Microsoft developed a database of building footprints across the country using satellite date, and the New York Times turned it into a map showing, more or less, every building in the country. Click on the link and you can enter a zip code to find your house, zoom in, and pan around. It’s a weird experience: satellite imagery has become common enough that the movable bird’s-eye-view has become commonplace, but having it turned into a black-on-white map is new and somehow feels more personal. In a satellite photograph, your building is just some pixels; in this map those pixels have been processed, so hiding in the background no longer seems like an option.
The snippet above is in Queens. The big building near the center, shaped like a square with two bent arms and oriented diagonal to the street grid, is one of our projects. North and south of it are ordinary rows of wood-frame houses, like cover so much of the borough. The very geometric pattern to the west is a garden-apartment complex that happens to be my route to the project from the subway. From the (oval-curved) street, the buildings are boring brick boxes, but in this view the designers’ intentions are clear.
This map is fascinating but not particularly useful. But sooner or later this kind of technology will get linked to more comprehensive databases. I’ve been using various maps put online by the NYC government, on general spatial information, on landmarks, and on city capital planning. Maps are an intuitive way to deliver geographically-sorted information, and I expect to see more of this as time goes by.
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