Data Visualization For Design Thinking: Applied Mapping 1138958352, 9781138958357, 1317339614, 9781317339618

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Table of Contents......Page 8
Foreword......Page 9
Preface......Page 11
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Figure Credits......Page 13
Introduction......Page 18
Chapter 1: Maps as Objects of Explanation......Page 60
Chapter 2: Terms of the Map......Page 106
Chapter 3: Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia......Page 155
Chapter 4: Case Studies......Page 206
Further Reading......Page 281
Index......Page 293

Citation preview

DATA VISUAlIzATIon For DeSIgn ThInkIng

Data Visualization for Design Thinking helps designers make better maps. Treating maps as applied research, you will be able to understand how to map sites, places, ideas, and projects, revealing the complex relationships between representation, thinking, technology, culture, and aesthetic practices. More than 100 examples illustrated with over 200 color images show you how to visualize data through mapping. Includes five in-depth case studies and numerous examples throughout. Winifred E. Newman is professor and head of the department of architecture at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA.

DATA VISUAlIzATIon For DeSIgn ThInkIng Applied Mapping

Winifred e. newman

First published 2017 by routledge 711 Third Avenue, new York, nY 10017 and by routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, oxon oX14 4rn Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Winifred e. newman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBn: 978-1-138-95834-0 (hbk) ISBn: 978-1-138-95835-7 (pbk) ISBn: 978-1-315-66127-8 (ebk) Acquisition editor: katharine Maller editorial Assistant: Trudy Varcianna Production editor: kevin Selmes Typeset in Univers by hWA Text and Data Management, london

For Michael, who makes all things possible

Contents

viii x xi xii 1

Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Figure Credits Introduction

43

Chapter 1: Maps as Objects of Explanation

89

Chapter 2: Terms of the Map

138

Chapter 3: Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia

189

Chapter 4: Case Studies

264 276

Further reading Index

vii

Foreword

An analogue to the spirit and function of the mapmaking endeavor, the subtitle of this book, Applied Mapping, is as necessarily deceptive as its cartographic subject. recalling the work of Mark Monmonier, this ambitious project to make mapping useful to designers of the built environment finds virtue in the way maps lie by omission. For newman, this deception is productive in that it foregrounds matters of selection and judgment which should be at the heart of any design practice. Put another way, as the author suggests, a map that offers a perfect representation of its cultural or geographic territory would be functionally useless for the purposes of design, creative thought, and ultimately, world-making. As she writes, ‘the world is constantly revealing itself around us, but to see we must create a productive gap between lived experience and our representations, not as mirrors hide our biases, but as possible worlds we can knowingly choose to unfold.’ newman’s hypothesis here is an optimistic one, aimed at effecting the theoretical scaffolding through which design can assume greater agency in the production of alternative futures. The book is part manifesto and part historical survey, but resists being collapsed into either genre. It is an unapologetically operative document concerned as much with locating the structure that enables the formation of representational method as it is with the comparative intelligence and relative strength of the methods themselves. In short, it both is and performs like a map. By newman’s estimation, we are all cartographic beings and we operate as mapmakers regardless of whether or not we are conscious of the process. Mapmaking is like the scientific method; it is like the act of thought itself. These metaphors are crucial to newman’s project, yet they are capable of being more fully instrumentalized, or put to work. here, we see that the ‘applied’ of the book’s subtitle refers not to an abstract set of rules which designers can simply import to their work, but rather is a nod to the fact that maps are nothing if not applied; that there can be no analysis without interpretation, or for that matter, creation. Maps are never value-neutral or outside of the world of things which they work through and reshape. For newman, the intellectual project of unmasking the logic of maps as subjective, conscious projections into the world is but the first step toward coming to terms with the ways in which our mapmaking facility can be used to produce a multitude of possible worlds, each ideally more beneficent than those we currently inhabit. This utopian claim is by no means a modest objective, nor is it without certain dangers, and newman, steeped by training in the cautionary tales of Foucault and Baudrillard, seeks a balanced approach throughout her text that suspends the question of privileging fact or

viii

Foreword

fiction. And, though newman’s particular bias is to insist that we not lose sight of the ‘there, there,’ or the real purpose which underwrites our efforts, her methods do not preclude a journey into pure fantasy as a roundabout way to return to the factual world on radically different terms. It becomes up to the mapmaker and the designer to exercise judgment in that regard and to decide the most useful approach with respect to the situation. To take one example, she argues that harold Fisk’s 1944 map of the Mississippi river for the U.S. Army Corps of engineers is powerful less for its accuracy than for its suggestiveness in conveying the dynamics of a fluvial system. Somewhat paradoxically, as a function of its symbolic power, the fuzzy imprecision of one map is often valuable for the precision of the subsequent observations, projects, and spin-offs it inspires—the local revisions, the specific political or ecological challenges to its authority, or its wholesale replacement by a more convincing, interesting, or usable alternative. The perpetual testing of alternatives in the space between this world and the next one we might imagine—‘somewhere between the real and the virtual, the probable and possible’—is, for newman, a fundamentally cartographic endeavor, and by extension, the very activity of life. This is the ethos of her pedagogical project as well and the book’s structure is indicative of the approach she takes in the studio and the seminar room. here, song lyrics, observant pop culture analysis and case studies drawn from the work of her students brush up against projects and insights gleaned from a litany of critical thinkers from both inside and surrounding the design disciplines. The book is an evocative hybrid offering readers a diverse array of points into and out of the text. Some fragments more directly appeal to design students, while others seek to supply design instructors with the frameworks and vocabularies through which to reconceive of their practices and modes of instruction. Across it all however, newman displays a method of investigation that quite literally makes ‘use’ of its subjects as a way of turning use into the book’s primary subject. The spirit here, however, is less one of appropriation than conversation as sources appear as fellow interlocutors in a collective endeavor. At times channeling Colin rowe’s theorization of collage, newman’s project complements and revises that architectural point of departure. It updates the idea of collage in the twin sense of building upon and improving its capacity to relate to evolving social and material conditions that fall outside the purview of the figureground plan or the weight of place implied in the concept of genius loci. If the designer or architect is to remain, or perhaps even truly evolve into a bricoleur, he or she would need to develop the capacity to accommodate a staggering variety of historical precedents, cognitive inputs, conflicting data sets, and cues from environments both virtual and physical. For newman, the conscious study of the processes and techniques of mapping allows us to confidently approach this uncharted territory with the knowledge that somehow we’ve done this before and can do so again in more interesting and humane ways. newman’s hypothesis, and the major contribution of this book, is its suggestion that how we go about doing so is always twofold. It involves developing a new set of analytical tools capable of bringing our maps into agreement with our intentions and desires, while also recognizing that we should be open to the refashioning of the premises of those desires that may come through our methodical engagement with the practices of mapmaking. Felipe Correa Associate Professor, harvard University graduate School of Design

