The London Underground Map: Imagining Modern Time and Space
http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/desi_19_1_25_0.pdf

Hadlaw, Janin
Design Issues
2003

Abstract:

In one of his short essays in Mythologies, Barthes equated a new Citroën with the great Gothic cathedrals. He based this equivalence not on any physical resemblance, but on similarities he perceived at the moments of their production and consumption. Barthes saw each as 'the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.' I would like to consider the London Underground Map in the context of Barthes’s list of 'supreme creations,' and I would like to adopt his argument as the starting point of my observations.