Word: wurman
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...irrationally organized. Yet how else to find out which museum has the Raphaels and where they serve good veal? In a radical approach to the genre, a two-year-old Los Angeles publishing company named AccessPress Ltd. has, under the guidance of its founder, Architect-Cartographer Richard Saul Wurman, 49, reinvented the wheel with a series of compact volumes that open up cities through striking graphics, terse copy and a tight format...
Most guidebooks, claims Wurman, "ghettoize information," putting hotels, restaurants, shopping, museums, nightclubs and other attractions in separate sections. By contrast, Access guides note them as an alert pedestrian would, door by door, block by block. To make sites easier to spot on the page, they are color-coded (red for restaurants and nightlife, green for parks, and so on) and profusely illustrated. The exquisitely limned maps are models of graceful lucidity...
...offer are contributed by old hands such as Jimmy Breslin, Beverly Sills and Walter Cronkite. But the bulk of the text is prepared by local experts and visiting writers who often have a fresher eye for detail than most natives. In every section, one guiding spirit can be detected: Wurman's childhood hero, Paul Klee. He explains, "Klee's paintings had a shorthand that described action, feeling, color, mood. They were not about painting but communication and visual literacy." The overall technique could be a model for future encyclopedias. In Hawaii Access, for example, there are entries...
Easier said than done. But Wurman is convinced that the man-made environment of cities holds few mysteries if urban information is explained clearly and concisely. "Given a good map," he says, "a person can see how parks relate to schools and residential areas. With that information, he can make intelligent decisions about where his city should build new schools or should not build new roads." Similarly, photographs, drawings, density studies and traffic counts can reveal how cities really work...
Trouble is, this data is seldom available. "The New York Times illustrated the moon landing of Apollo 14 with maps and diagrams clearer than any ever used to describe the location of a new highway on earth," says Wurman. "We talk in numbers we can't comprehend and about sizes we can't visualize." All of which has led the plump, bearded architect to try to fill the need himself. He and Fellow Architect John Gallery have just written a guidebook to his own home town...