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This version of the map is derived from sampled imagery from the previous map to create this Octagon Quilt Projection map of Oakland. The recursive sampling employed in this map creates a more geometric geography.

View the Google Map of Oakland Habour.

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When the 2005 USGS aerial photography was released to the public in the spring of 2007 there were a few places that were censored through pixilation. On this blog I documented how the White House was censored. I documented how the U.S. Capitol was censored. And I even experimented with a QR-Code to show that the Washington Monument was censored. After doing some exploration within the newly obtained 2008 Washington, DC orthophotography, I discovered that the White House and the U.S. Capitol are STILL censored.

However, now that the construction of the new visitors center at the Washington Monument has been completed, which is the reason, I am told, why the Washington Monument was originally censored in the 2005 imagery, the imagery of the monument is now available without pixilation. Moreover, its the exact same imagery that is being used on Google Maps. While I expect to showcase the censorship of the White House & U.S. Capitol in some future entries, I decided to make make my first map of this new dataset of the Washington Monument because I wasn’t able to make it using the last batch of imagery.

To construct this map, I first rendered a full-size Hexagon Quilt Projection map using the original imagery, then sampled a portion of the resulting map, and used the sampled portion to create this derivative map. I chose to sample the portion in the first map because of two underlying aspects of the map. First, I really liked the way the shadows of the Washington Monument combined together. Secondly, I liked the way the apex of the Washington Monument was combined (see detail below) to create a pyramid. Over the years I have enjoyed playing with the notion of aerial & architectural chiaroscuro, as in, using shadows generated by buildings within the original aerial photography to create a new, larger shadow. This map embodies this ongoing design element perfectly.

View the Google Map of the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

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After making eight different drafts, the client liked a modified version the best. Using derivative imagery from Draft #4, I was able to create the map above. It features the area around the fountain at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The client is having this map printed at 20″ x 16″ so the final printed version will look slightly different than the version above. As always, contact me if you interested in having a custom map created for you.

View the Google Map of the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

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A few days ago I started on a new commissioned map of the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The client made it somewhat easier for me because they were interested in either a Hexagon Quilt Projection map (above) or an Octagon Quilt Projection map (below). Unlike the previous two drafts, today’s drafts feature a far-away view of the area immediately around the Sculpture Garden.

View the Google Map of the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art

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The other day I started on a new commissioned map of the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The client made it somewhat easier for me because they were interested in either a Hexagon Quilt Projection map (above) or an Octagon Quilt Projection map (below). Like the previous two drafts, today’s drafts feature a close-up view of the area around the Sculpture Garden.

View the Google Map of the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art

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Yesterday I started on a new commissioned map of the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The client made it somewhat easier for me because they were interested in either a Hexagon Quilt Projection map (above) or an Octagon Quilt Projection map (below). Unlike yesterday’s two drafts, today’s drafts feature a close-up view of the area immediately around the Sculpture Garden. Tomorrow I plan on posting two more drafts featuring the close-up imagery…..

View the Google Map of the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art

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Today I started on a new commissioned map. The client desires a map of the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Earlier this afternoon I e-mailed a series of eight draft maps so that they could select which one they liked best. The client made it somewhat easy for me because they were interested in either a Hexagon Quilt Projection map (above) or an Octagon Quilt Projection map (below). However, I made the choice somewhat more difficult by providing a map of the location at different spatial scales. The two drafts shown here reveal more of the area around the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art, while tomorrow’s drafts will show the area close up. Over the week I plan on posting the rest of these draft maps, and like my previous commissioned map, the final map of the series will be the one that gets printed out.

View the Google Map of the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art

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Of the draft maps created for this series, it was the scaled down version of Tessellation Number Three that was ultimately chosen. Up next, a photo of the map printed on fabric :-)

Click here to view the Google Map of Sandy Spring Friends School in Montgomery County, Maryland .

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The last two maps I created for this commission feature identical tessellations of the area around the Sandy Spring Friends School in Maryland, but shown at two different spatial scales.

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These two maps feature identical tessellations of the area around the Sandy Spring Friends School in Maryland, but shown at two different spatial scales.

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These two maps feature identical tessellations of the area around the Sandy Spring Friends School in Maryland, but shown at two different spatial scales and rotate 22.5 degrees.

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This map features a different tessellation of the area around the Sandy Spring Friends School in Maryland.

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I was recently commissioned by a person who wishes to have me a make a map of Sandy Spring Friends School as a gift for their friend. The person asked explicitly for a map on fabric that uses the Octagon Quilt Projection. This made the process somewhat easier for me because all I needed to do was create different tessellations of the aerial photography around the school. Often the client does not know the map design they desire most, so I have to spend extra time rendering different designs based off of one or two tessellations. This time around I was able to focus on making numerous tessellations for the client to choose from.

