Club Manhattan held this mid-winter event celebrating everything vehicle storage rack related. It also happened to fall on the coldest day of the entire ’22-’23 winter season with temps of 12 degrees Fahrenheit as roll in to the CCC garage started. It was frigid, but the morning light was pretty special and illuminated the interior of this vintage MG for a few magical minutes. The warm hued wood rimed steering wheel and leather dash didn’t reflect enough heat to detach the camera frozen to my hands.
HBF Showroom | Flatiron NYC
Commercial textile and furnishings group HBF held a design media preview for the opening of their new showroom in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. The light filled loft space design by Alda Ly Architecture has views of the surrounding neighborhood, including the iconic Flatiron building itself. All the more reason to use some of the interior glass partitions to reflect the outside in for this capture of part of the seating gallery.
Architecture Tour | Incheon
I’m a traveler that likes to pack as much in as possible, right to the last second. That was the case with a sunrise visit to the MVRDV designed Chroma club/The Imprint. Located just beyond the runways of Incheon Airport in Paradise City, the windowless structure has sadly been siting vacant since Covid took hold in 2020. It was a slightly eerie experience visiting the completely desolate site, but it made for some good last minute photos before hopping on a plane back to NYC.
Architecture Tour | Seoul
Seoul City Hall is a bucket list building to visit for anyone remotely interested in architecture. Now over a decade old, the Yoo Keri of iArc designed structure looks like a cresting wave of glass on the outside. Stepping inside is an experience with the vaulted interior intersected by layers of complex columns and beams with massive sculptural artworks meandering through.
Pratt Architecture | NYCxDesign 2023
Pratt’s architecture program continues to churn out amazing scale models for their yearly student show and summer exhibition on Governors Island. Industrial designer Rose Moon‘s The Garden caught my eye for the elegant use of curves and subtle integration of reflected color. The Garden is designed to be a space for exhibition scents, the curved partitions both contain a fragrance to a set area and provide more open zones to reduce olfactory fatigue.
Timelapse | Sarah Sze
This was the exhibition I was most looking forward to seeing in 2023. Sarah Sze’s been a long time favorite of mine. Timelapse at the Guggenheim museum featured Sze’s obsessive chaos with the added twist of having to work on the rotunda’s sloping floor. Everything used to make the installations seemed to become the installations creating this kind of visual feedback loop.
Porschella | CarPark
CarPark’s late summer event at Brooklyn’s Industry City started out as a disaster. NYC experienced more than two months of rainy weekends and this Porsche-focused event occurred on one of the particularly wetter Saturdays. I shot through the morning roll in with soaked shoes. By late morning though, the showers tapered off and it was a great time to get some glossy cobbled images.
Art is the Process | Morton St. Partners
Morton St. Partners carried on through 2023 with some great exhibitions like Winter Surf. Over the summer, Queens, NY-based artist Greg Anagnostopoulos tackled disassembling and rebuilding a 1987 Porsche 911 for Daniel Arsham gallery show. Art is the Process was every garage geeks dream and an opportunity to see individual vintage Porsche parts up close. It was also fun to chat with Greg, who rebuilt the 911 mostly from memory.
Adaptation(s) | Pratt Institute
The Pratt House on Governors Island hosted a trio of architecture exhibitions this summer, one of them featuring student work called Emerging Currents. This show included conceptual work for transforming the flood prone neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn. From a visual appreciation angle, there were some impressive models on display which benefited from some really nice soft window lighting.
Design Miami/ 2023
One stand at Design Miami 2023 stood out above the rest, Villa Albertine and Mobilier national’s installation created by Atelier d’Offard. It was an all white stand with sculptural columns and arches formed from layers of paper. The stand was meant to spotlight the work of five contemporary French designers and craftspeople. The stand itself got all my attention, the mix of shapes are really interesting and feel fresh. There’s simplicity and detail. To me it says primitive sci-fi and it looks quite cool.
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