EmoriaCustom art prints and star maps
Maps · Collection 01

Washington DC poster, drawn from the real map

38.9072°N / 77.0369°W · United States

Three points hold the centre of this plan: the Capitol, the White House, and the corner where the two green arms that leave them meet. Join them and you have L’Enfant’s city in a single figure, two arms of parkland at right angles and an avenue on the diagonal.

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 Washington DC poster
What the map shows

A grid crossed by diagonals, and a triangle at its heart

Two waters close the bottom of the sheet: the Potomac, broad, coming down from the left with an island in it, and the Anacostia arriving from the right. They meet at the tip of a long green tongue. Above them the grid runs north-south and east-west, and over it avenue after avenue cuts across on the slant, meeting in small circles and leaving triangular blocks wherever it crosses a street. At the centre lies the largest green on the sheet, a band of lawn running east from the river to the grounds of the Capitol.

Read on

Look closer at that band. A second green arm rises from it at a right angle towards the White House, and one diagonal joins the two ends: Pennsylvania Avenue. The triangle they make is the whole plan in miniature. The monuments themselves, the dome and the obelisk, are not drawn, only the shapes of the ground around them; the long Reflecting Pool, on the other hand, shows as water. In the top left corner, Rock Creek Park makes a green strip running north, and the rail lines converging on Union Station, to the north-east, are too pale to read.

Compose your own

What suits Washington DC

The palette

This is a sheet where green does as much work as water. The Mall, the President’s Park, Potomac Park and Rock Creek Park all take the same tint, and the triangle at the centre only reads if that tint holds its own against the streets: give it real presence, without letting it rival the two rivers. The water, one ink for the Potomac, the Anacostia, the Tidal Basin and the Reflecting Pool, can go deep. The diagonals need no colour of their own: they take the ink of their rank like every avenue, and their direction does the rest.

The framing

Portrait, with the centre moved south-east of the engraved point: the confluence and the tip of Potomac Park settle at the bottom, the Mall in the middle, and the diagonals fill the whole upper half. The neighbourhoods east of the Anacostia leave first, then the north of the district. Come in closer and the triangle grows, but the Anacostia slips into a corner; pull back and both rivers fit whole, at the cost of a centre that shrinks.

The caption

The title, one line under it, the coordinates. In a city drawn around monuments, the caption can name what no plan shows: a front door, a corner, the year you arrived.

The sheet
Subject
Washington DC, United States
Palette
Golden stone
Map style
Clean and Detailed
Layout
Bar
Typeface
Character
Framing
Zoom 11.8
Fade at the edges
0%
Format
Portrait
The palette of this poster

Golden stone

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 facts you can see on the plan

1791Diagonals laid over a grid

George Washington appointed the French engineer Pierre L’Enfant to plan the new capital in 1791. The plan laid a network of broad diagonal axes over a more traditional pattern of east-west and north-south streets: hence the circles and the triangular blocks across the whole sheet. Its most important axis, Pennsylvania Avenue, provides a direct link between the legislative and executive centres.

1902The green arms, cleared at last

L’Enfant had planned two broad avenues of public land, one running south from the President’s House and one west from the Capitol. After his dismissal the plan was only partly carried out, and the area long remained loosely defined. The McMillan Plan of 1902 reasserted his axial design: it cleared the Mall of intrusive buildings, filled in the canal and established the long, open greensward that is now the largest green on the sheet.

1882A tongue of land made from the river

In 1882 Congress told the Army Corps of Engineers to act on the shallow flats of the Potomac: navigation had to be restored, and the growing city needed more land. The Corps dredged the river and dumped the material onto the flats; from 1890 a seawall held it in place, and by 1908 six miles of wall enclosed more than twelve million cubic yards of dredged material. That made land is Potomac Park, the long green tongue at the bottom of the sheet.

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 Washington

If you lived here, you knew a circle better than the Capitol: the one you crossed every morning, a bench in Dupont, the short cut through a triangle on the way to work. That is the one worth framing.

Compose my Washington DC poster