ix

Preface

The goal of this book is to help designers working with built environments make better maps. Using maps instrumentally in the design process enables designers to calibrate their observations about site, place, idea and the parameters of a given project. Cartographers, geographers, and cultural historians acknowledge existing frameworks for creating and understanding relationships through the map began to change in the mid-twentieth century. likewise in the disciplines that address built environments terms like zoning, boundary condition, and master plan, typically represented through the map, no longer adequately describe, catalogue, or represent what are now understood as complex, culturally specific contexts, expectations about performance over time, and process and information networks. new forms of mapmaking and new tools for representation allow data-intensive maps to be assembled quickly and easily. When used as an applied research method in design, mapping reveals a complex of relationships between representation and thinking, technology, culture, and aesthetic practices. Preparing, cataloguing, weighting, and reducing data to capture a productive representation of a condition is an important tool. This book shares knowledge from multiple disciplines about cartographical thinking in order to map potential scenarios for a synthetic understanding of a broad range of quantitative, qualitative, and spatial data sets.

x

Acknowledgments

I owe much to the works of Mark Monmonier and Alan Maceachren on cartography, J. B. harley, David Woodward and P. D. A harvey on histories of cartography, and Denis Cosgrove, Denis Wood, Jon Pickles, Jeremy Crampton, Derek gregory, James Corner, and Arthur h. robinson and Barbara Petchnik on cartographical thinking and contemporary theories of mapping. Valuable critique and advice from Antoine Picon, k. Michael hays, and hashim Sarkis sparked and informed the investigation into links between cartography and spatial thinking in architecture. The idea for this project emerged in response to a belief in the need for more robust mapping practices in the design disciplines. Maps are potentially a methodological system for organizing experiential phenomenon and ideation in a design process. Any errors or omissions in conveying these ideas are my own. It was challenging to balance how to convey guides for making maps and theories that structure map content, intent and use. The book draws from maps prepared by students for a series of courses taught at Washington University in St. louis, harvard University, the University of Tennessee and Florida International University. Special gratitude is extended to these students whose work added significantly to the quality and depth of the maps in the book. Their contributions to the ongoing discussion of the way spatial designers use maps were invaluable. especially helpful with archival material was the library of Congress, the Imperial War Museum, Fondazione MAXXI, lockheed Martin Corporation, MIT Press, the royal Institute of British Architecture, Alice Debord, Akio kawasumi, eisenman robertson Architects, and the gemeente Museum den haag. nicholas Wise, Sohee ryan and haley Walton assisted with image editing and nicholas’s and Sohee’s wonderful diagrams are seen throughout. Wendy Fuller, Trudy Varcianna and John hodgson guided me and the book through publishing with great care. Support for the early stages of the book was provided through a graham Foundation grant, Florida University International and harvard University. Special thanks are due to the University of Arkansas and the office of research and Special Projects. Their generous support made the final steps of the book possible.

xi

Figure Credits

Introduction 0.1: John nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon Considered as a Planet, a World and a Satellite (1885), from the book collections of the new York Public library [Public domain], Courtesy of the Internet Archive 0.2, 0.3, 0.4: B. W. Betts, Geometrical Psychology (1887) [Public domain], Francis A. Countway library of Medicine via Medical heritage library 0.5: Francis Crick and James Watson, photo courtesy/Science & Society Picture library 0.6, 0.7, 0.17, 0.18: ernst haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1904) [Public domain], Courtesy of WikiCommons 0.8: Image courtesy of Thunder Bay 2001, noAA-oer [Public domain] 0.9: Student, University of Tennessee 0.10: Student, Washington University in St. louis 0.11: Charles howard hinton, The Fourth Dimension (1904) [Public domain], Courtesy of the Internet Archive, from Boston College library; blc; americana 0.12, 0.13: Étienne-Jules Marey [Public domain], © Cinémathèque française 0.14: C. lombroso, from L’Homme Criminal [Public domain], Courtesy of the Internet Archive 0.15: Joaquin Pineda, Florida International University 0.16: François Chauveau [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 0.19, 0.20: Patrick Abercrombie, London Plan: Social and Functional Analysis (1943) [Public domain] 0.21: MArS group, Master Plan for London, courtesy of the rIBA 0.22, 0.23, 0.25, 0.26: Claude-nicolas ledoux, [Public domain], Courtesy of WikiCommons 0.24: Aerial photo, image © 2015 Digitalglobe [Public domain] Diagram 0.1: nicholas Wise, University of Arkansas Chapter 1 1.1: Brad Cooke, Washington University in St. louis. 1.2: Beatus of liébana, Locating the Garden of Eden, 1175—Wikicommons [Public domain] 1.3: École nationale des Ponts et Chussèes (enPC), 1792 Student map competition [Public domain], via Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment 1.4: gia Wolff, harvard University

