The New York Subway Map Debate includes the full transcript of the event from the newly discovered tape, along with new interviews with surviving participants John Tauranac, Peter Laundy, Arline Bronzaft, and more. The debate was a pivotal moment in design history, but the full substance of that evening's discussion was unknown, because no known recording existed… until now. A year later, the Tauranac/Hertz map was introduced and Vignelli's design was scrapped. Vignelli later thanked the event's moderator for helping him suppress the 'homicidal urges' he felt towards some of the other panelists. Insults were hurled and sides were taken. It was a battle of abstraction versus realism, simplicity versus complexity.

Tauranac's new subway map, which already had the blessing of the MTA, stressed geographic accuracy and included as much information about the city above as possible.įor over two hours, to the cheers and boos of a raucous audience of designers, transit officials and disgruntled subway riders, Vignelli, Tauranac and a panel of eight other experts argued. Facing off against Vignelli was John Tauranac, head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority's Map Committee, a critic of Vignelli's design who had spent years working on an alternative map, executed by graphic designer Michael Hertz. But it was criticized by some because it didn't conform to the actual geography of the city. Vignelli's map, designed with his associate Joan Charysyn, was a streamlined, minimalist masterpiece. On one side of the debate was Massimo Vignelli, the famed Modernist graphic designer who in 1972 had unveiled a diagrammatic map of New York City's subway system. The tape contained a recording no one knew existed, of a now-legendary debate which took place in Cooper Union's Great Hall on the night of April 20, 1978. Last year in a dusty basement storage area at Cooper Union in New York City, an old reel-to-reel audio tape was discovered.

New york subway map