Richard Saul Wurman’s first book, published when he was 26 and still working as an architect, featured plasticene models of 50 cities around the world. The models were all modeled on the same scale, providing readers with a uniform basis to gauge and understand the cities.

Nearly 50 years and more than 80 books later, Wurman’s latest project—dubbed 19.20.21.— is an attempt to standardize the information available on 19 cities that are expected to have more than 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century, giving readers, again, tools to easily compare and contrast them.

Along the way, Richard Saul Wurman has received both B.Arch/M.Arch. Degrees from the University of Pennsylvania graduating with the highest honors & awarded the Arthur Spayd Brookes Gold Medal. He established a deep personal & professional relationship with the architect Louis I. Kahn. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA), a recipient of the Gold Medal from AIGA & membership in the Alliance Graphique International.

Wurman’s oeuvre is outrageously eclectic, but it all springs from the same source: his own ignorance. Spurred by his lack of understanding of what he considered basic or crucial topics, Wurman has sought ways to convey them to others more clearly. The result has been a series of books ranging from city guides to health manuals to volumes on financial planning and the Olympics.

In this case, Wurman says, he was reading about Lagos, Nigeria, when he realized that for one of the largest urban areas in the world, the available information was insufficient and of dubious reliability. Was the information based on Lagos’ municipal limits, for example, or on the overall urban spread? How to compare it to others of the world’s sprawling metropolises, speed of growth, average income verses cost of living.

“It appears that there’s no comparative information, cartographically or statistically, on the major agglomerations in the world,” Wurman says. “Not only maps on the same scale and drawn the same way, but legends, questions and information that are the same—about the city’s economy, power grid, access to water, quality of life, business, population makeup, growth areas. Nothing is collected in a similar way, and in some places not much information is collected at all.”

Conferring with major corporate & institutional leaders, Wurman realized that the lack of standardized information meant that even multibillion-dollar companies and well-known cartographers faced huge shortcomings in understanding their global markets.

He has been awarded several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Graham Fellowships & two Chandler Fellowships. In 1991, Richard Saul Wurman received the Kevin Lynch Award from MIT for his creation of the ACCESS travel guides & was honored by a retrospective exhibition of his work at the AXIX Design Gallery in Tokyo, Japan on the occasion of their 10th Anniversary. He was awarded a Doctorate of Fine Arts by the University of Arts in Philadelphia, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Art Center College of Design.

In 1999 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Boston. His career has spanned from a 13-year architectural partnership in Philadelphia, a Director of GEE! Group for Environmental Education, to teaching at Cambridge University, England; CCNY; UCLA; USC; Washington University, St. Louis & Princeton University. In 1958 he was a member of the initial year of exploration & mapping of Tikal, Guatemala.

His most recent publications include those on diagnostic testing, heart disease, and his latest book, Understanding Healthcare.

Richard Saul Wurman lives in Newport, Rhode Island with his wife, novelist Gloria Nagy, and their three biblical yellow labs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.