Anatomy of Design

25

ANATOMY OF DESIGN

Graffiti has a long and controversial history dating to the Egyptian slaves who

left simple marks—desperate reminders that they once existed—on the stone

edifices they so laboriously constructed. But wild style, a phrase used by New

York’s spray can graffiti artists (also called wicked style in Philadelphia) to

describe urban graffiti’s complex interlocking letterforms, is the visual language

of the late twentieth century city street—and particularly the subway, where it

exploded into a major blight and curious art. Although freight train and subway

graffiti is traceable back to the 1920s, when rail-riding hobos left pictorial

marks ...