Author Archives: ETHAN LEE

The artwork I chose is “Skyscraper” created by Paul T. Frankl. Frankl was born on October 14, 1886. He is a furniture designer who started his own furniture company called Skyscraper Furniture. Through his company, he created his very own design-styled furniture called skyscraper style. This unique style garnered a lot of attention eventually making Frankl popular enough to open his art galleries displaying his furniture in Los Angeles. 

The museum that I chose to go to was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They had a huge section of modern art on both the first and second floors. The reason this specific artwork attracted my attention was that this is not traditional art. The more widely accepted types of art would be oil paintings and sculptures. When walking into a room filled with 2d paintings this large cabinet immediately caught my attention.

The “Skyscraper” is a bookcase. It is created from maple wood and bakelite (a very strong plastic). Like many of Frankl’s famous works the “Skyscraper” is designed with his skyscraper style. This bookcase is shaped like a towering skyscrapers. The bookcase has a section on the bottom with cabinets. On top of the bottom section of the bookcase, there are three beam-like sections ranging in size. The left beam is the tallest, the middle one is the second tallest, and the right one is the shortest. This makes it seem like there is a skyscraper coming from the bookcase.

Frankl’s style was heavily influenced by his first impression of New York City. The first time he arrived in America he was in awe of how the buildings were so tall. It was such an overwhelming feeling that was stuck with him. Frankl then outputs this feeling when designing furniture. 

Frankl’s “Skyscraper” fits the aesthetics of modernism perfectly. The whole idea of modernism to to break away from conventional ideas of art. Frankl’s idea of creating art from furniture is modernism itself. Frankl is creating an entirely new way to express his feelings. This new expression pushes the border of what is even considered art. In a way the “Skyscraper” can be seen as an abstract sculpture. Instead of following realism and creating a realistic model of a skyscraper he instead made a bookcase. At first glance, you would not know what this bookcase is trying to represent until you are looking from the bottom up. Looking from the bottom of the bookcase it feels like it is looming and towering above you thus the name “skyscraper”. 

Hi guys my name is Ethan Lee. I am currently a sophomore at Baruch College. My intended major is finance. I am from Fresh Meadow, Queens. It is a rather quiet part of Queens away from main street. I love art. I have been drawing since I was around first grade. My parents noticed this and decided to send me to art school. I attended art school for 7 years and decided to stop. It was a weekly class and I had to draw for every single class. Eventually, the art classes began to feel like a chore rather than something that I love to do. Now I still do draw but just not as often as before due to school and my part-time job.

Something else that I like to do in my free time is watching anime. I was first introduced to anime during 7th grade by one of my close friends and I became hooked instantly. At the beginning of my anime-watching phase, I would spend all night binge-watching anime. It was as if I was addicted to it. Now I have calmed down a lot.

One of my more recent hobbies that I picked up was fashion. From middle school to sophomore year in high school, I did not care about the way I dressed. It just never crossed my mind whether what I was wearing looked good or not. During quarantine, I was on youtube and found a section of my feed that was dedicated to fashion shows, and because I was so bored I started watching it. At first, all these fancy unproportional clothes looked weird to me. It was something I had never seen before. I was curious if people actually wore some of these pieces in public and did research. This research introduced me to fashion icons like Playboy Carti and ASAP Rocky. From there I fell in love with fashion and started to pay attention to the way I dressed. This also caused me to start buying a lot of clothes. Fashion has become more than just clothes to me, it has become a lifestyle.