"Sidelights"

Architect and graphic designer Richard Saul Wurman has, during the course of a long career, broadened his vision so as to become an expert on information--specifically, on the layman's access to information, and as a corollary to that, on education. His projects have varied greatly in subject and scope, and his job title might at times be author, at times editor, at times consultant or designer or chairman of a board. There has, however, been a unifying design, so to speak, connecting all his ventures. As Wurman told CA: "Each project has focused on some subject or idea that I personally had difficulty understanding. They all stem from my desire to know, rather than from already knowing--from my ignorance rather than my intelligence, from my inability rather than my ability. " Yet Wurman has proven himself capable not only of success in a number of fields, but of re-imagining at least one field, that of the travel guidebook.

Wurman grew up in Philadelphia, in a family where the father habitually questioned his children on current events at the dinner table; those who didn't know an answer had to look it up, according to David Streitfeld in the Washington Post. Graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with both a bachelor's and master's degree in architecture (the latter with highest honors), Wurman then went to work for the architectural firm headed by the eminent Louis I. Kahn, who would become both a personal and professional mentor to the budding architect. Kahn's guidance led to an academic career that saw Wurman serving as a professor of architecture in several American universities, as well as England's Cambridge University, during the 1960s and 1970s; while at California State Polytechnic Institute, Wurman would also serve as dean of the School of Environmental Design.

During the same period Wurman also managed to attend--and sometimes chair or create--a variety of conferences in architecture and design. His numerous awards and honors have included a Guggenheim fellowship and no fewer than five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eventually, Wurman branched out on his own, founding the highly successful publishing company Access Press and the consulting company The Understanding Business. A major project of the latter was the restructuring of California's Yellow Pages into the "Smart " Yellow Pages, a venture that directly reached the homes of over 33,000,000 Pacific Bell subscribers.

It is as author and publisher of his Access travel guides, however, that Wurman may have made his greatest public impact. These guides, dealing for the most part with cities but also with other regions (such as Northern California's wine country), have become notable for their tall, slim format, the use of color to lead the reader to different types of attractions (i.e., red for restaurants, green for shops, blue for hotels, black for cultural sites), readable maps, informative summaries, interesting sidebars on the best attractions in a given city, and most of all, their easy-to-use neighborhood-by-neighborhood organizational plan.

The earliest city guides under the...