Subway-Color-Archive: Final Parts

June/July 2024

Mari Kroin
7 min readAug 7, 2024
The ultimate S-C-A map.

It feels fitting that the final lap of the 8th Avenue line study runs beside the time of the 2024 Olympics. While watching women’s street skateboarding the other day, I noted how something incredibly layered and highly skilled can look so effortless. The slow-motion replay didn’t serve their talent justice either; without description, it is difficult to understand the precision required for each trick and maneuver. Congrats to Coco Yoshizawa and Liz Akama (14/15 years old) for their gold and silver medals and repping Japan. Go Nippon! Hard work pays off. Likewise, I look forward to hearing about the fins that grow from the triathletes who swam the Seine in the next couple of years.

This bulletin is a show-and-tell of the final research parts completed in June and compiled in July. Over the past ten months, I have kept the same subway map on my underground expeditions, crossing off stations as paint chips are collected and documentation fulfilled. Marking off the final station, 81st Street — AMNH, felt like completing a mental and physical marathon. I often contemplated cutting down on the number of stations surveyed because I was exhausted, but to miss any of the stops on this route would have been an opportunity I know I would regret. I watch a decent amount of Naked and Afraid in the background, and it feels like this project is on day 19; I have caught a big fish and am now prepping for extraction. In this case, extraction is the printed output of the compiled research from the past year.

Prepping for extraction has proved easier said than done. There is a lot of visual content. While incredibly generous, the monetary support for this project, provided by the 2023 Architecture + Design Independent Projects program (more on this below), can only go so far. Hence, I have been strategically compiling the essential elements of this project’s story, the parts that build a portal to something much more significant. (Good) Color printing is expensive!

Moreover, anything printed on something other than newsprint gets steep. I want people to hold onto the S-C-A printed output for current and future reference; it needs to feel good, stand the tests of time, and have tactility that bolsters the mission of this subway archive. Therefore, only so much can be printed this year, with the potential to expand, given additional funding.

From the beginning, I set out to make this project as publicly accessible as possible. The Subway-color-archive.com and updates on Medium aim to provide a comprehensive dive into the project’s findings, whether or not you have the tangible outputs. Since launching the site in October 2023, folks worldwide have visited. People are coming in from France, Germany, Australia, the UK, Poland, Ireland, Canada, China, and Singapore, to name a few! It is fantastic to see the map of interaction grow; I take this as a sign that this project is touching on some potent, globally relevant subjects. Keep spreading the word, and thank you to those who have!

Overview of Final Parts

The previous S-C-A bulletin, Forming Palettes + Compositing, outlined how I compiled the column palettes for each station on the IND 8th Avenue line. The May bulletin also gave a quick overview of my digital workspace and image sourcing. The following screencap is an update on the final Miro board of found images per station:

Final found image Miro board.

From this board, I created a reference sheet for each station (31) 8.5"x 11" sheets. I exported the following on August 6th, and it is subject to minor adjustments before the final research goes to print. There are quite a few cases where inferences are made. These inferences consider many factors, including potential column color shifts at multiple stations at or around the same time. For example, many chroma changes at 190 Street and 181 Street evolved in tandem due to their proximity and overlaps in platform elements/station layout.

Dissected paint samples and composited palette reference sheets.

In compiling these palettes and corresponding information, I often referred to Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, particularly in moments of uncertainty. In the portion titled “On teaching color-some color terms” Albers writes:

Relativity is caused by a variance of measure, by lack or avoidance of standard rules, or by changing viewpoints. As a result, 1 phenomenon has varying views, readings, and different meanings.

This instability of value is extremely characteristic of color. Resulting from the after-image, a light grey, for instance, may look dark at one time and almost white at another, and at various times like a shade or a tint of any color, as green may look reddish. The purpose of most of our color studies is to prove that color is the most relative medium in art, that we almost never perceive what color is physically. The mutual influencing of colors we call- interaction. Seen from the opposite viewpoint, it is- interdependence.

Though we were taught, only a few years ago, that there is no connection whatever between visual and auditory perception, we know now that a color changes visually when a changing tone is heard simultaneously. This, of course, makes the relativity of color still more obvious, just as tongue and eye perceptions interdepend when colors of food and of its containers increase or diminish our appetite.

In reading this part of his research, he reinforces the inherent nature of colors to be perceived differently depending on the mode of perception and even non-visual sense-based elements of chromatic space. It would be incredible if someone could take this S-C-A column palette research and apply the potential impact of sound or smell to the visual and memory-based perception of the represented station colors.

S-C-A 8th Avenue IND Station column paint samples. (All)
S-C-A 8th Avenue IND Station column time-aligned palettes. (All)

With Albers’ point considered, the colors depicted in these paint sample photographs and subsequent palettes were impacted by the tools used to document and composite this research. I encourage anyone reading this to take a swatch of paint from an indoor condition and bring it outside. Does the memory of that color change? Are there any immediate differences? Do you see it as a single color? I have grown to lean into this “uncertainty” because chromatic research tends to be (and should be) aware of its innate-shifting qualities.

Looking Ahead

  • In the next two months, I will finalize the content that goes to print with the assistance of a fantastic graphic designer. If you want your subway memory considered for tangible distribution, please contribute to the subway-color-archive memory portal before September 1st, 2024!
  • You can pre-order through the website for a copy of this first-edition print of S-C-A 8th Avenue IND research. These will start going out in October. Shipping rates will apply in November (after the grant period ends). Tentatively, you can expect a 5" x 5" column field guide (the size is for ease of reference on your commute) and an 11" x 17" poster. Both will be printed at a modest archival quality — more on this in the next bulletin.
  • The next bulletin will also feature a new interview, “Making with MetroCards,” with Lena Feliciano Hansen @felihans.studio. I am a big fan of her MetroCard art and know you will be too.
Photo courtesy of @felihans.studio
  • These written updates have so much content yet to dig into. In January, I recapped an event called “Rooted.” It featured some prints of photogrammetry reference scans in progress. I have many scans to share. These print palettes have taken priority. However, I hope to fold the gathered digital 3D imagery into a comprehensive website update starting in October after printing the first edition of S-C-A research. This site update will evolve several elements to better tell the rich color history of these underground columns.

I will close out this June/July update with some new overlays. They were fun to make, and I hope they are just as fun to watch! The underlay images are all from nycsubway.org.

S-C-A 2024 (overlay) 14th Street in 1970 by Joe Testagrose (underlay)
S-C-A 2024 (overlay) 59th Street in 1991 by Glenn L. Rowe (underlay)
S-C-A 2024 (overlay) Jay St./Metrotech in 1980 by Joe Testagrose (underlay)

The 2023–24 S-C-A route is supported by the 2023 Architecture + Design Independent Projects program, a grant partnership of the New York State Council on the Arts and The Architectural League of New York. Independent Project grants are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State legislature.

This project is not monitored by or affiliated with the MTA.

A study of 8th Avenue will hopefully build the framework for future chroma investigations that branch into other boroughs and neighborhoods — pending additional funding.

Questions, comments, thoughts? Please send them to subway.color.archive@gmail.com

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