New York landmarks transported to the wilderness

The white curves of New York’s Guggenheim Museum stand out against a burnt red landscape. The light blue column of the United Nations headquarters is set against a yellow sand dune, rather than the winding parkway of FDR Drive.

These two images are part of “Misplaced,” a series by New York-based digital designer Anton Repponen that sees the city’s buildings – both landmarks and lesser-known sites – superimposed onto his own travel photos, including desolate scenes from a desert, a meadow of pink flowers and a rocky valley.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

The bustling Lincoln Square that usually surrounds the Metropolitan Opera House has been swapped for rust-colored hills.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

Renzo Piano's irregularly shaped Whitney Museum is misplaced with an arid landscape dotted with small trees.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

Loose sand serves as the base for the twisting white pillars of Frank Gehry's IAC headquarters.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

A series of dark gray volumes are stacked to form the Met Breuer museum, located on the Upper East Side. Here it rests on a caramel-colored, arid landscape.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

Six blocks stack to form the New Museum, which has been moved from the Lower East Side to a Mars-like terrain with rusty dust.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

Frank Gehry's 8 Spruce Street, a 76-story residential skyscraper, juts out from a sand dune. Its rippling stainless-steel exterior matches the blue sky.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

The bent Standard Hotel by New York firm Ennead Architects seems to merge with this rocky landscape, with hotel windows opened to resemble surrounding boulders.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

Pink flowers surround 41 Cooper Square, a Cooper Union academic building designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

The United Nations headquarters, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier, appears behind yellow dunes.

Courtesy Anton Repponen

The white curves of the Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and George Cohen, stand out against a rocky landscape.

“I started with buildings (in New York City) that people knew first,” Repponen said in a phone interview. “And then it was paying homage to architects I really like.”

To create the images, he first photographed the buildings with a wide lens camera. He shot each one in chunks so as to avoid any distortion in the final images. (“The streets are quite narrow in New York and it’s quite impossible to capture buildings so that you see the whole thing,” he explained.)

He then edited them together in Photoshop, creating a single composite from multiple images.

“The Cooper Union building was eight images placed together, and there was a lot of manual work to redraw and to reconstruct to the first floor because the area was always under construction,” he said. “It was impossible to capture the building without any cranes or workers. It was a lot of intensive labor.”

Once he was happy with the buildings, he began stripping away their surroundings, leaving the projects on a white background. Yellow cabs, pedestrians and scaffolding have been edited out, leaving a flat visual of each structure, free of its urban surroundings.

“When I was cleaning it up (the New Museum), I got to the point where I cleaned up all of the other buildings to the left and to the right – the entire environment,” Repponen said. “The building didn’t look realistic at it. It looked taken out of context. It just doesn’t look natural.”

It was at this moment that Repponen decided to “misplace” the structures in natural settings.

“I dropped a volcano image behind, and started cleaning and adding more shadows, and making sure the sunlight matched (with the other photograph of the building),” he said.

Poised together, the metropolitan buildings and natural scenery emphasize their contrasting beauties – the former’s planned elegance and the latter’s organic allure.

“It is the buildings that we all know, which are put out of context and turned into a whole other story,” he concluded. “Now it’s something different.”