40.7127°N / 74.0060°W · United States
New York is recognisable by a geometric contradiction: a perfectly regular grid, laid at an angle. It follows the axis of the island, not north.
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.
Manhattan is a narrow spindle, ruled by twelve avenues and one hundred and fifty-five cross streets meeting at right angles. The grid is tilted about twenty-nine degrees east of true north, to follow the axis of the island. Two things break it and are visible at a glance: the empty rectangle of Central Park, which spans some fifty blocks, and the diagonal of Broadway, older than the plan, cutting across the weave.
Below Houston Street the regularity collapses at once and returns to the tangle inherited from the Dutch town: it is the most interesting part of the drawing, and the part posters forget. All around, water closes the figure. The Hudson to the west is a river; the East River is not one, it is a tidal strait, and neither is the Harlem River to the north.
Graphite and slate blue on an ivory ground. The city stands on a base of schist and granite and is bordered by water on three sides, and the ink needs a clear contrast against the ground: without it, the two thousand blocks of the grid turn to an even grey in print.
Portrait, without hesitation. Manhattan is a spindle running north-north-east to south-south-west, far longer than it is wide: landscape would lay it down in the middle of empty water. The frame has to hold the Battery at the bottom, all of Central Park, the diagonal of Broadway across its whole run, and both banks, so the island reads as an island. If you want all five boroughs, that is a different subject: framed wide, the grid disappears.
The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A street number, a date, the name of a neighbourhood: that line is what turns a plan of New York into your plan of New York.
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.
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.
The Commissioners’ Plan sets out twelve avenues one hundred feet wide and one hundred and fifty-five cross streets, from Houston Street to 155th Street, and deliberately turns the whole weave twenty-nine degrees east of true north to follow the axis of the island. About two thousand long, narrow blocks follow from it. Broadway existed before the plan and was never brought into line: it was connected afterwards, which is why it runs on the diagonal.
Central Park covers eight hundred and forty-three acres between 59th and 110th Streets, from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West. The competition was won in April 1858 by the Greensward Plan of Olmsted and Vaux, which sinks the transverse roads to keep the walks clear of traffic. The 1811 plan had allowed for a few small open spaces, but not for this one.
Battery Park City, some ninety-two acres at the western tip of the island, is ground taken entirely from the Hudson with more than three million cubic yards of earth and rock excavated for the World Trade Center. The landfill was finished in 1976: the west shore of lower Manhattan, on a map, is a twentieth-century drawing.
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.
Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.
The block you lived on, the station you got off at, the bridge you walked across. This is not the skyline, it is the plan: the framing and the caption do the rest.
Compose my New York poster
