Thursday, May 24, 2007

Eduard Imhof

First came to my attention through reading a thread on Edward Tufte's discussion board. Tufte calls Imhof's Cartographic Relief Presentation a “deep and essential book” about design and information representation.

Damnit, yet another book to buy!

Anyway, a link on that thread took me to Imhof's biographical page on the web site of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology where he was a professor of cartography from 1925 until 1965. He died in 1986.

His work is sharply clear and very beautiful. He was an artist and a scientist who was able to combine those two skills to produce amazing stuff:

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A watercolor so-called “bird's eye” map.

This one is from Imhof's sketchbook from 1930 when he was asked to measure the position and elevation of the “Minya Konka” in Tibet:

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A pencil drawing (!) of Minya Konka.

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Measurements for triangulation.

And my favorite, a pen and ink drawing of his house:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Unknown said...

Greetings, pseudo!
How's that for a shout? ;-)