In fact, the 1972 map was ahead of its time. As a vindicated Vignelli told me, the map was “created in BC (before computer) for the AC (after computer) era.” He’s right again. His original, economical format is perfect for web accessibility. The new digital iteration is the result of the combined efforts of Vignelli and two of his associates, Beatriz Cifuentes and Yoshiki Waterhouse. One of their first acts was to rename the map. It is now a diagram, which actually makes sense, as it is not a literal representation, but a semantic one. They also agreed to add supplementary neighborhood map options—online versions of the proprietary maps already used in MTA stations.
For The Weekender, the team rebuilt the diagram geometry from scratch using a new primary grid for Midtown. This grid is essentially a square bound by 14th and 59th Streets, and Park and Eighth Avenues, with Broadway running diagonally from corner to corner. Intervals between major cross streets like 14th or 42nd were placed equidistantly along the grid, with more minor stops, like 18th and 28th, placed in between. And, Waterhouse adds, “We introduced a hollow dot to represent stops, which were sometimes passed, depending on schedule, known as a ‘sometimes-stop.’”
Waterhouse explains that all critiques of the 1972 map—which had been dutifully retained by the MTA—were addressed. But Vignelli’s biggest bugaboo was showing the parks. He believed that including them—particularly Central Park—was the downfall of the 1972 map, so the new iteration eliminates all parks. Issues of type size and legibility were addressed, and line colors, station names, and connections were all updated.
In addition to temporary closures for maintenance, certain lines (such as the B train) do not run on weekends. Yet rather than eliminate the line from The Weekender map altogether, Waterhouse explained, “We reasoned that it was better to leave it in the diagram to be more consistent with the signage, only in a ghosted shade of the same color. For working lines, we created a series of line-specific animated flashing dots to designate stops undergoing planned work. Thus users can swiftly see if their stop is affected without parsing through the laundry list of text for each line, or referencing which trains stop where.”
On The Weekender website, the diagram can be panned and zoomed, and as you mouse over it, the adjacent dots that make up each station light up to indicate a link, allowing users to navigate the system graphically. Alternatively, the system can be searched by station, line or borough. Lastly, every view of the diagram is complemented by a geographic neighborhood map, essentially giving riders a means of navigating the system both above and below ground.
That Vignelli was allowed a second chance to correct the original map’s flaws is itself incredible. That the digital version works so well is a testament to his decision to make a “diagram” instead of a map—even if it was almost four decades too early.
ICONOGRAPHY
The Master Race’s Graphic Masterpiece
Designers and design historians told me over the years that they had heard about the existence of a Nazi graphics standards manual. No one could say they actually saw it, but they knew of someone who had. So it grew into something of a Big Foot or Loch Ness Monster tale, until one day I, too, actually saw it—and it had been right under my nose all the time.
I had envisioned a manual of the kind that Lester Beall did for International Paper or Paul Rand did for IBM, showing acceptable logo weights and sizes, corporate typefaces and colors. I was so familiar with these standards manuals, that it never even occurred to me they were postwar formats—and decidedly modern. Maybe the Nazis did theirs in a different way.
The Nazis brand may indeed be uniformly distinctive, but for all the significance they placed on graphic design, there was more variety and greater leeway than one might think. Nonetheless, once I determined who was responsible for maintaining the NSDAP brand, it was a bit easier to identify the identity manual.
First, there were different bureaucracies: the Party’s identity was overseen by one leader, while the state’s identity was handled by another—and within these were many sub-chambers too. Dr. Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda (PROMI) did not oversee the signs and symbols of the Party. Although his Ministry had a graphic design atelier, it was primarily for creating the propaganda materials. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and the designer of Nazi spectacles, did not administer to the identity either. His office designed monumental ways of displaying the existing brand.
The policing of all things Swastika was the responsibility of Dr. Robert Ley, the head of the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF). Known as much as anything for his heavy drinking, this former editor of the anti-Semitic newspaper, Westdeutsche Beobachter, was not a designer or an art director, but garnered considerable power owing to his intense loyalty to Hitler. One of his most ambitious design initiatives was taking over the development of the Volkswagen (people’s car) from Porsche.