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As I was doing research for the upcoming exhibition in Los Angeles, I decided to map out the area around the Gallery 727. After consulting a few different maps, I found that the gallery is technically located in the area known as the Fashion District, albeit on the periphery. Google Maps lists the area as the Historic Core, but I don’t think “Historic Core Quilt” has a good ring to it. I chose the Octagon Quilt Projection because I like the way the shadows in the streets form a compass rose around the center of the map.

View the Google Map of the Fashion District in Los Angeles, California

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Coke is used as a fuel and as a reducing agent in smelting iron ore in a blast furnace. Cokes are the solid carbonaceous material derived from destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulfur bituminous coal. Cokes from coal are grey, hard, and porous and the process of their creation gives off a lot smoke. It was also this smoke that brought me to this imagery.

The other night I was looking for new cities to map and came across the imagery of Erie, Pennsylvania. As I was looking around I found this blemish of industry near the center of the town. Like the maps Baton Rouge Quilt – An Oil Refinery Reflection and Enrico Fermi Nuclear Reactor Quilt, this map focuses on the smoke being generated by the geographic subject. I chose the Octagon Quilt Projection because I was able to create a smoke reflection that points to the eight general directions: North, South, East, West, North West, South West, North East, and South East (see image below).

What I find most interesting about the land on which the Erie Coke Corporation is situated is how dark the ground is. Surrounded by the blue hues of Lake Erie, the ground that factory sits on is completely black from all the coal that has been processed throughout the years. It makes me wonder how much pollution generated from this plant goes into the Lake and in the air around the town.

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Last night, after watching the video in my previous posting, I decided to look around the satellite/aerial imagery of Las Vegas to gauge the level of sprawl. Upon further inspection I discovered how much of Las Vegas is composed of large tracts of suburban, low-density housing. I knew there was a lot of this type of development, but it wasn’t until I started looking closely did I see the pattern of the development.

The neighborhood of Las Vegas that I chose to use for today’s map is called West Sahara. It’s a large retirement community that allows only people aged 55 or older to be residents. I guess you could say that I’m happy that I’m not even allowed to live there for at least 27 years. But as I mused before, will there be any water left in 2036 when I qualify to live in neighborhood? I jest, I would never live there– put me in the mountains or a city, but not in a cookie cutter house surrounded by only people my age.

Anyways, I chose the location because it features one of my favorite transportation designs, the traffic circle. I might make a derivative map of this location later today…

View the Google Map of the West Sahara Lake neighborhood in Las Vegas, Nevada

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It’s been over a month since I’ve made a map and to knock the dust off of this website I’ve decided to make a map of city that I’ve never sampled before. For over two years there was a licensing issue that prevented the imagery used in this map from being placed into the public domain. I don’t know when it was finally released, but I’m happy they did. This map features the downtown area of the Missouri side of Kansas City and when I was tessellating the source aerial photography I made sure to include something I remembered from when I was a kid. When we’d drive to Colorado from Missouri, we’d drive through downtown Kansas City and I always thought it was cool that there was a portion that created a tunnel that cars drove under. While I didn’t know it at the time, this building is the Bartle Hall Convention Center and I placed it at the exact center of this Octagon Quilt Projection map.

View the Google Map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri

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This fractal octagon quilt projection map was recursively rendered four times before the final result above. It took approximately two hours for each rendering to complete and then each tessellation was sampled while maintaining the source spatial integrity. Altogether this map took about 12 hours of rendering time and post-processing time to complete. I intend on printing this out for the upcoming lecture.

View the Google Map of the area around the New York Public Library in New York City.

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Using my new procedure, I pre-rendered 2 tiles to create this third derivative map of Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan. It looks very similar to Hirshhorn Quilt (they are both circular buildings) but they are composed of aerial photographs taken at different spatial scales. The NYC imagery has been downsampled to 2ft per pixel compared to DC’s imagery which is at 6 inches per pixel or a difference of about 16 times less detail (I think). Up next will probably be the New York Public Library, which was actually in the first tessellation, but dropped from the second.

View the Google Map of Madison Square Garden in New York City.

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I’ve had a couple geographers contact me asking if I was attending the AAG’s annual meeting in Boston. My answer has been that I’m too busy on various projects to attend. As a former employee and someone who helped facilitate two annual meetings (Denver & Chicago), I realized that the next meeting I plan on attending will be as either an exhibitor or if the trip is paid for by an employer. I would like to give another presentation again or organize a panel discussion, but, as with most things in life, I’m in no hurry.

Since I have not made any maps of downtown Boston since August of 2005, I decided to download the city, in lieu of going to the city. Pleasantly, I was able to download the city at two different spatial scales and from two different years: 2004 & 2005. So far the imagery looks a lot better than the patchwork design that was previously placed into the public domain. Eight different tessellations later, the entire downtown area will be remapped in the next week. Today’s map features the area around Boston Common, which is the oldest public park in America (created in 1634), and the Massachusetts State House. I chose an Octagon Quilt Projection because I liked the way the center creates a compass rose. Up next will be a derivative of today’s map.

View the Google Map of Boston Common in Boston, Massachusetts.

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