
13
ANATOMY OF DESIGN
Drawing comic parallels between human forms and man-made objects and
structures stretches back centuries, extending from Renaissance artists to
postmodern designers, and this penis-shaped subway map, created by Veit
Schuetz for an exhibit at the CAE Gallery New York City in 2000, is typical of
such metaphoric melds that are both absurd and logical.
Why sexual organs are so routinely conjured up in art is the stuff of
psychiatric colloquia. Sigmund Freud’s famously alleged quote goes, “Sometimes
a cigar is just a cigar,” but sometimes—in fact often—artists and designers do
see the strangest things in their mind’s eye and bring them ...