![]() ![]() Everywhere else, the MTA’s maps have been geographically accurate and chromatically unchallenging since 1979, that reactionary year that also brought the world Margaret Thatcher, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Disco Demolition Night. Yet Vignelli’s map still hangs on the walls of connoisseurs of Modernism, many of whom are willing to pay good money for a copy on eBay. And tourists in “Fun City” wanted to see Central Park as a green rectangle instead of as a gray square, and to see Midtown as a traversed by a grid of single lines rather than the rainbows of triple and quadruple lines that Vignelli’s schematic offered up. After all, longtime riders who knew the system hodologically-as a series of stops arranged sequentially across lines-preferred to think of themselves as under neighborhoods and landscapes they could readily imagine, not trapped in an abstract web. Whether this sounds sleek and colorful or grimly abstract, it seems not to have been well-received. In his representation of New York, water was beige, parks a dark gray, and Staten Island was nowhere to be found. Vignelli made few concessions to geographical conventions. In the age of “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” Vignelli’s map transformed the subway’s lifelike twists and kinks into design work that was abstract but not austere.įor most of the 1970s, then, straphangers saw their system as a web of colored lines, arranged mostly at right angles, stretching from the West Bronx to the Rockaways. This is his 1972 map of the New York Subway, which made travel on its labyrinthine system look like a tidy and organized affair. What is likely Vignelli’s most famous achievement, however, has disappeared from the system’s walls and display cases. In the same era he did similar work in New York the two most ridden metro systems in the United States thus carry elements of his design work, and will for the foreseeable future. In the 1970s, Vignelli named the Washington Metro and generated much of its signage. For certain people-including design enthusiasts, collectors of maps, and veteran riders of the New York Subway-his is not a new name.
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