It’s a new exhibition at SPUR – San Francisco’s centre for all things urban:
The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists.
It’s kind of a greatest hits: Corbusier’s Radiant City, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadace City. Lots more cities here.
But there is one that I had never seen before:
The Nolli Map
This 1748 map of Rome was created by Giambattista Nolli. It doesn’t look particularly exceptional today, but Nolli’s map established the now common practice of portraying entire cities from above without a single focal point (every block is viewed instead as if the cartographer were directly above it). The resulting image highlights the shape of the city’s street network and its development patterns.
I think this map, among other, dating from 1726, will replace the Nolli plan novelties in “perspective”:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_de_la_ville_de_Rennes_(F._Forestier,_1726).jpg
Notice, among other detail, that the public buildings are represented in exactly the same way as in the later Nolli plan:..