Perhaps a lesser, though significant, responsibility was developing an NSDAP handbook that detailed the organizing principles and mechanics of building the Nazi movement. It is this 550-page, red cloth-bound book titled Organisationsbuch der NSDAP, with the symbol of “Greater Germany” embossed in silver on the front, which turns out to be the elusive standards manual. The DAF was also responsible for typesetting guides and other graphic arts handbooks, but this is the graphic masterpiece of the Master Race.
It is not exactly clear how much Dr. Ley (who hung himself after the war) was personally involved, although his introduction is in the volume. Perhaps he did not know the difference between typefaces, or even what graphic design was. But it was his office that determined the standards of stationary, enamel signs, flags and pennants, awards and badges, party uniforms, and all things involving the swastika and ancillary symbols. So someone in Dr. Ley’s office knew what he was doing, though received no credit.
Published in 1936, the Organisationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over seventy full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book “over-explains the obvious” and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.
When I noted above that the book was under my nose, I meant this literally and figuratively. Many of the color plates, which visually establish the identity standards, have been reproduced in histories of World War II and the Nazis, without proper attribution. So, I’ve seen some of them before. Also, the Nazis issued a 255-page book, ABC des Nationalsozialismus (1933) by Dr. Curt Rosten, which in a more condensed fashion provided some early Nazi visual standards. It turns out I had this book in my collection all along without knowing its significance.
There was a standards manual after all. It just was not what I envisioned or expected. It turned out another record of graphic standards existed where I least expected it: the Reichsgesetzblatt (Law Journal). When a graphic element was changed by law or decree, it was chronicled in this document. So the Loch Ness mystery was solved, somewhat.
Clipping Art, One Engraving At a Time
I don’t know who coined the term “clip art” but it is the universal moniker for permission-free imagery. The concept dates back to decoupage in the late nineteenth century, but became a formal anti-art art in the twentieth with the Dadas in Zurich and Berlin, who freely clipped printers’ cuts found in commercial catalogs and samplers for use in their ersatz advertisement and periodical layouts. It was further fine-tuned by, among others, Max Ernst in his 1934 proto- “graphic novel” Une Semaine De Bonté (A Week of Kindness), which usurps and converts nineteenth-century steel engravings for his quirky surreal narrative. To say the preoccupation with old engravings and printers’ fragments pre-dates psychedelic, punk, and grunge is a clic
hé. Nonetheless, it did; each style used clip art. While influenced by Dada and Surrealism, it was also a cheap and facile way to make something that had all the characteristics of professional art but none of the muss. All one needed were scissors, X-Acto, glue (or wax), and just a meager sense of the absurd. The funny thing about clip art is it kind of composed itself. There were (and are) so many variations on so many visual themes, that one had to be blind as a mole not to find a way to make graphic connections. In other words, if one could not employ clip art to great advantage one should look for another line of less demanding work.
Paging through my old books was a trip down desperation lane. I was reminded of literally scores of collage illustrations I made on numerous occasions for a couple of publications just when deadline time was running out. My biggest outlet was the New York Times Letters to the Editor page back in the seventies, which I art directed back in the days. In fact, I actually remember many of the specific briefs I was illustrating and the various cuts I played with until coming up with the finished mechanical. Usually, these things took less than an hour to make, and as long as I stuck tangentially to the text, the image did its job. For an image, titled “Meditations From the Countryside,” I found cuts of dancers prancing, a Lincoln log cabin, and variations of bulrushes a’ growin’ (all in the same book) that I photostated in three different sizes, cut and pasted into a seemingly seamless whole. It was a pleasurable feeling to make the puzzle work out. I also loved Oxford rule boarder tape that gave the image more vintage patina. Voila! Instant art! And free too! Yet how embarrassing it was to find other collagists using the same imagery, doubtless from the same source, for totally different concepts.