xii

Figure Credits

1.5: robert Fludd [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, 1.11, 1.12: evan Barrett, Washington University in St. louis 1.13: Étienne-Jules Marey [Public domain], Paris, Cinémathèque 1.14: emanuel Ferro, Florida International University 1.15: Joaquin Pineda, Florida International University 1.16: Priscilla Pagan, Florida International University 1.17: elisa kim, Washington University in St. louis 1.18, 1.19, 1.20, 1.21: Samantha Stein, Washington University in St. louis 1.22: Colin Sieburg, harvard University 1.23: Anthony zephyr, Washington University in St. louis 1.24, 1.25: Mohammed hossain, harvard University 1.26: Map courtesy of the U.S. geological Survey [Public domain] 1.27, 1.28, 1.29, 1.30, 1.31: Atlas Mar, Florida International University 1.32: Marsha McDonald, Florida International University 1.33: hernan guerero Applewhite, Florida International University 1.34: o. h. Bailey et al. The City of Boston 1879. Boston, 1879. Map retrieved from the library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/75694555/ 1.35: Manuel lam, harvard University 1.36, 1.37: Valerie Michalek, Washington University in St. louis 1.38: Margaret Cooke, Washington University in St. louis Chapter 2 2.1, 2.2: John Branigan (Azavea), North America in 8 Projections [Public domain] 2.3: harold Fisk, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Missisissippi River, 1944 [Public domain] 2.4, 2.5, 2.23, 2.24, 2.25, 2.26, 2.27, 2.28, 2.29, 2.30, 2.31, 2.32, 2.33, 2.34: Map courtesy of the U.S. geological Survey [Public domain] 2.6, 2.15, 2.16, 2.17, 2.22, Diagram 2.5: nicholas Wise, University of Arkansas 2.7: Domenico remps [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 2.8: Joan Blaeu [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 2.9: Student, Washington University in St. louis 2.10: Student, University of Tennessee 2.11, 2.12: Maria lorena reyes Bahamon and Jennifer Sandoval, Florida International University 2.13: eileen nunes koo and Aileen zeigen, Florida International University 2.14: Jean-Baptiste regnault [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 2.18: hans Vredeman de Vries, Perspektive, 1604 [Public domain] 2.19: By YY (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuyo/2284479415/) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 2.20, 2.21: Andrew Butler, Washington University in St. louis 2.35: Image courtesy of eisenman Architects, house X Project, 1975 2.36: Photo courtesy Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCAlA / Art resource, nY

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Figure Credits

2.37, 2.38, 2.39: Charles Joseph Minard [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 2.40: eduardo garcia, Florida International University 2.41, 2.42: Taejun James kim, Washington University in St. louis 2.43: The Evolution of the Web by hyperakt [Public domain] 2.44: Angelica Trevino, harvard University 2.45: hereford Mappa Mundi, courtesy of hereford Cathedral [Public domain] 2.46: Catty Dang zhang, Washington University in St. louis 2.47: Valerie Michalek, Washington University in St. louis 2.48: elisa kim, Washington University in St. louis 2.49: Michael Pope, Washington University in St. louis 2.50: Xi Chen, Washington University in St. louis 2.51: Alejandro Torres, Florida International University 2.52: kosuke Bando, harvard University Diagrams 2.1–2.4: Author Chapter 3 3.1, 3.44, 3.45, 3.46: Betty ng, harvard University 3.2: Thomas More 3.3: Aerial photo, Image © 2015 Digitalglobe [Public domain] 3.4: Angelica Trevino, harvard University 3.5: Yunhee Min, harvard University 3.6: Margaret Cooke, Washington University in St. louis 3.7, 3.8, 3.11: kosuke Bando, harvard University 3.9: o. h. Bailey et al. The City of Boston 1879. Boston, 1879. Map retrieved from the library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/75694555/ 3.10: Constant nieuwenhuys (1920–2005), Symbolic representation of New Babylon, 1969, collage of city maps. 120 × 133 cm, Collection gemeentemuseum Den haag. Photo Tom haartsen for Fondation Constant 3.12: By Strebe (Mobile Traffic Monetization) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 3.13: By Strebe (own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bysa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 3.14, 3.15, 3.16, 3.18, 3.19, 3.20: Photo courtesy of Akio kawasumi 3.17: Banque d’Images, ADAgP / Art resource, nY 3.21: Aerial photo, Image © 2015 Digitalglobe 3.22: herman Mao, Washington University in St. louis 3.23: netherlands Institute for Art history, Archive Constant (0095), inv.nr. 488, Psychogeographic Map of g. e. Debord, Guide Pschogeographique de Paris. Use of map courtesy of Alice Debord 3.24, 3.43, Diagrams 3.1, 3.2: Author 3.25: Camouflage of lockheed Aircraft Company, Burbank, CA, c. 1945, Image courtesy of lockheed Martin Corp 3.26: Aerial image of lockheed Aircraft Company in camouflage, Burbank, CA, c. 1945

