EmoriaCustom art prints and star maps
Maps · Collection 01

Houston poster, drawn from the real map

29.7567°N / 95.3653°W · United States

No coast, no hill, no edge of any kind: a grid running off every side of the sheet, with green threads wandering through it. One of them, heading east, stops wandering.

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 Houston poster
What the map shows

A ring, a grid with no end, and a bayou that was made straight

Follow the water from west to east and you have the whole city in one movement. It begins as a bayou, sinuous, doing what water does on a flat plain. Then it widens, squares off, and continues to the bay as a channel with rectangular basins cut along it. That change from winding to straight is not decoration. It is a fifty-mile dredging works, and it is the reason a city with no coastline became a port.

Read on

The other thing to notice is how little order there is beneath the motorway ring. Houston is the largest city in the United States without zoning: the city charter forbids the council from adopting it without a referendum, and voters have rejected it three times. That does not mean there are no rules, since subdivision ordinances and private restrictions between owners do a great deal of the work, but it does mean nothing on this map prevents a tower from standing among bungalows. Look for a single centre and you will not find one: there are several, and they grew where they could rather than where a plan put them.

Compose your own

What suits Houston

The palette

The ground is a grey-beige weave with no accents, and against it the bayous should read as thin frank green: that is the master contrast of this map. Put your strongest colour in the motorway ring and the radial spokes, in clean lines rather than a wash. Water is three different things here: winding in the bayous, geometric in the ship channel, striped in the flood reservoirs to the west. A map has a single ink for all its water, and the drawing tells them apart. If you make it green for the bayous, the lakes and the channel will be green too: that is the choice our poster makes.

The framing

Vertical, with the centre pushed east of downtown. The city explains itself from west to east, so the frame has to hold both the ring around the old centre and the channel leaving towards the bay; putting downtown in the middle of the sheet loses the second half of the sentence. There is no need to make the centre prominent. It is small, and its smallness is one of the true things about this place.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A bayou, an exit number, a date: that line is what turns a plan of Houston into your plan of Houston.

The sheet
Subject
Houston, United States
Palette
Bayou
Map style
Clean and Detailed
Layout
Header
Typeface
Minimal
Framing
Zoom 10.2
Fade at the edges
0%
Format
Portrait
The palette of this poster

Bayou

Sixteen inks, in the configurator’s order. It is not in the catalogue, but you will find it in the palette library, filed under its material.

  • Background
  • Water
  • Greenery
  • Built-up areas
  • Roads
  • Buildings
  • Text
  • Motorways
  • Main roads
  • Secondary roads
  • Minor roads
  • Streets
  • Service roads
  • Paths
  • Railways
  • Borders
Compose with this paletteStart from it to make your own

Opens the colour workshop with these 16 inks in place: change one, keep the rest.

It will wait in your account, ready for any piece.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

1836The city was an advertisement before it was a place

Two speculators from New York, the Allen brothers, laid out a grid in 1836 at the head of navigation on Buffalo Bayou, the furthest point boats could reach, named it after the hero of San Jacinto and sold it by advertisement. It became the provisional capital of the Republic of Texas. In four months of 1837 the settlement went from twelve inhabitants to fifteen hundred, and the first steamboat, the Laura, tied up on 22 January of that year. The site was chosen for one reason only: it was as far inland as a boat could come.

1914A city fifty miles inland dredged itself a sea

Buffalo Bayou and Galveston Bay were dug into a single channel fifty miles long, its head of navigation four miles east of downtown. The businessmen behind it took Manchester and its Ship Canal as the example to follow, and invented what became known as the Houston Plan, splitting the cost between local and federal money. The dredge TEXAS sounded her whistle to mark the end of the work on 7 September 1914, and on 10 November President Wilson opened the channel by firing a cannon remotely from Washington. Refineries lined the water within twenty years.

1948The city has voted three times not to be planned

Houston is the largest city in the United States with no zoning. Its charter prevents the council from adopting any without putting it to a referendum, and the voters have said no three times, in 1948, in 1962 and again in 1993. What governs building instead is a mix of subdivision ordinances, parking requirements and private restrictions agreed between owners. The result is legible from above: the grid is uniform, and what stands inside it is not.

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?

Making depends on the edition: 1 to 3 working days for Fine Art paper and wooden hangers, 3 days for the poster and the mounted frame, 3 to 5 days for the framed canvas. Transit depends on the country:

Delivered toIn transitIn total
European Union5 to 7 working days6 to 12 working days
United Kingdom2 to 3 working days3 to 8 working days
United States4 to 6 working days5 to 11 working days
CanadaNational deliveryGiven at dispatch
AustraliaNational deliveryGiven at dispatch

These are standard delivery times and remain indicative. For a set date, order two to three weeks ahead.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece can be downloaded from your account as soon as you order, and an email lets you know the moment it is ready.

All the questions

Your Houston

The loop you take without thinking, the bayou at the end of your street, the drive east that goes on longer than anyone believes. The grid is the same for everyone. The part of it you call home is not.

Compose my Houston poster