Even with pictures, this project is difficult to describe because it's so large and unusual. A family in La Jolla is building their dream house, a modern masterpiece that I think looks like Falling Water meets the Getty. They met me at Dwell on Design and later approached me about creating a custom art installation for their home. They are native Californians but love New York City and when they visit they always take the subway. The project started as a request to imagine a wall sculpture that depicts the NYC Subway map in an artistic way. What follows is the result of my imagination running wild. What you see above is the project hanging in my shop in LA as of January 2012. Those are the islands of New York City as they truly appear on the globe (derived from satellite maps), cut into walnut plywood with the aid of a computer-guided router using the master file I created by hand. As the piece develops, it will have layers of subway lines and stops, street markers, a few buildings, lights, and even sounds, like the prototype I made to get the job (third picture). Below are two architect renderings and the house under construction last year. They serve as reference points for the art piece, showing you where it will end up. The sculpture will hang on that long skinny wall above and below the staircase landing, twenty feet tall by five feet wide.
My piece is equal parts art, interior design, map-making, and woodwork with a splash of engineering thrown in. I love precision, and in order to get the streets and island contours right, I drew them all by hand using satellite images, a process that took two months. Below on the left you can see the master file and on the right the cut-sheet that I sent to the CNC router. Each gray rectangle represents one 4x8 sheet of walnut plywood.
For the prototype I chose the western section of Midtown Manhattan around Madison Square Garden and Times Square. The CNC cuts grooves into the walnut plywood along the lines created in the file. To create a menu of options for the client, I did different wood and metal inlays for the streets and several styles of subway lines, stops, and signage. The final version will be modified from this prototype.
Once the islands all got cut they arrived in the shop and took up every available surface. I checked them against my atlas and then began the painstaking process of creating the plywood panels and mounting the islands on the walls of my studio in downtown LA.
To get a good feel for NYC subway maps through the century, I found vintage map images and made this poster for comparison:
Target completion date for this project is March 31, 2012 with an April or May installation. Check back here for updates between now and then!