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Figure Credits

3.27: rocklea, (DAVA-USArmy) [Public domain] 3.28: Faux-Paris, Adoc-photos / Art resource, nY 3.29: Bombing diagram [Public domain] 3.30: By printmaker Frederick Birnie, after robert and henry Aston Barker [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 3.31: Aquatint by henry Aston Barker, after robert Barker (http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/ work.aspx?obj=29586) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 3.32: robert Mitchell, Plans and Views in Perspective (1801) [Public domain] via Stephen oetermann, The Panorama History of Mass Media, zone Books, new York, 1997: 104 3.33: Courtesy of British Museum [Public domain] 3.34: Jeremy Bentham [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 3.35, 3.36, 3.37: erin Dorr, Washington University in St. louis 3.38: Carolina rivera and Jessica Dickinson, Florida International University 3.39: new Plan of rome interpreted by Piero Sartogo, Constantino Dardi, Antoine grumbach, James Stirling, Paolo Portoghesi, romaldo giurgola, robert Venturi, Colin rowe, Michael graves, robert krier, Also rossi, leon krier. Courtesy of MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, rome. MAXXI Architettura Collection. roma Interrotta Archive 3.40: giovanni Battista nolli [Public domain] 3.41: nolli: Plate XIII, Colin rowe, Peter Carl, Judith di Maio, Steven Peterson, MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, rome. MAXXI Architettura Collection. roma Interrotta Archive 3.42: Colin rowe, L’Aventino l’Orto Botanico, Courtesy of MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, rome. MAXXI Architettura Collection. roma Interrotta Archive 3.47: Image, Plykin attractor, courtesy of Yves Coudene, University of Western Brittany, Department of Mathematics Chapter 4 4.1: lysa Janssen, harvard University 4.2: Filippo Calandri, Trattato di Arithmetica (1491–92) [Public domain], published in Florence by lorenzo Morgiani and Johannes Petri, 1 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.22: Author 4.6: Sohee ryan, University of Arkansas (after Trachtenberg) 4.7: Sohee ryan, University of Arkansas (after Paronchi) 4.8: Piazza della Signoria [Public domain], Photo courtesy of JoJan—own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=431779 4.9: Author (after evans) 4.10, 4.11: Author (after kemp) 4.12: Sohee ryan, University of Arkansas (after kemp) 4.13: Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi (1472–75) [Public domain], Size cm. 22 × 29.5 4.14: Florence Dome (WgA), View up (Bjorn S., Flickr, 2013), Panorama (Andy hay, Flickr, 2013) 4.15: San Spirito, Florence, Photo courtesy of WgA

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4.16: San Minato al Monte, © Vanni Archive / Art resource, nY 4.17: Sohee ryan, University of Arkansas 4.18, 4.19: nehemiah grew, Anatomy of Plants, 1682 [Public domain], Courtesy of Missouri Botanical garden via the Internet Archive 4.20: rené Descartes, ‘Vortices,’ from Principia Philosophiae, (1644) [Public domain] 4.21: Author with Sarah kellerman 4.23: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCAlA / Art resource, nY 4.24: erich lessing / Art resource, nY 4.25, 4.26: Sara Johnson, Washington University in St. louis 4.27: Auguste Choisy, Palatin [Public domain], Courtesy of Colloque Centenaire Auguste Choisy 4.28: Michael Schwartz, Washington University in St. louis 4.29, 4.30: lysa Janssen and Author, harvard University 4.31, 4.32: lysa Janssen, harvard University 4.33, 4.34: Daniel Alonso, Florida International University 4.35, 4.37, 4.38, 4.39: Siliang Fu, Washington University in St. louis 4.36: eric gaba, Dymaxion map [Public domain], Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons 4.40, 4.41, 4,42, 4.43, 4.44, 4.45, 4.46: gia Wolff, harvard University 4.47, 4.48, 4,49: raymond Chau and ruogu liu, Washington University in St. louis 4.50: Feixion Yu, Washington University in St. louis 4.51: Students, Florida International University 4.52, 4.53, 4.54, 4.55, 4.56: Vipavee kunavichayanont, harvard University 4.57: Maria Ines Aragon, Marsha McDonald, Veronica requeña, Florida International University 4.58: kristen Argalas, Viviana restrepo, Fannie Torres, Florida International University 4.59, 4.60: Brendan Willis, Washington University in St. louis 4.61: Tokaido dochu ezo byobu, a panorama of the Tokaido road from edo to kyoto to osaka, seventeenth century, courtesy of the C. V. Starr east Asian library University of California, Berkeley 4.62, 4.63: D. Appleyard, k. lynch and J. r. Myer, The View from the Road, drawings, © 1965 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press 4.64, 4.67, 4.68, 4.69, 4.70: Melissa Blair, Washington University in St. louis 4.65: Photographer not identified. official photograph [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, photograph Q 43387 Courtesy of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. 2500-06) 4.66: ‘Dazzle camouflage effect’ [Public domain], Diagram by Ian Alexander—own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46167419

xvi

Introduction

not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential. Mark Monmonier1

Mapping as Thinking-Mediating-Making The objective of the book is to theorize the practice of mapmaking for designers by providing designers with the structure, grammar, and syntax for maps and mapping procedures. Mapping and mapmaking emerge as ubiquitous modes of thinking in the last twenty years—you don’t have to look far in any discipline to find a map. harder to find is a literature addressing how to use maps as tools in design. one problem is maps are familiar: the naturalness in the way we read them obscures their complexity as representations. Artist Stanley Brouwn invoked the familiarity of the map in a provocative project done over a two-day period in Amsterdam (1961). Brouwn randomly selected people on the street and asked them for directions. he offered them paper on which to draw their responses and sometimes they took him up on this, sometimes not—later he would stamp ‘This Way Brouwn’ on the sheet of paper. ‘As they were drawing, people talked,’ Brouwn explains, at times they talked more than they drew. on the sketches we can see what the people were explaining. But we cannot see what they have omitted, because they had trouble realizing what might be clear to them still requires explanation.2 Using maps as communication tools masks their complexity as a mode of thinking. Maps act like language: we attribute the signs or marks in the map to a natural extension of thought. But post-structuralism exposed maps (like language) as artificial signs whose meaning is tethered to time, place, culture, gesture, smell—in short, a plethora of cognitive and phenomenal attributes of our communication ecology. Mikhail Bakhtin uses a lovely term for the primacy of context over text—heteroglossia. equal significance is given to the nature of the utterance and the way words are aware of and mutually reflect other words—words live in seas filled with the ebb and flow of all other words. As part of a communication ecology maps employ cartographical thinking in excess of mere representation. In a similar way to the passers-by in ‘This Way Brouwn’ whose marks and words created a seamless continuity to the degree

