James Gulliver Hancock, ALL THE BUILDINGS IN NEW YORK, Universe Publishing, an imprint of Rizzoli New York, 2013. 

You’ve heard of scrupulous cartographers mapping our world’s cities, but did you ever think that someone could draw an entire metropolis—I mean take the time to literally draw out every building that makes up an urban landscape? While this sounds highly improbable, Brooklyn via Sydney-based illustrator James Gulliver Hancock has attempted to do just that.

In his new book All The Buildings In New York, Hancock assembles his charming and extensive drawings of some of the Big Apple’s most iconic buildings, as well as some more unfamiliar ones, into 64 pages of colorful illustrations. Described as a “love letter” to NYC, Hancock’s drawings capture its diverse architectural styles, from the brownstones of Brooklyn to the Art Deco Chrysler building.

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By Karen Wong
Karen Wong is the Deputy Director at the New Museum and an Architizer A+ Awards juror. In an on-going series, she profiles the latest and most interesting architects, designers, and thought leaders to join the A+ jury. See her previous post on Arup’s Rory McGowan here.

Maps are beloved by architects and designers. They reveal the nature of civilizations, migration of peoples, and often surprises that lie just beneath our feet, like the secret tunnels below the Vatican City. Mapping, as in the process of plotting data to inform a design practice, takes this affinity for logistics even further. The process is being readily integrated by architects and designs as a tool with which to craft anything and everything from monumental parabolic architecture to artificial ligaments and tendons. Three high priestesses have made mapping a new religion, and each has gained a devoted following: Paola Antonelli (the discourse on mapping), Zaha Hadid (mapping buildings) and lesser-known Neri Oxman (mapping matter). Continue.

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Japan has a tendency to take existing innovations and bring them to the next level. For instance, Japanese cars have consistently excelled in Western markets. Some say Japanese macarons have surpassed those of traditional French patisseries. Fine dining service in Japan is indisputably supreme. And now it seems that some cartographers in Tokyo came across London’s darling Animals on the Underground project—a project that traces line drawings of different wildlife within the famed London Underground map—and thought, “We can do this. Better.”

The resulting Tokyo Zoo Project reveals complex cycling routes throughout the city traced into the elaborate shapes of wild animals, from a tediously striped zebra to a mother koala with a child mounted on her back. Working with a host of requests from Twitter, the team of cartographers picked out 15 startlingly realistic geo-glyphs and programmed the routes into a personal bicycle navigation system. Each animal announces the total distance traveled and calories burned while giving a brief summary and a few poetic words of advice about the route. Be warned, “You need guts to draw the stripes of a zebra.” Especially if the zebra is 43 miles long.

[via Spoon & Tamago]

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Wind Map is an exquisite live-feed map that harnesses surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database to illustrate “the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US right now.” Designed by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, Wind Map visualizes meteorological data in a simple but resonant moving image, translating wind speeds and directions from their more common numeric and symbolic expressions into wispy, flowing lines that build upon each other like a silverpoint etching. “An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us,” the site explains, “energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.”

Could this be our favorite climate analysis site after Is It Iced Coffee Weather? Check out today’s wind map and an archive of past wind maps here.

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Image (c) Harry Zernike On Earth.

Fenceline communities are neighborhoods located adjacent to chemical plants or  industrial facilities. It’s not a term you hear very often, unless you work in environmental law or come from a town embroiled in conflict over illegal pollution. And small wonder: companies (and lobbyists) spend millions to suppress the negative publicity that comes with producing toxic chemicals within a few hundred yards of humans.

Yet the fight for environmental justice in many American fenceline communities have received an unexpected boost in recent years, from an unlikely source: DIY technology. GOOD’s Ben Jervey reports on one MIT Media Lab project called Grassroots Mapping, that’s helping average citizens discover powerful evidence of environmental damage in their communities using cheap, off-the-shelf parts. And he’s not the first to spearhead a movement to bring accessible technology to communities fighting for environmental justice. Keep Reading.

Image (c) Jeffrey Warren, via Flickr.

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Diorama Map: Rio de Janeiro

Drawing out mental maps of cities is nary a dull activity (first time I’ve used the word ‘nary’). Warped by what some would call an impaired sense of direction, my own scribbled maps have often dissolved into floating arrows and cartoonish landmarks peppered with unnecessary written details. These maps, drawn on the back of receipts and corners of take-out menus, knowingly brush up against a rich art historical tradition of attempting to understand and often systematize the world beyond our immediate line of sight. From Ptolemy and Mercator to Google Earth, maps have indisputably informed the way we perceive and interact with our surroundings.

Aware of the profound implications of cartography, Japanese artist Sohei Nishino has created a photographic series entitled Diorama Map, carrying out what seems to be Situationist-inspired artistic process, which goes as follows: the artist walks around a chosen city on foot and documents various locations on film. He then returns to the footage, extracting still images to collage into wonderfully complex mental maps that turn imprecise lines, misalignments and gaps into spaces for individual interpretation, resisting the colonizing forms of traditionally rendered geographies. More cities after the jump.

