|| 4/9/2009 || 12:31 pm || Comments Off || ||
Phoenix Quilt
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Over the years I’ve done my best to map every major city throughout the United States. Some cities & states withhold their imagery from the public domain and I’ve been unable to map those geographies (I’m looking you at Vermont!). While Tuscon, Arizona was released to the public a few years back, Phoenix, the primary city of Arizona, was not released until sometime last year. I don’t get updates of when new imagery is released in the public domain, which has kept me in the dark about when other cities are releasing new imagery, otherwise I would have mapped Phoenix sooner.
For this map I decided to employ the Diamond Quilt Projection on the area around downtown Phoenix. The source aerial photography was originally .8 feet per pixel, but in order to capture more of the downtown area I reduced the spatial resolution of the source imagery to cover more area. In doing so, I have most of the important buildings in downtown Phoenix. Known as Cooper Square, the buildings in this map include Chase Field, U.S. Airways Center, Sandra Day O’Connor US District Court, Bank of America Tower, City Hall, Maricopa County government buildings, Phoenix Civic Center, and Patriot Square Park. Unlike most of my state capital maps, the Phoenix state capitol is located to the west and I will probably have to go back and make a subsequent map so I can include it in my ongoing series of state capitol buildings.
Anyways, I resampled a portion of this map and will post it tomorrow.
View the Google Map of downtown Phoenix, Arizona
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|| 3/20/2009 || 1:08 pm || Comments Off || ||
Erie Coke Corporation Quilt
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
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.
View the Google Map of the Erie Coke Corporation outside of Erie, Pennsylvania
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|| 3/8/2009 || 4:59 pm || Comments Off || ||
West Sahara Lake Circles Quilt #2
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Using this portion of West Sahara Lake Circles Quilt to make this derivative map.
Upon closer inspection of the aerial photography, I think I know where all that water from Lake Mead went. Swimming pools!
View the Google Map of the West Sahara Lake neighborhood in Las Vegas, Nevada
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|| 3/4/2009 || 1:05 pm || Comments Off || ||
West Sahara Lake Circles Quilt
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
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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|| 2/25/2009 || 1:42 pm || Comments Off || ||
Harvard Quilt #3
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
The other day I decided to snoop around on some of my old hard drives and discovered that I had quite a bit of imagery that I never used to create a map. Yesterday I decided to use some of this imagery to make today’s map. It features .3 meter per pixel imagery that was taken in 2002 of the area around Harvard University.
What is interesting about this imagery is that its really not .3 meters per pixel, but closer to .6 meters per pixel. I found this out when I was post-processing this map and discovered that when the imagery is viewed at its full resolution it becomes quite blurry. At first I thought that I had screwed up and over-projected the map, but when I reopened the source imagery I discovered that it was blurry to begin with. Had I known this, I would have only rendered the map at 9,000 x 6,000 (one half the current size) because this downsampling would make the map less blurry.
Anyways, I haven’t been as active on the mapping front because I’ve made just about every major city in America. I still intend on publishing an atlas featuring all of these maps, but I have yet to find an interested publisher and am wary about going down the self-publishing route. I would, however, love to start mapping cities in Europe. Please contact me if you can obtain public domain imagery of any European city.
View the Google Map of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Do you see the heart within a heart?
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|| 1/14/2009 || 11:07 pm || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Quilt #5
: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :
Its been awhile since I’ve made a map, so I decided to revisit Georgetown. When making this map, I tried to center the focus on the intersection of M Street & Wisconsin Ave. I was able to do this more easily because I started with a smaller piece of aerial photography than I normally work with.
View the Google Map of the Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, DC
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|| 12/23/2008 || 12:12 am || Comments Off || ||
Saint Louis Art Museum Quilt
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
I recently read about the proposed expansion of the Saint Louis Art Museum and was reminded of all the hours I spent there when I was a kid. From school field trips to miscellaneous enrichment visits with friends & family friends, the museum was an integral part of my upbringing. My mom even has a VHS tape of me that was recorded there when I was 8 years old (1988). If my memory serves me right, I was enthusiastically talking about the notion of living in Egypt two thousand years ago, being a pharaoh, and the pyramids. Its been nearly 5 years since I set foot inside the museum and I wonder how much different it will look with the new wing? Probably not as awesome as it looked during the 1904 World’s Fair when it was the Palace of the Fine Arts, but I digress. Times do change and when I visit family during the holidays I’m going to inquire about the location of that VHS tape. I’m also going to look into my digital photo archives because I believe I took some nighttime time-lapse photos of the exterior of the museum in 2002. They’ll be a good follow-up entry.
View the Google Map of the Saint Louis Art Museum in Saint Louis, Missouri
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|| 12/19/2008 || 1:51 pm || Comments Off || ||
Commission: Yankee Stadium Quilt
: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :
At the beginning of the week I received an inquiry about making this map. It’s intended to be a gift for the client’s friend who’s a big Yankees fan. I was unsure if I’d be able to obtain the newest imagery featuring the new Yankee stadium, but since the client felt the friend had spent more time in the old stadium, the newest of the imagery was not an issue. I went with .5 meters per pixel imagery from April, 2006. There was a second set of imagery of the area at lower spatial resolution, but I liked the coloring on this imagery better and went with it. This is my first map of the Bronx borough of New York City and for 2009 I am planning on mapping the rest of the boroughs.