1

Introduction they could not ‘see’ the gap between what they said and what they drew. The book examines maps in the context of the cartographic imagination and its expression through the form of the map used: ichnographic, cognitive, or photogrammetric. The attention is on mapmaking as a strategy for calibrating the gap between observations about territory, idea, or object and their representation so designers develop informed hypothesis in design. Mapmaking begins with an observation or set of observations. observations are made in a detached mode where you think about a subject—it becomes object—aware of the act of standing separate from the object of thought. When fashioned as maps, observations trace the mapmakers’ ‘thoughts about thinking’ and the object of thought. Consider the primal perception of the infant received as a singular object with many parts—infants don’t perceive themselves separate from the world around them. Their lived experience is an undifferentiated world. It is with maturation and social communication the demand for categories arises: red is a color, cows are animals, our earth is a round thing and so forth. But unlike infants we are caught in our own subjectivity. Maps isolate parts of reality from the whole of reality without fully disrupting originary relationships—allowing us to slip between whole/part, object/subject, point/field, or identity/non-identity on a continuum rather than closed sets or categories necessarily defined by contrasts. Instead of thinking of the map as an objective tool, I propose it more as a phenomenon of perception albeit one cloaking itself in positivist respectability. For my purposes the maps included in the book move outside of representations historically considered maps to architectural representations, spatial models of data surfaces, abstract analytical models, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artifacts like panoramas and dioramas, military camouflage, photographs and cinematic images, film and videos. histories of cartography privileging terrestrial or geospatial maps were until recently predominantly oriented towards the West and mostly promoted an underlying progressive determinism: map accuracy, correspondence and detail improves as our technologies of measurement make it possible.3 I don’t assume the same approach but look instead at spatial organizations implied by the construct in the map—like the spatial order of the itinerary mapped in the Tabula Peutingeriana, a thirteenth-century map of roman troop movements copied from a map dating to the fourth or fifth centuries, compared to recent itinerary maps by students. This book isn’t a history of cartography although it includes a number of historical maps. It is an epistemology of spatial thinking invoking the map as a representational modality for communicating geospatial thinking. recent histories of cartography by J. B. harley, The New Nature of Maps, Martin Dodge, rob kitchin and Chris Perkins, Rethinking Maps, Denis Cosgrove, Mappings, David Turnbull, Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas, and John Pickles, A History of Spaces suggest a move away from the tendencies mentioned above, but only Pickles considers scientific graphical indices, models and simulations, geometric drawings by architects and designers, panorama, diorama, and analytical mathematical models as maps.4 Volume 2, Book 3, in the History of Cartography series edited by David Woodward and Malcolm lewis entitled Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies5 classifies categories of non-Western spatial thought and expression and divides these into processes (thought and performance) and products. Thought characterized as cognitive cartography includes organized images like spatial constructs. Performance, specifically

2

Introduction performance cartography, includes non-material ephemera like gesture, ritual, song, and dance and material things, models and sketches. Products mean any record of a material cartography from rock art to recordings of performance maps. Woodward and lewis open the door and throw a broader net, but as Pickles notes, recent reopening of the canon to the cognitive, as well as the diversity of material products embodying those mappings, even more sharply highlights the limits of traditional cartographic thought.6 Pickles develops the social instrumentality of the map as a practice and discourse ‘naming the world’ territorializing socio-politico-economic regions and regimes of power. Chapter 3 addresses this issue in utopian maps for the design fields. My goal is furthering mapping practices enabling designers to hypothesize new conditions, cognitive approaches, and perspectives. Multiple intersections occur between cartography, social history, psychology, philosophies of science and technology, and the engineering cultures of architecture including landscape, interior, and urban architecture. Unpacking the epistemic cultures of representation in mapmaking and reading foregrounds productive dialogue between these disciplines. The subject can’t be dealt with comprehensively in one book but I’m hoping to convey in part how geospatial thinking predicts the kinds of geographies we make and inhabit. The structure of the book is itself a map. reading it means looking carefully at text and comparing maps. The maps bear careful examination revealing rich layers of information only on close examination. A number of maps are redrawn from the original to improve legibility or highlight specific qualities. The book outlines general principles governing how maps are made. When applied to specific problems these yield an infinite number of possible maps. The maps in the book cover varied cultures, places, and times from maps made by renaissance cartographers to maps by students in architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture. A note to the reader—my intention is not to offer instruction in software or graphics. A few of these resources are given as additional reading, but in the main a plethora of books addressing the mechanical construction of maps are readily available and provide an interested reader software instruction or domain-specific techniques for managing effective graphics. Visualizing A brief explanation of the term visualization, especially regarding its relation to maps and mapping, before we proceed. In the broadest sense visualization is the power or process of forming a mental picture or vision of something not actually present to sight. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition indicates visualization is a relatively recent addition (1883) coinciding historically with advent of the tools, instruments, and processes making things visible.7 For example, psychology made human thought visible, x-rays and echo-sounding visualize otherwise hidden structures within the body, and for the english psychologist and psychic researcher edward gurney visualizing meant seeing images of the psychical unconscious as apparitions after death. Maps and mapping are special technologies ‘making visible.’ The OED includes a note applying this to ‘chiefly numerical’ information, but with

