The Los Angeles posterA Los Angeles poster in a black frame, on a warm white wall, in flat afternoon light.0.707

Maps · Collection 01

Los Angeles poster, drawn from the real map

34.0500°N / 118.2500°W · United States

At this distance Los Angeles is not a city but a basin filled to the brim. Downtown is one point among dozens.

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 Los Angeles poster

What the map shows

A basin filled to the mountains, and a ribbon reaching for the sea

The Santa Monica Mountains cross the top of the frame from west to east, and Griffith Park sits in them as a solid pale mass: the city owns a mountain. Beyond them, the San Fernando Valley starts its own grid. The Pacific closes the west, and the freeways are the only black lines heavy enough to read at this scale, drawing a web over an otherwise even grey weave. That evenness is the point. Nothing here rises to a centre.

Read on

Two things worth knowing before you compose. The grey weave is not one city: Los Angeles County holds eighty-eight incorporated cities, and several of them, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, are enclaves entirely surrounded by Los Angeles. Nothing on the map marks the borders, which is exactly what makes them interesting. And the concrete river, which does run from the north-west down to Long Beach, is drawn here as a grey channel but is thinner than a printed line at this width. Come closer and it appears. Stay at this distance and the freeways carry the drawing instead.

Compose your own

What suits Los Angeles

The palette

The weave is the subject, so let it stay quiet: a warm grey, close to sand, holds better than a cold one over this much surface. Keep your strongest ink for the freeways, which are the only lines with enough weight to organise the sheet. Green here means two different things and it is worth separating them: the dry green of the mountains, which is wild, and the rare flat green of the parks below. The sea enters only at the south-west corner, and the harbour basins at the bottom will take a geometric treatment.

The framing

Vertical, pulled back further than any other city in the series. A wide format would suit the basin, but the story of this city runs north to south: downtown high in the frame, the annexed ribbon descending, the port at the bottom. Tighten by even half a step and the port leaves the sheet, which cuts the ribbon and takes the point of it away. If you want the concrete river instead, that is a different poster: come in close enough for the channel to hold its width, and let the harbour go.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. An exit number, a street in a city that is not quite Los Angeles, the name of a canyon: that line is what turns a plan of Los Angeles into your plan of Los Angeles.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

1781The oldest grid is tilted on purpose

On 4 September 1781, governor Felipe de Neve settled forty-four pobladores, colonists of Amerindian, African and European descent who had walked up from northern Mexico, around a plaza that still exists. The village was called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles; the American city was not incorporated until 4 April 1850. The Laws of the Indies required the streets of Spanish colonial towns to run at forty-five degrees to the compass, and when American surveyors laid their own streets due north, the seam between the two grids stayed legible. It is still there, in the middle of the map, though you have to come closer than this frame to read it.

1896The city was given a mountain

On 16 December 1896, Colonel Griffith J. Griffith gave Los Angeles 3,015 acres of the Rancho Los Feliz, five square miles of hill country, as what he called a Christmas present to the people. Enlarged since, Griffith Park is one of the largest municipal parks in the country, with the 1935 Observatory at its top. It is the pale mass you can see in the mountains at the top of the frame, and it is the reason the grid stops where it does.

1906The city annexed its way to the sea

Los Angeles had no coastline. In 1906 it annexed a strip of land a quarter of a mile wide, the shoestring strip, running south until it reached the shore. The port was created in December 1907, and in 1909 the towns of Wilmington and San Pedro were annexed in turn, against a pledge of ten million dollars of harbour works. That ribbon is on this map, and it is why the city has a shape no one would have drawn on purpose.

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 Los Angeles

The stretch you drove every day, the canyon you crossed to get to the other side, the block where your city quietly became another one. The basin is the same for everyone. The part of it you kept is not.

Compose my Los Angeles poster