Nishino in front of his Diorama Map of London at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, photo via The Japan Times.

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Spot the shortest building on the block! That’s the Architizer HQ.

City dwellers have a tendency to think that the whole world revolves around their respective cities. While New Yorkers are correct in the assumption (just kidding!), a new Google Maps hack allows you to access Streetview through a trippy panoramic fisheye lens, turning your favorite city street into a microcosmic earth or an immersive urban whirlpool. The hack uses data from Streetview to create stereographic images that either wrap a stretch of road into a planetary ball or conversely explode Streetview outwards, creating swirling vortexes of urban fabric. Prosthetic Knowledge gave an italicized warning about how this is “probably the best way to waste your day,” and boy were they right. Two hours after exploring planet Kyoto, I took my final screenshots of a spherical Las Vegas Strip. More images after the jump!

Kyoto, Japan

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Last year, chef and Croc-toting television personality Mario Batali teamed up with Lidia Bastianich and son to open a 50,000-square-foot ‘temple’ to Italian cuisine in Midtown Manhattan: Eataly. New Yorkers hungry for a taste from abroad could now leisurely sample gelatos, sip on Espressos, and enjoy imported antipasti and freshly baked ciabatta whilst shopping for fresh fish and oversized jars of Nutella in a single Mecca of edible delight.

As much as this magical emporium seeks to commemorate its mother country by filling shelves and display cases with her culinary splendor, we are quite certain that Eataly is not synonymous with Italy, as the window banners claim, though its partial representation cannot be completely dismissed. Food has long been a principal means of exploring our geographies, evidenced in the spike of TV shows and blogs that document wayfaring travelers in search of the most eye-opening, vividly storytelling, perfect bites. In keeping with this trend, Antonie Corbineau has created an illustrated ‘food map’ depicting the celebrated boot-shaped peninsula as an agglomeration of vibrantly illustrated foods. Click through for a closer look!

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Click the image for larger view.

If you live in New York City, you may be familiar with the city health department’s campaign against soda, which—along with graphic images of bodily fat pouring out of soda bottles sure to discourage any eating on subway trains—has produced a cropped map of Manhattan with a yellow line plotting the 3-mile distance one needs to traverse between Central Park and Yankee Stadium to burn off the calories from an average 20 oz. soda.

The spatial homogeneity of gridded Manhattan and a widely shared familiarity with its geography have made the island a valuable scaling tool. One of the latest graphics using Manhattan’s layout to understand less observable distances was spotted on Brainpickings this morning: Kelli Anderson’s “Scales of Income Walking Tour.” Considering the Occupy movement as a physical occupation that has unfolded in space, Anderson converts annual income into physical distances on the Manhattan map, specifically equating $20k/year to one mile on the walking tour.

The average income of $54k/year, also known lovingly as the 99%, occupies none other than the latitude of Zucotti Park. Seen in this way, climbing up metaphorical Manhattan to the domain of the 1% ($506k/year) would mean traveling from Zucotti Park all the way to Pelham Park, which already exceeds the visible scope of the map. To find your way to the 0.01% ($27.3M/year) would require some serious traveling, putting you all the way up on Prince Edward Island in Canada. Meanwhile, the bottom half of all US households, which earn an average of $15k/year, can be found near Brooklyn’s Red Hook Ball Fields, where even some taxis won’t take you.

The scales of income map can be found gracing the cover of the third and final issue of Occupy!, a print gazette revolving around the development of OWS produced by literary and cultural magazine n+1. All royalties from the publication are donated to OWS, so pick up a copy here!

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This past March, the New York Times released satellite images of Japan before and after the earthquake and tsunami devastated the eastern coast. With a spectacular sliding feature that seamlessly overlays aerial views of Japan in two contrasting states, the interactive photos quickly spread through the Internet, becoming the most viral story of 2011.

Since then, the stream of news from Japan has dwindled, and the sensational imagery that had once gripped the world has lost its hold. An organization known as the Nagasaki Archive works to counter the fading impact of such watershed historical events through the creation of interactive, digital maps. Starting with the atomic bombing of Nagasaki over 65 years ago, the Archive overlaid photographs, stories, videos and more relating to a single widespread tragedy onto a navigable map of Japan generated by Google’s satellites. In having people confront instead of overlook these terrible events, the Nagasaki Archive hopes to move and to inform the public, one individual at a time.

Their latest map for the East Japan Earthquake offers a “mash-up” of content that users can explore to “understand the real state of affairs…that cannot be understood by inspecting individual photographs.” The map reveals over 100 photos taken from the New York Times overlapping with three-dimensional geographical features that offer comprehensive views of the Sendai airport and Fukushima nuclear plants, 360-degree panorama images, and geographically arranged videos of victims’ testimonies. The project is ongoing, constantly updated with the most recent photos and information that users can browse through chronologically. Click here to access the East Japan Earthquake Archive.

Images via.

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