NOTA | ARTICLE
“Shakespear, you should know children are not brought by the stork”. People do believe. So do I. According to Chesterton: “It’s not because they cannot see the solution. They cannot see the problem”. On the other side, there are persons that don’t believe in signals. Those lovely old women that arrive to Heathrow Five Terminal in London have a formidable devise of public signposting at their disposal. However, they prefer a good “Bobby” to take them to migrations, the toilette, hold their luggage, their poodle, walk them to the cab and advise the drunk driver to drive carefully. Signals? What signals? In 1995 we started the “Subte” (subway) project. And it was that, the term “Subte” that we retrieved from people’s voice and it’s installed in the collective imaginary. We gave to every subway line its original color in every entrance transforming the city in a real rainbow. At the focus the people told us: “I take the red, the green, the blue…”. The first stage of the Subte started in 1995 and it was focused in its identity, the interior signposting and the redesign of the system’s maps formed by five lines (since then a sixth one has been added). We work with our traditional project methodology: investigation, analysis, summary, drafts, final project and implementation. Lorenzo visited the main subway systems of the world, and came back to the studio with the best and the worst of the design of those systems. For the design of the map, which would become an iconic guide of the system, the team was inspired by the map laid out for the London subway in 1933 by Henry C. Beck. At that time, the decision of ignoring the real topology of the subway lines and do a simpler, more accessible and geometric abstraction was a radical idea. By limiting to vertical, horizontal and 45-degree angles, and then adding a diagram of the main streets of the city (another original perspective), the team generated a map that’s understandable and useful. If we put it together to the map of New York’s subway designed by Massimo Vignelli, we’ll discover another important influence of the work.
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