atlas(t)

scale model of san francisco ca. 1940

okay, I said this blog was mostly dead, but I came across this other thing: a scale model of the city of San Francisco, commissioned and made by the WPA and completed in 1940, has been found and partly reassembled, and will be displayed in public libraries all over the city. !!!

The model was constructed (from wood) in interlockable blocks, and showed every single building extant in the city at that time (!!!) so if your building was around then, you can see not only the tiny facsimile of it, but its actual color at the time.

The current project, an installation called "Public Knowledge: Take Part," is planned as a library treasure hunt: "A map is available, to be stamped at each branch. There will also be four bicycle tours covering six to eight libraries per ride."

When the exhibition ends in March, “the hope is to put the model back together,” Lochman says. She has identified three locations big enough to hold it: the Light Court at City Hall, the Roberts Family Gallery at the new Howard Street entrance to SFMOMA, and the Ferry Building.

The installation will be on display in various libraries through March 25.

I was going to squee, but I'll leave off. I think I'll organize a tour myself though.

the san francisco earthquake blend

just sticking my head in here for a second to draw your attention to these awesome photos by Shaun Clover. He selected archival photos from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and then took photos from the exact same spot and blended them together. They look like sci-fi stories where two moments in time are blended by a wormhole or time-warp, or whatever the current fashion calls them. Awesome.

More on the project here.

Via Dino Ignacio.

mta.me

via Pireeni, this lovely map tracking trains in New York's subway system as they leave and course through the city. As each line crosses another, it "plucks" it like a string, and you hear a thoughtfully chaotic music. Subway art. Enjoy.

foreclosures: then and now

then:

Via.

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Via.

Via.

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now:

Via.

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Via.

Via.

Via.

Via.

the silent evolution

awesome. This artificial reef was created by artist Jason deCaires Taylor in Mexico out of environmentally friendly materials. It comprises 400 sculptures cast from members of the local community.

I saw this and thought: now that's some reparative terraforming! It's one of the less grandiose things we can do to reverse the damage we've done to our biosphere (although I think it's plenty grandiose as it is) but it hits a lot of buttons.

First of all: who doesn't love a reef? There are already schools of colorful, curious-looking fish taking in the sights. And seaweed hanging off the cement people's faces.  Who doesn't love a reef?

Secondly: it's an invasive/noninvasive project. I mean, yeah, the guy did just plunk down tons of concrete into the ocean where no concrete was before. The fish might find that invasive, particularly during installation. But no one is actually seeding chemicals or changing the terrain, or blocking the sunlight or anything. Just dumping concrete.

And then there's that whole aesthetic issue: i.e. the non-issue until you ask yourself why. Why isn't terraforming aesthetic? I mean, if all the stuff discussed during the conference is really as science fictional and underfunded as all that, why can't they play around with more aesthetic attempts at a fix?

I love that the figures are looking around in wonder at the fish surrounding them. It's cheesy, but effective. I can't wait to see what they look like a few years from now, wreathed in kraut and crusted with molluscs.

This could very well get me to learn to dive.

cityscape paris rug

lust, desire. Caution.

Yes, it's commodity. Yes, you can own it. For 3200 English pounds.

It's the felt Cityscape Paris rug by Hive. And I want it.

There's also a New York version, and, you can commission any city you want. And here's the best part: you can commission street maps as well. Omigod, I want a Berlin and a San Francisco! Arrggghhh!

I'm actually drooling.

animated kosmos

neither an animation, nor a map. But this vid of drawings of the cosmos over an old recording of Bach is quite lovely.

Now, can someone take these people aside and explain to them the difference between dissolves and pans of static drawings, and animation?

map animation vi

okay, our YouTube map animations have to take a turn for the interesting and meaningful or I'm gonna lose my shit (read: interest.)

This one above is part of a talk by some Canadian dude about who knows what. The data presented here are interesting, though. The first part is simply oil production between 1965 and 2005. The second one is oil production AND consumption. And if you look at the US, those Gil-Scott Heron lyrics (from 1984) start running through my head.

What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer. And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune...the consumer has got to dance. That's the way it is. We used to be a producer – very inflexible at that, and now we are consumers and finding it difficult to understand. Natural resources and minerals will change your world. The Arabs used to be in the 3rd World. They have bought the 2nd World and put a firm down payment on the 1st one. Controlling your resources will control your world. This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now.

Yes indeedy, it has. We should be seeing animated maps like this on the nightly news. The government should be reporting our resource usage to us like a department at a staff meeting: "Today's metrics are ..."

your entropy hand

i think I've found my new favorite blog (sorry Pruned!):

I've been working with Kaya Press (I'm doing publicity for them, freelance) an awesome, high-quality indie book press for Asian/Pacific Islander/API diaspora books. They published poet/novelist Sesshu Foster's first collection of poems, City Terrace Field Manual, an amazing work of landscape writing about the people and stories that inhabit a particular piece of L.A.