That was one major problem with clip art: the curious phenomenon that most of us who used it used the same basic 100 or so cuts. Aside from the typical tropes—flags, Uncle Sam’s, Santa, donkeys and elephants, variations on Venus and David, Model T cars, etc.—pointing fingers were the biggest favorites. It is incredible how many editorial problems could be solved simply with a pointing finger—they were everywhere. But one image that for some inexplicable reason was the most commonly and annoyingly employed was the one of crazed old man in a nightshirt frolicking, hand-in-hand with a young barefoot nymph. It is on the cover of Old Engravings & Illustrations just beside the famous Gibson Girl (the number one icon of the Gilded Age), and could be found in countless layouts, almost as though it was the sign of some cult and all the members conspired to fill the media with it.
Eventually, I weaned myself off clip art. The style had become too familiar and out-of-date. What’s more, getting illustrators to do original work was far more satisfying. There were still a number of illustrators, however, using clip art in their own work and after a while I forbade any such being used in the work I assigned for the Times. Of course, in the age of Photoshop and digital tomfoolery, an entirely new clip art aesthetic has emerged that some art directors I know have begun to reject. I wonder as the style wheel turns, whether the new generation will return to the old clip art tradition. Let’s hope not. I prefer it as a memory.
1939/1940 New York World’s Fair
Sometimes at night I lie awake in the dark and try to recapture the vision and the sound of the World of Tomorrow,” wrote Meyer Berger in 1940, shortly after the World’s Fair closed. “I try to remember how the pastel lighting glowed on Mad Meadow in Flushing: soft greens, orange, yellow, and red; blue moonglow on the great Perisphere and on the ghostly soaring Trylon. I think with a sense of sweetened pain of nights when I sat by Flushing River and saw the World of Tomorrow reflected on its onyx surface, in full color, and upside down… . ”
The 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair was an extraordinary experience for the reported fifty million visitors who passed through its futuristic gates and gazed at its majestic centerpiece, the Trylon and Perisphere. It was the most ambitious international exposition since the phenomenal Crystal Palace housed the first New York World’s Fair in 1853. Not just a trade show, it was endowed with mythic qualities; it was the “Fair of the Future,” the “World of Tomorrow,” and the “Dawn of a New Day.” It was a masterpiece of showmanship, the epitome of stagecraft—a real-life Land of Oz indelibly etched in the memories of those who attended and in the imaginations of those who did not. It was more than a collection of exhibits; it was a wellspring of innovation in corporate identity and promotion.
In 1935 the fair’s 121 incorporators decided to put an end to a decade of municipal malaise, marked by the stock market collapse and subsequent economic depression, with the most elaborate demonstration of scientific, technological, and human ingenuity that the world had ever seen. As the guidebook announced: “This Fair of Tomorrow is a promise for the future built with the tools of Today, upon the experience of Yesterday.”
Towards this end New York’s park and highway czar, Robert Moses, gave his blessing. The fair corporation took as its site the once beautiful tidal basin of the Flushing River, which had been turned into a festering bog and ash dump by one Fishhooks McCarthy and his Brooklyn Ash Removal Company. Miraculously it was transformed into Flushing Meadow, the park of the future. Heralded as a “scientific victory,” it was the most ambitious environmental reclamation project of its time.
Consistent with the theme committee’s precept that “super civilization … is based on the swift work of machines, not on the arduous toil of men,” the fair was a mélange of provocative, often symbolically designed pavilions (some representing architecture parlante, or billboard architecture—a building whose exterior look revealed its interior purpose, such as the Aviation Building shaped like a dirigible hanger) that were organized into thematic zones covering all aspects of human activity in which man and machine were somehow wed: Transportation, Production and Distribution, Communications, Community Interests, Government, Business Systems, Food, Medicine and Public Health, Science and Education, and Amusement.
