Glacial Errata, No. 25

One: Lawrence Halprin and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

I’ve had this chart on my hard drive for quite some time—just one of those arresting images that even stripped of its context cannot help but convey real beauty. The Sea Ranch was a planned development in Sonoma County, California, designed by Lawrence Halprin as something of a utopian community that would be in concert with its natural surroundings, as opposed to trying to dominate them. The graphic design for the project was handled by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.

Two: Mark Lombardi

Long before the “conspiracy theory wall” had become a meme, Mark Lombardi was making these amazing pieces of work, connecting various global and historical figures in sprawling, minimalist works of art. Lombardi committed suicide in 2000, and so is no longer around to appreciate how deeply conspiratorial our world has become, but what I come back to in his work is the aesthetics of them—the way a sprawling network does not appear itself disorderly or chaotic (as per the usual meme), but instead starts to appear as though it is its own, newly discovered, biological entity. More information on Lombardi’s work is here.

When we were discussing the cover of my last book, my design note was something that might look like Lombardi’s work (I was, alas, overruled).

Three: W. E. B. DuBois

Hopefully by now many people reading this already know about W. E. B. DuBois’s amazing data visualization (made in collaboration with the students and alumni of Atlanta University), but putting together a newsletter about charts this week, I realized will never pass up an opportunity to highlight such striking work.

Four: Clarence Larkin 

Clarence Larkin—a dispensationalist Baptist who saw the history of the world in successive “ages” that all prefigured and predicted an imminent return of Jesus Christ—is not, shall we say, a person whose philosophy I necessarily co-sign. But his charts are fascinating, fabulous, and have continued to linger in my mind for the past twenty years or so, ever since I first came across his depiction of Hell.

Five: William Darton and W. R. Gardner

Another classic, made by William Darton and W. R. Gardner for an 1823 atlas, depicting the world’s rivers by length and mountains by height (the first, apparently, to do so in the same image). It’s one that always stays with me because of the arrangement of the visual data here—the rivers completely decontextualized, appearing as dangling tendrils of some unknown and unknowable species of vine. A reminder that in our need to translate the natural world into legible data, we often cannot help but render it alien and uncanny, estranging it from itself and ourselves in our attempt to understand it.