THE GRID

Having grown up in cities, it is always hard to get perspective on the urban landscape while surrounded by level pavement and rectangular buildings on all sides. The natural environment has been entirely constructed to the point where it is easy to forget the fact that any sort of topography exists between the gridlines of a city.

I began by downloading existing vector and 3d data that New York State stores in an online database. I then selected 4000 by 4000 foot sections of the New York map to focus on, that contain important places in my life. I then transformed the street grid, building footprints, subway lines, and waterfront border into separate layers to laser cut out of paper and glue together. Mounted on a generic topographic model, the effect of these three map segments is a standout 3d topography of the the city’s streets.

Digital tools allow me to get a new perspective on the places that I have lived in. The goal of my work is to demonstrate the departure from the rolling hills to the neatly sectioned streets that I grew up among. At the same time, it demonstrates the arrival to a new ‘urban topography’ where beauty is formed from the complicated rectilinear adaptation of existing land.