3

Introduction maps this isn’t the only content. Maps include experiential, non-quantifiable, and qualitative information. Cognitive maps are one type exemplifying this notion. Say you make a map for a friend giving them directions to your home, you would probably use a combination of lines representing roads, arrows to show direction and significant landmarks—‘turn right when you see the big brick building’ or ‘take a left at the fast food place.’ on the face of it this looks like quanta—measurable information about how to move toward a goal (in this case, your house), but a second look will reveal this is your interpretation of this path—someone else may have noticed different landmarks or different signs. As your cognitive map, it is data generated from your subjective and personal experiences. orit halpern in Beautiful Data reminds us ‘vision’ is a term that ‘multiplies—visualizations, visuality, visibilities’ and these permutations of the term ‘vision’ demonstrate vision can’t be simply the isolated sense of vision but must be, following Walter Benjamin, a technical condition—and, following Foucault, what makes the organization of the senses critical to understanding the tactics of governance and power at any historical moment (emphasis mine).8 Visualization is defined as process and object, epistemology, subject and discipline—all terms equally applicable to maps and mapping. Data visualization is a mapping or mental construct using instruments and technologies for ‘seeing’ what isn’t apparent in a place, object, or idea, but could be if we make a map. Maps versus Mapping A quick discussion of current theory in maps and mapping provides general insight into the terminology. Making a map is the physical production including conceptualization and design. Mapping is the mental interpretation of the world and although it must precede the map, it does not necessarily result in a map artifact.9 Mapping defined in mathematics is the correspondence between each element of a given set with each element of another. Similarly in linguistics emphasis is on the correspondence between associated elements of different types. For designers all drawings are maps—they represent relationships between objects, places and ideas. Cartographers Arthur robinson and Barbara Petchenik offer that, ‘A map is a graphic representation of the milieu.’10 The key word is ‘representation’ because it emphasizes map-representations are separate from the reality they describe. It seems obvious but mapping, as the mental interpretation of the world, and mapmaking are easily confused. Implicit in most assumptions about mapping is that physical space and intellectual space overlap so maps become surrogates of space. As robinson and Petchenik write: As we experience space, and construct representations of it, we know that it will be continuous, everything is somewhere, and no matter what other characteristics objects do not share, they always share relative location, that is, spatiality; hence the desirability of equating knowledge with space, an intellectual space. This assures an organization and basis for predictability, which are shared by absolutely everyone. This proposition appears to be so fundamental that apparently it is simply adopted a priori.11

4

Introduction Although the idea of maps as intellectual space continues to resonate, the notion the same cognitive or intellectual frame is shared by ‘absolutely everyone’ doesn’t. The idea of ahistorical or transcultural categories implied by the forms of the map is since problematized by the mapping community. harley and Woodward argue maps regardless of look or form are expressions of human experience and therefore highly particular; they are more than simply vehicles for communication but historically contingent. In Volume I of the massive History of Cartography, harley and Woodward adopt a new definition of the map in order to include maps outside of the traditional Western-centric canon: ‘maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.’12 John Pickles calls for an even greater range of possible practices considered as maps from experiential to cognitive to spatial analytics including spatial models of economic surfaces such as Von Thunen’s analytical models.13 The idea maps are socially contingent does not mean they are a matter of personal choice, but as Pickles notes this is a matter of ‘pre-existing and changing forms of identification, categorization, and typification transforming and reworking structures of meaning and identity and their corresponding spaces.’14 This is not unlike the way adaptive re-use changes the typological meaning and signification of architectural spaces. The analogous intellectual structures represented by architecture representations only heighten the comparison between mapmaking and hypothesis-making in design. Cartographers Arthur robinson and Barbara Petchenik pointed to the need for theorizing maps and mapping in their seminal book The Nature of Maps (1976): ‘Mapping is based on systems of assumptions, on logic, on human needs, and on human cognitive characteristics, very little of which has been recognized or discussed in cartography.’15 They argued a thorough understanding of the cognitive character of the map was not nearly so important earlier as maps were relatively simple. Chapter 1 tackles issues pertaining to how maps act as objects of explanation including maps as text and image and the way maps as social and technical artifacts contribute to our shared cognitive experience of the world. I look at maps made by architects at the end of this chapter and utopian maps projecting possible worlds in Chapter 3. Increasingly designers are making complex maps and mapping more complex conditions using software and hardware linking digital and physical space in new and exciting ways. however, computer programs are products of human thought and the ‘analytical and intuitive effort needed to produce successful maps’ can only increase.16 Chapters 2 and 4 expand the idea of mapping and mapmaking for designers and share a methodology tested over the course of six years in design studio and a seminar on applied mapping. In Chapter 1 we look in depth at the problematic of the map as ‘cultural practice’ in a post-representational cartography. The terms map and mapping move across disciplines acquiring varied definitions and applications. The question of instrumentalizing mapping in visual design isn’t easily answered and will only be available to the reader after some trial and error making maps of his or her own. Throughout the book are examples of maps made by students, by cartographers, geographers and countless others known and unknown throughout the long history of maps. There are map examples ranging from pre-history to very recent examples. Maps pre-dating written language in human evolution are found in the caves of lascaux as a series of dots mapping sections of the night sky. Mapmaking

