You get what you pay for: professional cartographer Evan Applegate interviews better cartographers. Listen to the best living mapmakers describe how they create worlds in pixels, ink, graphite, threads, film, paint, ceramic, wood and metal. For show notes and bonus content visit https://veryexpensivemaps.com
https://veryexpensivemaps.com
episode 43: John Tauranac: “I seldom think macroscopically; I think microscopically.”
Manhattan writer and cartographer John Tauranac on his first maps of Midtown’s pedestrian passages, a public debate with Massimo Vignelli (“His geography was egregious”), working at a very different MTA (they used to have an aesthetics committee?), the “no improvements” made to the subway map since he chaired the 1979 MTA map committee, guiding Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s helicopter photo surveys of Manhattan, walking every block and learning Illustrator to create his acclaimed 176-page Manhattan tourist guide, how to make a usable bus map, New York’s vanished map stores, and a longitudinal view of the business: “plus ça change, plus c'est la même bull████.” See his work at johntauranac.com
- Tauranac Maps
- Manhattan Block By Block: A Street Atlas
- Bauhaus vs. Beaux-Arts
- Vignelli’s 1972 NYC subway map
- Tauranac’s 1979 NYC subway map
- The 2023 NYC subway map
- Nobu Siraisi
- John explains his subway map design choices
- Yann Arthus-Bertrand
- DeLorme Maps
- Alex McPhee’s giant maps of Canada