Tauranac teaches New York City history and architecture at NYU's School of Continuing & Professional Studies.
For most of the twentieth century, official maps of the New York City Subway were geographic in the sense that they represented the actual coastline and selected topographical features such as parks, zoos, and stadiums.
There was often some distortion to fit things in - Manhattan was often broadened, and Brooklyn twisted around toward the northeast, but the maps preserved the broad facts of the geography.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) was founded in 1968, and its first chairman, Dr William J. Ronan, sought to establish a modern brand image.
Claire McCarthy and senior manager William Allison required that the subway map in the Guidebook be geographic, so that it could also show the locations of visitor attractions.
[11] At the end of 1976, Wilkinson was assigned from Transit to be Executive Officer of Surface operations and stepped down from the Subway Map Committee.
This was exhibited at the Cooper Union in April, when Tauranac debated with Massimo Vignelli in a public battle between the two schools of map-making.
[19] The extant minutes of the Subway Map Committee show that Tauranac was responsible for several major design decisions - such as the use of a geographic style, the use of trunk-based color coding, the use of route markers, and the appearance of transfer stations.
He also organised and coordinated the contributions of everybody in the group and liaised with TA and MTA staff to get approvals and funding and then to ensure that all the station and car signs in the subway network were changed to match the color scheme of the new map when it was launched in June 1979.