John Tauranac

Who is John Tauranac?

John Tauranac writes on New York history and architecture, he teaches the subject and gives tours of the city, and he designs city maps and transit maps.

His first published maps were New York Magazine’s “Undercover Maps,” which showed how to navigate passageways through and under buildings in Midtown and Lower Manhattan so you could stay dry in the wet and warm in the cold.

Tauranac wrote the guidebooks for the Culture Bus Loops operated by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority as a freelance project for the Municipal Art Society, whereupon he was hired by the MTA to write and edit “Seeing New York: The Official MTA Travel Guide,” which included a depiction of the subway in a geographic light. He went on to chair the MTA subway map committee and to be the design chief of the 1979 subway map which, in addition to depicting the subway in a geographic perspective, simplified the system with the introduction of a color-coding system based on trunk lines. For his dual roles, he was awarded a commendation for design excellence by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Transportation.