Just One Line Art Embrace simplicity

One city. One line.

Philadelphia Skyline Art

City Hall at one end, the tallest tower at the other.

Philadelphia Skyline Mug
Philadelphia Skyline Mug
from $16.99
Philadelphia Skyline Canvas Print
Philadelphia Skyline Canvas Print
from $49.99

$7.99 shipping across the US, arriving in 5 to 15 business days. Anything that turns up damaged or wrong is replaced free within 30 days. Shipping and returns in full.

Philadelphia spent a century with nothing built higher than the figure on City Hall, and the drawing keeps the argument visible. The old tower holds the left, and the thing that eventually beat it stands right at the opposite edge.

What is in the drawing

A slim pinnacle marks the start, then City Hall: a long low front pierced with arches, and above it a clock tower with a tiered ornamental top and a small figure standing on the very point. Next come three towers close together, two of them crowned with nested chevrons that narrow to a needle and the middle one capped by a plain triangle. The line drops to a low group at the center, a pitched pavilion roof, a squat block and a wide opening with two legs beneath it. It rises once more through a spired tower set on a long horizontal roof, runs out flat across small scalloped frontages, and then climbs without warning into a pair of narrow slabs at the far right, the tallest thing in the drawing and the only shape standing entirely on its own.

Who buys it

Philadelphia buys for itself. The city has an unusual tolerance for pride in the plain fact of being from there, and this ends up on a desk at work or a kitchen wall rather than being posted somewhere as a souvenir. It also travels well to the ones who moved down the coast and still come back for holidays.

Mug or canvas

Of all 22 American cities drawn for this store, this is the one whose proportions match the mug's printable band almost exactly, 2.143 to 1 against 2.143 to 1. Nothing is cropped, nothing is shrunk to fit, and the drawing meets its own edges. That makes the mug the unusually good answer here. The canvas argument is the composition instead: the two ends are a long way apart and the tall slab only makes sense once you can see how far it stands from everything else.

Other cities

The whole catalog runs to 258 cities. See every design.