Earthscapes and The Design of Sites

In the last decade, Google Maps, Bing, and Mapquest have brought aerial maps to every phone and computer, democratizing what was previously the domain of governments. Aerial maps are endlessly fascinating, and have incredible power - illustrating how we've changed the landscape, and influencing how we might continue to do so, as discussed so eloquently in the essay “Aerial Representation and the Making of Landscape” in Taking Measures Across The American Landscape by James Corner and Alex S. Maclean.

 

The Postal Service is catching up with Internet. They have recently issued a series of stamps called Earthscapes, containing aerial views of the country. The views are divided into three types: rural, agricultural, and urban. The photographs on the stamps are composed in such a way as to balance the beauty of an abstract color composition with the literal pictorial representation of the various earthscape scenes. The central-pivot irrigation in the Kansas farmland looks like a new surface pattern design from Orla Kiley. The Manhattan skyscraper appears like an intense textile pattern. The colors and patterns are equally stunning in each of the three categories.

 

From Upper left to lower right, the stamps depict:

1. The Bear Glacier of the Harding Icefield in the Kenai-Fjords National Park, Alaska.
2. The crater of the Mt. Saint Helens, Washington.
3. The Grand Prismatic Spring in the Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
4. The Castle Butte in the Monument Valley, Arizona.
5. Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
6. Salt/seawater evaporation ponds near San Francisco, California.
7. Log rafts made of harvested timber float toward a mill processor in Idaho.
8. Central Pivit irrigation, of Kansas farmland, "false-color" image.
9. A cherry orchard in Park Rapids, Michigan.
10. A cranberry bog in Massachusetts.
11. A suburban landscape in Nevada.
12. Towboats in Houston, Texas.
13. Locomotives turntable, Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
14. An apartment complex in Manhattan, New York.
15. A view of Interstates 95 and 395 crossing in Miami, Florida.

A further description of each stamp, with some further links, can be found here.

http://www.mountainstamp.com/2012%20New%20Issues/2012%20USA%20Earthscape.html

The new stamps reflect and acknowledge a growing awareness of maps, mapping, and the contrasts of natural and developed land patterns. They help illustrate the scope and vast scale of human intervention across the landscape of the earth, and the very close and ongoing working relationship we all have with the surface of the earth, whether or not our dayjob involves tractors or computer terminals.