The map doesn’t look like a map.
That’s the point.

We started by drawing buildings

The first designs drew real buildings. We started with a hotel: one room authored once, tiled across a floor, stacked into an estate — and even then the water sat at the top, in the roof plant, falling to everything below.

Then we drew the Shard. Its architecture is a spire — and inside it, the water huddled where the people are: dense through the hotel floors, a thin spine down the offices.

So we deleted the building. What remained was the truth: the water is a different shape from the architecture — wide where the showers are, narrow where they are not. Draw the building and you have drawn the wrong thing. Every attempt at architecture forced the design simpler.

The container ship

The answer came from cargo. Seen from the side, a container ship is rows of blocks — no hull, no rigging, just decks and load. That is the map: your building seen from the side, each floor a deck, each room that contains water a container on it. Rooms without water are not there. Corridors, walls, architecture — gone. It is almost a shock, and it is meant to be. This is your building the way the law sees it: water only, everything else removed.

The traffic lights

Then colour, and only four. Grey before monitoring switches on. Green when the record proves the work. Amber when something is coming due. Red when something needs doing now. A box wears the worst of what is inside it, so one glance reads a whole building — and a colour cannot be argued with, because the map only changes when the record does.

The vocabulary took its own beating. An early build said “up to date” and “action required” before the four words settled — and wore a serif face the product later shed.