Democracity, the Fair’s central theme exhibit, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, was an idealized projection of America in 2039, an interdependent network of urban, suburban, and rural areas. Viewed from two moving circular galleries, the viewer was given a bird’s-eye view of Centeron, a perfectly planned, modern, riverside metropolis that could accommodate a million people but, in fact, had no inhabitants because it was used exclusively as the hub of commerce, education, and culture.
The mellow yet authoritative voice of H. V. Kaltenborn in a recorded narration, underscored by music written by William Grant Still and conducted by Andre Kostelanetz, told visitors about a population that lived in commodious high-rises amidst suburban garden developments, or Pleasantvilles, and in light-industrial communities and satellite towns called Millvilles, rimmed by fertile and profitable farming zones or greenbelts—all linked, of course, by modern express highways and parkways. “This is not a vague dream of a life that might be lived in the far future,” wrote Robert Kohn, chairman of the Fair’s Board of Design, “but one that could be lived tomorrow morning if we willed it so.”
Democracity was suitably housed in the Perisphere, an enormous white futuristic temple that also served as the fair’s indelible, architectural trademark. Designed by Wallace K. Harrison and J. Andre Foulihoux—who had also been involved in the design of Rockefeller Center—the Perisphere was the largest “floating” globe ever built by man: 180 feet in diameter and eighteen stories high, twice the size of Radio City Music Hall. The theme center emerged after more than one thousand sketches and models, and despite its new forms, the design was not without precedents, including Bauhaus and constructivist references.
Each hour more than eight thousand spectators entered the Perisphere through the Trylon, a triangular obelisk 610 feet high, larger than the Washington Monument, ascending on the two largest escalators ever built to a 65-foot-high bridge that led directly into this visionary extravaganza. Six minutes later they would exit down the Helicline, an 18-foot-wide ramp with a stainless steel underbelly. Ironically, this futuristic trademark was built with co
mmon steel and clothed in the imperfect materials of the day, including gypsum board that would flake and crack, and required continual maintenance. Even Harrison commented that “in many ways, it was more beautiful when it was just steel.”
Selling the public on modernity, and more importantly on coming to see it incarnate in Flushing Meadow, was a task as monumental as building the Fair itself. No sales pitch was as persuasive as the one extolled by the view from the Perisphere as visitors left Democracity. That first elevated view of the fairscape was a stunning advertisement for the rightness of the future—or so the planners hoped. Laid before Mr. and Mrs. Average American in all its colorful splendor was the World of Tomorrow today. Equivalent to more than 370 city blocks, it included more than two-hundred modern and moderne buildings curiously laid out according to a nineteenth-century beaux-arts rond-point system of radiating streets and fanlike segments extending like spokes from a central hub.
The Fair vividly represented and profoundly utilized the new, distinctly American field of industrial design. Industrial designers were industry’s predominant form-givers, whose “faith was … based on moral conviction,” wrote historian Francis V. O’Connor, “that the public good was to be attained by the universal adoption of a certain rightness of form in all matters from the design of cities to the styling of pencil sharpeners.” The lighting stanchions, monumental fixtures, and most of the kinetic exhibits were imaginatively designed by these gifted proponents of the new streamline aesthetic. Among them were Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague (who was an original member of the design board), Henry Dreyfuss, Donald Desky, Egmond Arens, Russell Wright, Gilbert Rohde, and Norman Bel Geddes.
Loewy, who before establishing himself as an industrial designer was a commercial artist following the dominant moderne style, conceived of the Chrysler Corporation and Transportation exhibits; Teague, who was also a skilled but pedestrian commercial artist, designed seven exhibits including those for Kodak, U.S. Steel, Consolidated Edison, DuPont, National Cash Register, and Ford; Desky applied surrealism to the Communications exhibit and Russell Wright did likewise for Food. Of all these, however, the most memorable was the brainchild of a one-time scenic designer, Norman Bel Geddes. His theatrical extravaganza for General Motors, called Futurama, was housed in architect Alfred Kahn’s seven-acre-square streamline monument, and was the most ambitious and visionary multimedia educational entertainment built for any fair.
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