For more than 50 years, architectural illustrator Frank Costantino has been bringing buildings to life with his meticulously hand-drawn project designs.

Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston takes us through a new exhibition of Costantino's work at one of Boston's most storied institutions.

It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

From afar, city buildings can stand as hulking towers of glass, steel, and stone. But up close,

they pulse with daily life. And for decades in Boston, artist Frank Costantino has been the man to give them the look of life.

So these were freehand sketches done right on the spot.

Costantino has long been a man. Architects have commissioned to transform their clinical architectural designs into colorful, humming, atmospheric visions.

And in an arrow and most of these illustrations are rendered on computers,

his have always been done by hand.

Hand drawing is a discipline that derives from the early Renaissance and the early Renaissance

development of perspective and the obsession that they had in developing these systems.

You see graphite pencil, and incredibly, he's able to show

glass and sort of translucency through graphite pencil, which is like, blows my mind, really.

Lauren Graves is the curator of the exhibition Visionary Projects, highlighting Costantino's

projects throughout Boston and New England,

from hotel plans to parks, convention centers to concert halls.

His drawings in graphite, watercolor, and colored pencil, imagine new buildings and ways to revive old ones.

The old state house, you really are able to see the flags really blowing in the wind.

You can imagine it to be this kind of blustering day.

So this is a sort of classic New England summertime day.

And all of these small little trait school children reenacting the Boston Massacre here.

And then also British troops, you know, dressed in the sort of 18th century garb, intermixing with people in contemporary dress.

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