This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.
Interesting story from the New York Times on The Great Subway Map Wars:
One day not long ago, in a sunlit apartment on the Upper West Side, John Tauranac could be found examining a large, taped-together draft of a subway map.
[…]
The map also did something that present-day New Yorkers take for granted. It picked out parks and islands, labeled airports, and identified neighborhoods in blue type. In other words, it showed many features of aboveground New York – just as the M.T.A. map does, with its faint street grid, its bridges, train tracks and cemeteries.
Mr. Tauranac’s latest effort is also a potent reminder that one of the stormiest battles involving New York’s self-image involved neither development nor political leadership, but what would seem the most mundane of issues: the look of the city’s subway map.
This is a story about the overreach of Modernism (as in Corbusier) and how a movement became an aesthetic. The above graphic shows three phases of the New York City Subway map, from top to bottom: Unified 1939 map, Vignelli’s 1972 map, and the present-day map (pdf). I ask a simple question: which one would you like to use each and every day?
Vignelli’s 1972 map is, contrary to prevailing thought, an atrocity. The city is not a machine. Some have commented upon the design as …a marvelous conceptual map, and it was easy to read. It was a tool for navigating the subways, although not one for navigating the city streets.
I take exception to the first point, and agree with the second. Vignelli’s map is a put-on of Harry Beck’s London Tube Map which disregards London’s geography for a “rational” map. Vignelli’s map completely disregards New York’s strange historical accident of a subway system in addition to New York City’s unique geography.
Case in point: who thinks it is a good idea to have both local and express stations – the third most important piece of information after line number/letter and direction – designated by the same symbol?
This flaw is a wholly separate problem than Vignelli’s strange contortion of the landscape to fit his machine. Besides Chicago, New York City is distinctly defined by the gridiron; besides the effect on Manhattan by the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, the grid is a huge component of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, albeit in multiple overlays and intersections. One’s conception of New York City is hard to disengage from the geography. Michael Beirut makes exactly this point: …a lot of Manhattanites could tell you authoritatively how long it would take to walk from Fifth and 28th to Seventh and 44th. So the geographic discrepancies in the Vignelli map, which are no more than those you find in lots of subway maps around the world — they’re just glaring.
While the Unified 1939 map showing both subway and the extensive elevated lines is a charming but confusing failure at information presentation, it is more successful at its’ job than Vignelli’s map. And the current map (pdf) will not win design awards, it is a clear and concise diagram of the subway which lives inside the context of the city.
Clearly, today’s subway map is easier to use than previous maps. While not the spartan tabla rasa of Vignelli’s 1972 map, today’s map reflects reality and the city. Vignelli’s map is the repudiation of the messy life of urban living. However, life is not a geometrically pure existence, New York City even less so. By distilling and warping away the actual geography of the city and its’ connected vitality, Vignelli isolated the city from the people, much like Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine (1922) which envisioned three million people living in high rise filing cabinets.
It is interesting that Vignelli’s turning away from the city is during the exact period when the city was dying and was told to Drop Dead. Urbanism was thought to be dead, and what purported to be Modernism was springing up all around New York: World Trade was going up on Radio Row, Lincoln Center invaded the middle class Upper West Side, and the Bronx was burning (read the excellent book).
While parts of the city have become Disney, and it is increasingly hard to survive in a city already a playground for the rich, I for one, am quite happy to not be living in Vignelli’s cubic wasteland.
For more information, check out NYC Subway’s historical map collection, a history of NYC Government Issued Maps, and compare New Jersey Transit’s map.
I actually find this to be a very interesting topic! I am torn about my position in regards to the maps because I am a messy realist that loves the purity of the diagram. While living in London I found it unnerving to not be certain as to where I was in terms of geography (however, London’s cityscape it far more difficult to navigate than that of NYC) yet, at the same time was quite thankful that such a large and complex system was easily understood because of the diagrammatic manner of the map itself.
who wins?
I’m giving more thought to this issue and after a re-read I am taking some time to attempt to understand what your objective in this piece you have posted is. What is the question you are attempting to answer with this information? What is the thesis?
Which would I like to use each and every day?
Is it about the amount and kind of information illustrated on the subway map itself?
Is this posting about how it seemingly ignores some strange historical accident forever linked to the subway itself?
Or, how it ignores the “real” geography/cityscape that is New York City itself?
Is it about the place and role of this map within the modern movement/history or perhaps it acting as a symbol, at least in your perspective, as modernism turning away from urbanism and the city.
There are several large and general jumps (historical, architectural, graphic, social, urban etc) that take place in what you have written which is making it difficult for me to pick a subject to focus on to respond to further. There are many topics, all of them good yet difficult to create a discussion about at the moment.
I will post more as time permits because I do find this to be an interesting topic however, I appear to be alone! HA
I think the biggest clash between the Vignelli and Beck maps is that London’s system asks you to change trains (and platforms) quite frequently, which makes a wholly diagrammatic map more useful. It’s less of a lie to treat each route as a separate line in London, denoted by its own color and indeed its own actual “line” on the map, because there’s relatively little in the way of shared trunk lines and distinct branches.
Vignelli’s mistake was pretending each route, each letter or number, was a separate line. It’s just not so. Lines are physical realities, and routes are what you do with them. The two concepts are far from interchangeable in New York, not least of all because the physical lines correspond almost directly to a street above or below, be it Eighth Avenue, Flatbush Avenue, Queens Boulevard, or the Grand Concourse. The subways, therefore, are inextricable from the surface world, and attempting to separate one from the other wreaks cognitive havoc. I need only think of how many friends from out of town suddenly “got” the subway system when I pointed out this correspondence to the outside world.
Vignelli’s map attempts to adapt a good piece of design (Beck’s London map) to a context where it simply doesn’t work. This is less a matter of ideology than of design skill.