Friday Eye Candy: Mapping All of New York's Shadows, in All Seasons

The New York Times has produced a series of artful maps that illustrates "all of the shadows produced by thousands of buildings in New York City over the course of one day."

Quoctrung Bui and Jeremy White provide the context for the maps, noting that in most parts of America, "sunlight is not debated the way it is in New York, where the city’s thirst for living space, working space and economic growth has turned the sun into a virtual commodity."

Planning, and specifically zoning, has been at the center of the debate for decades, according to the article.

The city’s first attempt at light preservation was through a setback rule. As successive buildings grew taller, they would have to be continually set back a couple of feet from the street (like the Empire State Building), producing the classic wedding-cake style of skyscraper. Decades later, in the 1960s, the city overhauled this rule in favor of a floor-area ratio model, which tended to produce tall, narrow structures with open plazas at the base (like the Seagram Building).

The article includes three maps, presenting the variations between the seasons.