This poster, produced as a classroom exercise, advertises an exhibit of aerial photographs of a rapidly-urbanizing region to the east of Los Angeles.

The poster seeks to evoke the region’s character. Scars on semi-desert land heal slowly, and the ground is covered with a mesh of roads, jeep trails, and ATV tracks, evidence of human activity. The region has become Southern California’s workaday back yard, where developments and industrial parks grow to enormous scales, their geometry sometimes shaped by natural topography, and sometimes remaking it.

↑ Source material for the poster. USGS Urban Areas orthophoto, College Heights, Calif., 2004.

Aerial photography serves as inspiration and as raw material. The details of the type and poster have been plucked from USGS aerial photographs, but now they take on new shapes. The original tract houses provided shelter and a ground for a community – here they communicate. Grid squares refer to land surveyed under the township-and-range system, and the regular curves recognize the engineer’s role in re-shaping the local topography.