Blowup.(The Talk of the Town)(larger-than-life size drawings of Matteo Pericoli)

Matteo Pericoli has never felt compelled to keep his drawings to standard sizes. In 1998, he began drawing the entire perimeter of Manhattan on two thirty-seven-foot rolls of white paper. (Pericoli, an architect who now works mainly as an artist, turned that drawing into his first book, "Manhattan Unfurled.") But there is no sheet, or scroll, or any other type of paper big enough for Pericoli's latest drawing, which was commissioned for the new American Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. When it is done, it will be three hundred and ninety-seven feet long and will range from thirty to fifty-two feet in height. The drawing fills a wall that runs the length of the entry hall of the new terminal, and its shape reflects the terminal's swooping roofline.

"At first, I played with the idea of using drawings that existed and blowing them up," Pericoli, who is thirty-eight, said the other day. "And then I thought of putting buildings from cities I liked from all over the world into a single skyline." Eventually, Pericoli came up with a composition that includes four hundred and fifteen buildings from seventy cities. He organized them by instinct, not geography. Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, is next to the Burj Al Arab hotel, in Abu Dhabi, which is beside an old building in Buenos Aires, which is not far from a building that Frank Gehry designed in Prague. Pericoli balanced tall buildings with short ones, which meant that the Foshay Tower, in Minneapolis, looms over buildings lining a Venetian canal, and the curving tower of the Toronto City Hall gets to play against the curving roof of the Sydney Opera House. He also decided to add a building that never existed, an imaginary, Bauhaus-style structure by the artist Saul Steinberg. The one exception to the geographical melange is a cluster of New York buildings at one end. Pericoli made this grouping to represent the notion that it is from New York that you fly off to see the rest of the world.

Pericoli's freehand style is both precise and gentle: the buildings are meticulously detailed, but they are all washed with soft accents of blue and ...