This map depicts a stretch of suburban commercial landscape in Chandler, Arizona with strip malls, big box stores, parking lots, gas stations, and fast food restaurants rendered in precise detail. Every element is accounted for: the drive-through, parking lot stripes, even turning lanes. Walmart, Fry’s, IKEA, Ross, Staples, In-N-Out, Chevron, Starbucks, and a dozen other […]
Samantha’s map of her Vermont neighborhood centers on a large green field ringed by roads, with a bunch of fun things to explore: a pond, a stream, a sinkhole, and even a snake island. All of these features are carefully labeled alongside her house, the woods, the dinosaur hills, and the chicken coop. The circular […]
Ben was a fifth grader and avid hiker when he drew this remarkably detailed topographic map of Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. Dense hand-rendered contour lines fill the page, with dozens of labeled peaks, trails, brooks, ponds, and roads including Mt. Lafayette, Mt. Lincoln, the Kancamagus Highway, and Tripoli Road, all recorded with the kind of […]
Alec writes, “I learned about ‘behavioral maps’ in sociology class. All hand drawn maps are more or less behavioral maps because they reflect the scale and importance of place in the human brain – like the famous map of Manhattan by [Saul] Steinberg.”
These maps were drawn by Graeme to spatially document his dorm room at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He used them as preliminary research while creating a temporary sculptural intervention in the space for a class assignment. The drawings depict Graeme’s unique interpretation of a room he inhabits for only a brief period […]
Victoria gave us this map one night at the opening of a municipalWORKSHOP project in Wilmington, Delaware. She drew it with the help of her friend while the two of them reminisced about their hometown. We see a single road running from top to bottom connecting interstate 95 with the Kirkwood Highway (Route 2). Various […]
Pier was recently commissioned to create a map for a client’s soon-to-be husband. The client wanted the image to depict every place her fiancee called “home.” Pier’s solution was to represent a pile of overlapping books. He writes,”the four open atlases display maps – each in a different way: the charming and exotic town names […]
Tina writes, “This map is based on the view from my window. It is an aesthetic response to the graveyard of which my flat borders. While it is a very quiet place, and not visited by people very often, because I live next to it I get to see the ‘comings and goings’ of not […]
Every year, Irene draws a of map of her garden, and, as the season progresses, she adds notes about each plant. In 2011, she sent us this lovely map, drawn in the spring, for her garden plan that year.
Marshall’s richly illustrated map of his local area in Londonderry, New Hampshire captures a community defined by its orchards — oversized apples crowd the landscape alongside churches, farms, horses, and the the everyday activity of small-town life. He noted that some of the buildings depicted have since disappeared to development (and likely even more so […]
Walt, an artist who has spent most of his life in Oklahoma, made this collage map of Tulsa as a meditation on place and belonging. Coins adhered to the surface nod to oil money, blue glass tiles suggest the Arkansas River, and a triangle marked “STAY” captures the central tension Walt describes: an ongoing inner […]
Drawn on a rainy afternoon with her eight-year-old daughter, Lux creates a fanciful world in her home’s kitchen. Everyday appliances transform into potentially treacherous points of interest. The refrigerator houses the Icy Lair of Evil Troutus [top right], the stove transforms into an island of fire [middle left], and her precariously overstuffed bookshelf morphs into […]