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Introduction technology changes but surprisingly, maps from the seventh millennium bc and modern era share similar constructs. The advent of the computer in the 1970s increased data quantity and type and production in maps shifted accordingly. There was increasing use of thematic cartography allowing for the representation of abstracted and nonvisual phenomena and the post-structuralist ‘spatial turn’ implicating the relationship between ideas and the spatial context in which they are formulated and received.17 This affected designers indirectly, but significantly. historically designers used maps to describe conditions of place: road maps, site maps of various types like pedestrian routes, building types, and locational or environmental conditions of place. Until the introduction of the figure/ground map by Colin rowe, maps used by designers tended to ideal representations of places. Figure/ground or gestalt maps show buildings as figures in white and context in black. Used to represent urban plans this map type created a visual contrast between building and ground underscoring the continuity of the spaces between buildings. The gestalt map contested the building as object instead creating continuity between building and space. In the 1980s Peter eisenman, using French theorist Jacques Derrida, explored the mapping procedure to manage buildings as narrative. The process resulted in site maps with a variety of imposed grids articulating different narratives according to survey information, historical conditions, and other types of data. Buildings were extruded from the palimpsest created by these superimpositions. For eisenman the plan-map acts as commentary or exegesis on the geographical location through the map-texts referencing the history of the site. These examples suffice as an introduction to mapping and maps. They demonstrate the relatively new mode of hypothesis-making using maps, however if the number of recent books on maps, graphics for maps and software used to produce them is any indication, maps are quickly becoming a significant representational technology in the design arsenal. Cartographic ideation, or what Derek gregory called the ‘geographical imagination,’ changes with the technologies used to produce maps, but many of the inherent structures of visual analogues for the world persists throughout the history of maps.18 The geographical imagination links the social and technological to the ‘world-as-exhibition’ where our representations of the world act in the place of unmediated seeing. gregory proposes practices like mapping are part of a larger epistemology of representation influencing how we see the world through the lens of national boundaries, perspectival grids, the division of lands into parcels, practices of camouflage and surveillance and place names. John Pickles includes our recent practices remapping all aspects of social life. he reminds us maps emerged as a tool or technology embedded in the practices and institutions determining how we live our daily lives: (Maps) are a way of cataloguing the ‘important’ (and ignoring the ‘unimportant’) features of the earth’s surface and the social world; a way of accounting for the resources, objects and public infrastructure of the earth’s surface; and a tool for the representation and territorialization of space (emphasis in original).19 A single map can’t describe a territory, or to say it differently: there isn’t a single way to imagine a given place, idea, or thing through the map. Producing and reading maps

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Introduction is part of a cartographic imaginary, as Pickles terms it, proliferating spaces and the way we see them. Maps are social inscriptions producing a spatial identity.20 looking at maps specific to their use in design offers a window into spatial identities created by architects, landscape architects, interior designers and urban designers working in different periods using various technologies engaged across differing arenas of agency. geographical imagination is our socio-spatial projections of self and society in terms of our collective psychology of space. Mapping produces spatial practices as it inscribes geographical places or conceptual ideation. limiting how we use maps in effect limits our capacity to think about places and ideas through the map. Franco Farinelli proposes our capacity for rationality itself may be determined from a cartographical point of view: the grapheme lies at the heart of our capacity for reasoned thought. In effect we possess a cartographical reason enabling us to project ourselves into geographical space.21 James Corner proposed maps are ‘unfolding potential.’ The function of maps is not to depict but to enable; ‘mappings do not represent geographies of ideas; rather they effect actualization’ (original emphasis). The map is remaking a territory over and over again— as such their agency isn’t in their reproduction, but in ‘uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined’22—hypothesis enacting as much as making. The map is one possible representation of space and an organizer of knowledge in space. Another way to consider the problem is using an example from language. This isn’t outside the pale. Chorley and haggett remind us that, ‘It is characteristic that maps should be likened to languages and scientific theories … we sometimes think of maps as models for languages and scientific theories.’23 however, language severs the object/ word relationship in a particular way bearing examination. Maps and language share many structural attributes but the distinctions are significant: words stand in for objects so we bring to mind their referents. once the link between word and object is created the sign itself is effectively severed from the object. To paraphrase kenneth Burke, ‘What is the representation of what?’24 An illustration of the problem from Burke’s ‘dramatism’ proposes we treat language as a kind of action mediating between the social realm and the realm of nonverbal nature—an elaboration on Spinoza’s insistence things must be understood in their overall context instead of treating words as ontologically real entities. Burke offers a linguistic model where things are the signs of words. Thus he gives an example sentence, ‘The man walks down the street.’ What man? Is he tall, short, fat, blond? Is this a walking-situation, a street-situation, a man-situation? The sentence as stated cannot be illustrated. language falls short of the spatial problem where maps may fall short of language’s capacity for brevity—‘the man walks down the street’ takes significant time to map, but little effort to say. Just as language delineates the temporal ordering of our intellectual or cognitive process, the spatial ordering of the map confirms our assumptions about relative locations of objects and ideas in context and informs the structure of the context. Questioning the structure of the context opens up a way to recapitulate the ontology of the map. If maps aren’t mirrors of nature but as Pickles argues, ‘producers of nature,’ their status as representations is itself in question. For Pickles, maps and cartography don’t simply explain the world—they are part of the ‘interplay between the world and ourselves’

