from visualcomplexity
In 1972, the renowned Italian designer Massimo Vignelli redesigned George Salomon's New York Subway map, which persisted until 1979, when superseded by Michael Hertz's design.
It was 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. Out with the complicated tangle of geographically accurate train routes. No more messy angles. Instead, train lines would run at 45 and 90 angles only. Each line was represented by a color. Each stop represented by a dot. There was an obvious influence from the London Underground map, originally created by Harry Beck in 1933, however, Vignelli took it one step farther, in creating the now-famous intertwined wiring-diagram map of New York's vastly complicated subway lines.
The result was a design solution of surprising beauty. However, Massimo Vignelli reached a level of abstraction that quickly ran into problems. To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. For instance, Vignelli's map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide. It is said that Vignelli had planned a second, complementary map that would have been more tied to the actual above-ground geography, but the city never let him do it.
from Mike Hertz
ReplyDeleteVignelli's map remains to this day a shining example of how handsome a work of art can be created as a depiction of rail service. The map I created to succeed his, working for MTA's Map Committee, did not approach that level of graphic beauty, but did, on the other hand, provide the traveler with many more cues to where they are related to destinations above-ground, where they would ultimately wind up.
The notion of a second map, geographically accurate, strikes a wrong note in my head. I believe that a second map of the same system,creating some sort of parallel universe, would benefit no one, especially first-time travelers in a system that is at best vast and confusing. (A man with a watch knows exactly what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.}
Michael Hertz
MTA Subway Map Designer 1976-present
Michael,
ReplyDeleteI agree- there's a lot of tension between strikingness and usefulness. I understand that there was a lot of confusion with Vignelli's design.
Besides making nearby destinations more prominent, what was the goal you focused on in your designs?
Aside from actual destinations, we attempted to portray the city in a more familiar context for all travelers. Showing parks and bodies of water (in familiar colors), neighborhood names, ferry connections, large cemeteries, and an abridged street grid, we hoped to engender some feeling of trust in our map. Vignelli's map showed a city that wasn't at all like his pristine 'diagram'. If you remember the seventies then you'll remember that there was a lot of street crime, dirty stations and trains, and a feeling among riders that if they had to use the subways at all, they wanted their journey to be as expeditious as possible and an assurance that they were as close as possible to where they wanted to be when they exited the station,.
ReplyDeleteI'm almost positive that if NY City's geography resembled more closely most of the cities where so-called 'Beck' derivative maps are used, Vignelli's map would have worked better. Transit hubs are more centered in other cities' footprints as opposed to the Lower Manhattan/Downtown Brooklyn, asymmetrically focused hubs here.
His geography could have been much closer to the actual without even trying.
Mike Hertz