Like my previous commission I was able to modify the source aerial photography so that the nearby outdoor track has been converted into a heart. I debated on modifing the coloration so that the pinkness of the heart (below) would be more pronounced, but I opted to follow my current style of non-modification. Yet this inclusion of the heart motif is something that I find to be an unique addition to my current map design. I am adjusting the imagery to not only create a geometrically perfect design, but literally adding a bit of love to it. An aerial landscape design of love, so to speak.
There is also a sense of transition in this map. By the varying degree of translational symmetry placed upon the the actual stadium, there appears to be an architectural metamorphosis taking place. Where the old stadium is becoming a new stadium. And some day in the future, when it’s time that I make the next map of Yankee Stadium, with newer contemporary imagery, it will be a new stadium. But will the heart (track) still be there in the future? Will development change the love of the geography? I don’t think so. Yet in making this map for the client, I’ve captured the love between two people (and probably thousands of others) that will never change.
Unlike my previous commissioned map, which was printed at 32″x48″ on stretched canvas, this Hexagon Quilt Project map will be printed a bit smaller at 10″x16″ on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl paper. If you are interested in obtaining a custom map, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
View the Google Map of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx
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|| 12/13/2008 || 10:04 pm || Comments Off || ||
Newark Quilt #2
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Using this portion of Newark Quilt, I was able to constructive this Hexagon Quilt Projection derivative map. If you look closely there is a nice hexagram in the center of the map. I’d like to make a map of Trenton, New Jersey next.
View the Google Map of downtown Newark, New Jersey
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|| 12/12/2008 || 11:43 pm || Comments Off || ||
Newark Quilt
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Would you believe that this is my first map of the Garden State? It is. After hundreds of maps, I have finally gotten around to making a map of New Jersey. Originally the delay was based on the availability of color imagery due to the fact that I could only obtain false-color composite imagery of New Jersey. While it looks nice, it is not within the color parameters I’ve chosen to work with. If you look around this website you won’t see any quilt projection maps using this type of coloring. While I have modified the colors of the source aerial photography before, I have not started with false-color imagery and then made a map.
The imagery I was able to obtain and use for this Dodecagon Quilt Projection map is, ummm, to say it nicely, pretty much crap. According to the metadata, this .5 meter aerial photography was taken in March of 2006, processed in June of 2006, and released to the public on June 26th, 2007. Instead of using a digital camera, this imagery was taken with an analog film camera, printed out, scanned, and finally digitally altered for correctness. The result is a very grainy resolution when looked at up close and is comparable to the poor-quality Los Angeles imagery I worked with last year.
The imagery also suffers from the fact that it wasn’t taken completely at nadir. This means that you can see a mishmash of perspectives, where buildings literally run into each other because the angle at which the photograph was taken wasn’t completely overhead (nadir). For example, in the detail below you can actually read the lettering of the Prudential building due to the obliqueness of the original aerial photograph.
Anyways, now I only have to complete a map of somewhere in Vermont and I’ll have a made a map of a city in every state in the United States! I think its time to remove the dust from my last book proposal….
View the Google Map of downtown Newark, New Jersey
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|| 12/10/2008 || 3:04 pm || Comments Off || ||
Eye 670 – A perspective of Interstate 670 in downtown Kansas City
: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :
Using this portion of Kansas City Quilt #2, I created this derivative map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. This map is a unique map because it features aspects of the Lenz Projection and the Quilt Projection combined to create what looks like a human eye. By combing what it looks like with the location, I-670, the name of this map becomes a play on words.
View the Google Map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri
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|| 12/9/2008 || 2:42 pm || Comments Off || ||
Kansas City Quilt #2
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Using this portion of Kansas City Quilt, I created this derivative map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. When making this map I tried a few different variations but settled on a Diamond Quilt Projection map.
View the Google Map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri
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|| 12/8/2008 || 2:19 pm || Comments Off || ||
Kansas City Quilt
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
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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|| 10/24/2008 || 1:38 pm || Comments Off || ||
The National Archives Cross
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
So far I’ve made two other crosses: Mount Pleasant Cross and Memphis Cross. I am pretty sure how to make these now and future maps of this type will be added to it’s own special category on the sidebar. The cross above was chosen out of about 8 different tessellations and within this map is the National Archives at the center of the cross (hence the name), the Federal Trade Commission, the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Navy Memorial- which features a map of the western hemisphere (below), the Winfield Scott Hancock statue, the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial, and portions of the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden and the west building of the National Gallery of Art, which make the vertical and horizontal stripe.
For reference, click here to view the outdated Google Map of downtown Washington, DC.
: detail of the National Archives :
: detail of the Navy Memorial :
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|| 10/15/2008 || 6:16 pm || Comments Off || ||
Newest Commission: Shirlington Quilt
: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :
I’ve been working on this commissioned map for a few months now. It was originally going to be Paris, but we decided to it would be easier to make a map of their house. I spent some extra time transforming the nearby highway into a heart (below) to signify the love between the husband and wife. I think it looks beautiful :-) It will be placed in the client’s home, which is featured within the map.
View the Google Map of the Shirlington neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia.
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