my father’s maps
[Via Slate, a map drawn by artist Alexander Calder]
My father writes the most meticulous directions. He uses street names, number of stoplights, and landmarks. I always took it to be a symptom of his engineer training and a need to build-in redundancy. After living in Seoul for five years and struggling with the general non-usage of street names (we navigate by subway stop exits and landmarks, sometimes ones that no longer exist like how I told cab drivers to drop me off at the “old district office”), I decided that his triple-threat directions were just a merger of American and Korean directional structures.
So as much as I appreciate Google Maps in all its satellite glory, I really adore the spatial oddities collected by the Hand Drawn Map Association.
It’s a situation we are all acquainted with: planning to visit friends in an unfamiliar part of the city, you draw yourself a rudimentary map with detailed directions. In March 2008, graphic designer Kris Harzinski founded the Hand Drawn Map Association in order to collect just such drawings of the everyday. Fascinated by these accidental records of a moment in time, he soon amassed a wide variety of maps, ranging from simple directions to fictional maps, to maps of unusual places, including examples drawn by well-known historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton, and Alexander Calder
