Artists and designers through the age have imposed their visions of the present and future on an always-changing New York.
maps
Posted inArt
A Guide to Urban Havens in NYC, from a Quaker Meeting House to a Bird-Watching Refuge
The National Park Service and the Cultural Landscape Foundation launch a guide to New York City’s cultural landscapes as part of a series on urban design.
Posted inArt
An Incredible Map Collection Gets Its First Physical Home
Since the 1990s, collector David Rumsey has digitized and made freely available his thousands of historical maps; his site has long been one of the best resources for cartography.
Posted inArt
Maps Made to Influence and Deceive
Some maps are not designed to chart geography, but to express a particular belief.
Posted inNews
Discover NYC’s Over 1,000 Public Artworks with a New Interactive Map
New York City has over 1,000 monuments across the five boroughs, and the new NYC Public Art Map and Guide plots them on an interactive map
Posted inArt
Mapping the Fossils and Meteorite Impacts in London’s Architecture
The building blocks of urban landscapes are often riddled with fossils, with Jurassic reptile bones and Cretaceous sea creatures sometimes emerging from the stone surfaces.
Posted inArt
Charting Chinese History with 17th-Century Jesuit World Maps
Mounted on remnants of the old Ming Dynasty city wall, which once surrounded Beijing, are Western clocks and astronomical instruments for observing celestial bodies.
Posted inBooks
A Collection of Creative Cartographers’ Madcap Maps
Originally intended purely as tools for navigation, maps have long branched off from this practical function to become an unexpected medium for visual expression.
Posted inArt
A New Tool Maps the NYC Landmarks Near You
Last month, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) voted to recommend 30 of the sites from its backlog of nearly 100 as potential landmarks.
Posted inArt
Painted Maps Jam-Packed with Data
Paula Scher, the first female principal of Pentagram and designer of identities for the Public Theater and Tiffany’s — not to mention hundreds of hit album covers — grew up surrounded by maps.
Posted inNews
A Map Library Is Digitizing Its Rarest Globes as 3D Models
“Globes have a very low survival rate,” explained Ian Fowler, director of the Osher Map Library (OML) at the University of Southern Maine.
Posted inArt
Why Cannibals Were on Every 16th-Century Map of the New World
Many of the first European maps of the Americas included warnings of cannibalism, despite no proof of such activity.