A diagram rather than a true map, you distort what you represent

Which London Underground Map are you?.

You are the 1933 Beck Map! A diagram rather than a true map, you distort what you represent. A thing of engineering beauty, many after you will form themselves in your image. Hand me that 3/8th Gripley, would you? [via Owen Massey's now encyclopaedic list of Underground maps]

A month+ of various on maps and cities:

Mapping terra incorporata: new version of They Rule.

Map is[n't] the territory: the map-territory relation. Also Eco on maps with 1:1 mappings in 'On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1' (from How to Travel with a Salmon, and Molly Steenson's We are not our maps. And Borges's 'Partial Enchantments of the Quixote', or 'On Exactitude in Science':

"In that empire, the art of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire, the entirety of a province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless..."

Call for submissions: CITY|SPACE's Urban Legends: The City in Maps [via Galloway] and a love affair with maps.

A history of maps and Index of Cartographic Images illustrating maps from the Ancient Period: 6,200BC-400AD [via webb]

National Geographic's Mapmachine and Distorted map: anamorphosis (Cf Holbein and others) [via Heathcote]

Metropolis walkthrough. Need one for Alphaville or Twin Peaks next. [via ?]

"Useful buildings know something about how they're used. [...] If it works, it's good."
Compare with:

"Architecture is art that you do to shelter something else"

and

"It wasn't the building that inspired us. It was the connection within it. At best, a building can frame our experience, and then get out of its way."

... So, architecture as a box for keeping things in: Quik house made from containers [via ?]

A city is a tree, a city is not a tree.
A city is a tree, a city is not a tree.

New cities for old [transcript] [via Demos]

Cities of Text - on intranets, knowledge management and urban planning [via various] and Castels: The informational city is a dual city: Can it be reversed?

Blue plaque project and Diamondgeezer's London stuff, all in one place.