Roberts M – THE DECADE OF DIAGRAMS 2019

Description

The paper traces the history and methods of schematisation in transport mapping—removing surface detail, simplifying and linearising routes, and distorting scale—to improve legibility for wayfinding and publicity. Although Henry Beck’s 1933 London Underground map is widely celebrated, Roberts argues the 1930s more broadly constituted a “Decade of Diagrams,” marked by widespread, diverse schematised maps across Berlin, Copenhagen, Chicago and elsewhere. Influences included modernist design doctrines and extensive network modernisation and electrification, while airlines embraced abstraction for route publicity. Designers experimented with octolinear, tetralinear, multilinear and curvilinear rules; octolinearity later became the dominant convention. Research is hampered by sparse archives and serendipitous discoveries, but evidence shows many contemporaneous innovations predated, paralleled, or independently resembled Beck’s work. After WWII mapping paused, resuming with notable postwar designs such as Salomon’s 1958 New York map. The paper calls for targeted archival research in cities with early electrified networks to fill gaps in the historical record.