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.
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.
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.
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. And give the water three different treatments rather than one, because it is three different things here: dark and winding in the bayous, geometric and pale in the ship channel, striped in the flood reservoirs to the west.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Four, from the barest to the most dressed.
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.
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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
