The Atlanta posterAn Atlanta print framed in walnut, on a green-grey wall, in soft light.0.707

Maps · Collection 01

Atlanta poster, drawn from the real map

33.7490°N / 84.3880°W · United States

No grid. Atlanta is a weave of winding streets that follow ridges, and the green is not at the margins but threaded through the whole map, between the houses, along the creeks. The forest is part of the drawing.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Atlanta poster

What the map shows

Streets that follow ridges, and a forest in the weave

Two motorways alone cut through that soft weave: the north-south column of Interstates 75 and 85 running merged, and the east-west crossing of the I-20. To the north, a second centre, Buckhead, lines its towers along one artery. To the south-west, the airport takes up an immense rectangle, and it is no peripheral detail: it is the largest employer in the state.

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Look for no river either. The Chattahoochee stays outside the frame, to the north-west: it borders the city without crossing it, and Atlanta owes it nothing. The city was born at a railway junction instead, where the lines still converge near the centre like the spokes of a wheel. And Peachtree Street is one precise street, the ridge diagonal: the dozens of streets that share the name are local folklore, not the axis.

Compose your own

What suits Atlanta

The palette

Green is the main colour here, which is rare for a city this size: an undergrowth green, laid as a thin sheet over the whole weave, thickening along the creeks. A study by Georgia Tech put the canopy at 47.9 per cent of the municipal territory in 2008 and 47.1 in 2014, mostly on residential land, and the city’s own plan makes fifty per cent an official target. Against that ground, the dark grey of the converging railway and the red of the two Interstates, column and crossing. The only great voids are the airport and Piedmont Park: treat them as silences, not as patches.

The framing

Vertical, following the logic of the city: Buckhead at the top, the airport at the bottom, the column of Interstates 75 and 85 as the axis. Those two ends are twenty-five kilometres apart, so this is the widest frame of the series, and the centre pays for it in size. The point that matters is the railway junction, the zero mile where the lines converge, and it deserves to be the focus. Leaving the Chattahoochee outside the frame is faithful to the city.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. The name of a neighbourhood, a date, the name of a creek: that line is what turns a plan of Atlanta into your plan of Atlanta.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

1837The city begins with a stake

In 1837 the engineers of the Western and Atlantic Railroad drove their zero mile into a ridge seven miles east of the Chattahoochee. The settlement was called Terminus, became Marthasville in 1843, then Atlanta in 1845, the feminine of Atlantic proposed by the engineer John Edgar Thomson; by 1846 two more lines converged on the stake. That ridge is no scenery: the divide between the rivers that run to the Atlantic and those that run to the Gulf of Mexico begins near Peachtree Street. At about a thousand and fifty feet, Atlanta is one of the highest large cities east of the Mississippi.

1864Sherman came for the junction

It was the railway crossroads he came to destroy. The city fell on 2 September 1864, and from 11 to 15 November, before the march to the sea, Union engineers twisted the rails over burning sleepers, then set fire to the depots, factories and warehouses. Soldiers burned houses that were not targets, and much of the centre went up in smoke. Not all of it: churches and whole neighbourhoods were spared. Rebuilt on its rails, the city became the capital of Georgia in 1868, because in the South it was now the railway, not navigation, that decided capitals.

1999A loop found by reading a map

In the late 1990s a student named Ryan Gravel noticed that the old industrial railway lines formed a rough loop around the centre. His thesis of 1999 became a public project launched in December 2005: the BeltLine, twenty-two miles of converted track linking forty-five neighbourhoods. It is one of the few large projects in any city to have begun as an observation made on a plan.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.

How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Atlanta

The street that climbs its ridge, the stretch of the BeltLine you walk, the trees over the road in summer. The forest is the same for everyone. The part of it you keep is not.

Compose my Atlanta poster