A Sanborn sheet was never meant to be looked at. It was meant to be priced. An underwriter two states away opened a bound folio, found a block at one inch to fifty feet, and read the building off the page: pink meant brick, yellow meant wood frame, blue meant stone, olive meant fire-resistive, grey meant iron cladding. The colour was a material code before it was a colour.

Everything on the sheet earns its place. Storey counts sit at building corners, dimensions run in feet along wall lines, firewalls are cross-hatched in six-inch increments, hydrants are solid black dots. The lettering is fine condensed gothic, tightly set, because a label had to fit inside a footprint. This system takes that discipline literally: flat fills, hairline rules, measured labels, nothing decorative.