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The 20-foot-tall mural that GSA commissioned Alex Katz to create for the original lobby of the Silvio J. Mollo Federal Building demonstrates this prolific painter’s interests in photography and the effects of scale. Katz has said that his work is influenced by the large-scale images on billboards and movie screens, where faces are rendered gigantic, and yet we still interpret them as "life sized." In his work, Katz combines these everyday forms of commercial culture with the two-dimensional flatness of photography to create portraits and landscapes that are distilled to their barest essences, as totally flat planes of color. Katz has described his work as "something hot done in a cool way." He has cultivated this "cool way" with his smooth application of paint, the intentional flatness of his compositions, and the enormous scale of his canvases. Together, these techniques make the ordinary scenes of daily life depicted in his work appear dramatic and heroic. The five faces portrayed in Katz’s mural for the federal building lobby reflect the diverse backgrounds of the people of New York City, the artist’s hometown.