METROGRAPHIES
VISUAL EXPERIMENTS WITH URBAN GEOMETRIES—Personal project, ongoing.
Metros or subways are underground transit systems that greatly influence how we read the cities above them with a single dominant image, the metro map. Metro maps are usually diagrammatic, simplified abstractions of a complex urban landscape that need to be very practical. Within their design lies a kind of sacred urban geometry. I love to play around with these maps, mostly of places where I’ve lived and took the metro a great deal.
I start with a set of parameters based on simple ideas and questions related to the visual translation of these urban systems. For example, what if the Paris metro was redrawn using only circles on a radial scheme? I transfer these ideas as a geometric language of points, lines and basic shapes, with limited use of text.
This process is an exercise in diagrammatic abstraction and exploration of its visual language: breaking down and playing with the diagram’s essential syntactic elements, concepts of readability, practicality and beauty, while deconstructing the domination of these hegemonical maps.