Sesshu's also been on my hit list for a long time because his second book was the novel Atomik Aztex, an alternate history which switched a Latino L.A. meatpacker back and forth between two parallel universes: this one, and one in which he was an Aztec prince in a world in which the Aztecs had beaten the conquistadores and ended up an atomic power. So up my alley.

Anyway, I didn't know Sesshu had a blog, but someone pointed it out to me recently. There I found this wonderful photo-poem of infrastructure entropy and imagination, titled "Sad America, who will hold your Entropy Hand?" Lovely.

I supposed someone could make a book or zine out of this, but then you'd have to fuss with permissions, and expenses, and stuff. I think this is exactly the sort of art/writing that blogs enable, and I want to see more more more! I kiss it!

Enjoy.

atlas(t) holiday gift guide

i've written so. Damn. Many. gift guides and year-end lists in the past couple of weeks that I can't think in any other mode. Such is the life of a blogger.

So, since my head's in this space already, might as well do a gift guide for the mappy and geographically inclined geek in your life. This is an ENTIRELY SUBJECTIVE list. I will not consider gifts that SOME OTHER map/geo geek than myself might like. This is just what you should send me if you wanna get on my good side.

Here goes:

• Panamap Series by Urban Mapping

A brand new series of what I can only imagine to be lenticular maps, in which three maps of the same city -- streets, subways, neighborhoods and landmarks -- are arranged like those postcards of Jesus so when you tilt the map one way, you'll see one image, and when you tilt it another way, you'll see another image. Three maps in one! Whether it works well or not, it's a collector's item. There are currently maps of Manhattan and Chicago.

• City Walks Decks Series by Chronicle Books

A wonderful series comprising one boxed deck of cards for each city. There are 50 cards per city, and each card contains a simple walking tour of a route of particular interest: either a neighborhood, or a themed tour. On one side of the card is a map of the route, and on the other side is the text explaining what you're seeing. The cards are the size of a mass market paperback, i.e. easy to carry around, and this is the perfect gift for someone going to a city with an extra day or two to spend walking around. The series covers 14 major metropolises at this point.

• Window Seat Books by Gregory Dicum

Two books that offer a detailed and well-designed guide to reading landscapes from the window seat of an airplane. There's one for the US, and one for Europe. I don't know if this series will continue, but I sure hope so. This is the perfect gift for a frequent flyer.

• Elvis Mars Globe by Greaves and Thomas

At £90.00, it's not cheap. But this accurate globe of Mars, with the whimsical inclusion of the site where an Elvis statue was found in 1989, according to a British tabloid, is the perfect gift for a Mars fan. My folks won years' worth of brownie points by getting this for me for Christmas a few years back. Greaves and Thomas also has a number of other historical and beautiful globes, including Cassini's 1790 terrestrial and celestial globes, and the first antipodean globe, which simply reverses the direction of the globe so we can see what the world looks like to an Australian.

• Starry Night star mapping software

When I was trying to figure out, for my feng shui on Mars novel, what constellations one would see from Mars, an astronomy professor turned me on to the Starry Night software which, among other things, enables you to see what the night sky looks like from other points of view than from Earth. Awesome. They've just released a new version, which is a bit pricey ($150) but great for your astronomer or star chart geek.

• Cheap historical facsimile maps

For those mapping geeks who just like to see -- or hang on their walls -- maps from historical periods, you can't go too far wrong by looking online for facsimile reproductions.

• Like these maps of the Great Lakes, which are $10-15 apiece.
• Or this boxed set of maps of London from four different periods for £27.50. 
• Blue Monocle Maps has a whole historical collection, which you can get in a variety of sizes and on your choice of paper, including world cities like this one of Beijing. These start at around £30.
• Historic Urban Plans has smaller maps of cities the world over that start at around $10.
• Historic Maps Restored has a series of higher-quality maps starting at $30 which are mostly of the US -- railroad maps, topographical maps, panorama maps, etc. There is a small collection of international maps.
• The Old Map Company sells maps of mostly England, starting at around £6. There's a small collection of international maps.

• (ETA): Here's one more I just found ... MAP PLATES! From Signals.com, these plates represent some of the countries of Europe, not all. But how cool is a series of plates in geographical shapes that fit together to make a map? I WANT.

There's much more along the lines of interdisciplinary books on geographical ideas, but I don't want to recommend very many books right now. I think the above is enough to go on for now, don't you?

But please feel free to add your ideas to the comments below!