It’s easy to get lost in the impressive architectural drawings of Virginia-based artist Benjamin Sack. His pen and paper works are not just complex and detailed, but also balance the fine line between order and disorder, making it challenging to unpack everything they have to offer.
Sack’s drawings usually depict metropolises packed with imposing buildings, spectacular maze-like streets, and other monumental presentations of urban spaces. Some are inspired by the real cities and architecture from the world, while others are a product of the artist’s imagination and contain abstract, fantasy, or dystopian elements.
It also isn’t rare for Sack to combine reality and fiction, creating a new “personal universe”, as he puts it in a recent interview.
“For me, buildings become literal building blocks, similar to cells and atoms, that as a whole, employed ad infinitum, spell out a cosmos,” Sack tells Voyage Houston.
Sack applies this to his creative process as well. Most of his drawings begin with a single landmark or a structure. He then develops his metropolis from that point, adding buildings, streets, and other constructions.
Over the years, Sack exhibited his works in galleries around the world while having artist residencies in Virginia, Italy, and on the cruise ship MS Amsterdam. He also frequently shares his new drawings on Instagram. Check out more of them below.