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Introduction describing the world exposed to us through our questions. rob kitchin and Martin Dodge pushed the theory of maps to the limits of the ontology where maps aren’t treated as unified representations but constellations of ongoing processes.25 These are the social, political, scientific and technological worlds in which maps are made and received. This moves the focus of the map away from representation and allows us to re-conceptualize the map as cultural practices involving action and affects.26 Image or Representation I would like to foreground the following with a caveat about the general status of maps as representations. Without contradicting the notion maps register give and take between culture and perception, the ‘interplay between the world and ourselves’, what matters is the specific nature of the representational model of creating and receiving what is mapped— what registers on the visual schema of the map. First, we need to interrogate the ontological status of images and representations. Images as artifacts reproduce, duplicate or copy the aspect, form or character of another object.27 The usage in english is from old French, himage, originally from the classical latin imagin, imago, sharing the same roots with the english imagine. The man in the street would most likely not make a great distinction between image and representation—on the surface, images, like representations, share the notion of artificial imitation or the re-presentation of something, but where image offers a sense of the idea of imitation (lat. imitatio) or copy, representation is more about denoting symbolically, as in a symbol or sign, or the action of portraying a person or a thing.28 The difference is instructive for maps. Borrowing from the way historians of science manage discussions of the difference suggests where the image suppresses its rhetorical purpose by relying on imagination and distance; images are ‘A mental representation of something (esp. a visible object) created not by direct perception but by memory or imagination; a mental picture or impression; an idea, conception (emphasis mine).’ A representation is ‘a mental image or idea regarded as an object of direct knowledge and as the means by which knowledge of objects in the world may indirectly be acquired.’29 ronald giere emphasizes the context of use is paramount in representations: ‘S uses C to represent W for purposes of P.’30 Where use encompasses a wide range of different factors: the intention of the creator, the coding conventions extant in the community, the way in which an audience or viewer takes it, the ways in which the representing object is displayed, and so forth. As Sauer and Scholl underscore: the context of use also determines the selective choices made in the presentation. The ways in which representations are selective are hence not arbitrary but systematically dependent on the context-specific relations between user, representation, and represented.31 The mechanics of creating representations versus images determines if these levels of consideration register in the structure of the content being conveyed. Discussing the status of the photograph is instructive. Photographs can be either images or representations. In early photography the realistic portrayal of subjects seemed to capture what our eyes see—photos look enough like the thing photographed that they can be taken

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Introduction as duplicates, hence images. With little work, manipulation or distortions created in taking or processing photographs produces clearly not-real photographs, like panoramic views physically impossible for us to experience. These exceptions prove the rule: photographs are representations or simulations of what we ‘see’ with rules of construction depending on the contexts discussed: what lens is used, who takes the photograph, the way it is displayed, received and catalogued.32 Photographs when used as maps often have captions and are positioned in relation to other images and text. Brian Molyneaux, theorizing the way photography is used in archeology, goes so far to suggest we make distinctions between photographs and photoworks, recognizing that photographic techniques bring into question the notion of representation as finding some correspondence with an exterior reality where ‘reality’ is to be put in quotation marks.33 Maps as representations operate in much the same way. Maps re-present artifacts and their milieu from within specific reception modes. geographic and chorographic maps highlight this difference. geographic maps are primarily terrestrial maps describing land features in a planimetric configuration based on euclidean geometric ordering. The receptive mode is rational and distant. Chorographic maps, in contrast, convey a limited knowledge of the topography of the earth but convey cultural context focusing on individual parts, the qualities not quantities associated with a condition.34 geographic maps require some cartographic knowledge on the part of the viewer where chorographic maps are pictorial and present features of a place to the viewer in perspectival views more like tourist maps. Studying tourism in Bangkok, Thailand, Stephen hanna and Vincent Del Casino turn specifically to tourist maps to understand this mode of reception.35 They argue visitors must use tourist maps in the context of other texts, narratives like guided tours, and conversations with strangers to ‘read’ back into the map; rendering it legible as more than color, lines and graphics. The tourist is both consumer and producer of space where ‘maps, spaces and identities as interrelated processes rather than final products.’ Using identity and post-structuralist theories from Deleuze, guattari and Judith Butler they show maps are ‘intertextual,’ meant to be used in the presence of a broad range of existing representations of the place being mapped, social histories, and personal perceptions: a ‘map space.’36 Map space is the unbounded, changing space of the map produced by social actors using the map. Del Casino and hanna remind us these spaces must remain ambiguous because any attempt to ‘fix oppositional categories, boundaries and other meanings is always partial.’ Ambiguity is what makes map space so potent for a designer. Map space becomes the interactive mode of production and reception for the representation of spatial relations, ideas, or things in the design process.37 Diagram, Image, or Map? The conventions of mapping also apply to other kinds of data. Data visualization or information analysis use principles and representational strategies of mapping to systematize information of various kinds: proteins in gene mapping, neurons in brain mapping, human perceptions of spatial configurations in cognitive mapping. Cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove differentiates maps and mapping: the latter once understood as a weak synonym for cartography is more recently defined through process, specifically the process of

9

Introduction

projection.38 Mapping as act creates, visualizes, and conceptualizes a possible situation as much as it records, represents, or describes one. Jean Baudrillard condenses this to the idea that territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it, ‘the map precedes the territory.’39 An exemplar of this idea is the map by naysmith and Carpenter (Figure 0.1) comparing ‘things that age’ to the same shapes found on the moonscape. The map hypothesizes ridges produced with aging (like those shown on the apple and the human hand) are akin to the ridges and craters seen on the moon produced by the activity of a heated core through volcanism (a popular belief at the time). Although incorrect, the power of the representation of aging coupled with argumentation in naysmith and Carpenter’s theory was popular with planetary scientists for over 70 years until we landed on the moon and disproved their hypothesis. Making good maps is an artful science. Moving from maps as objects of explanation to recognizing the key semiotic structures of maps helps us understand how maps-as-representation operate as signs/signifiers. Visual representations of data engage our cognitive perceptions, graphic skills, and rational capacity to synthesize complex ideas. For designers, maps represent observations about places, ideas or relationships. Being able to frame, represent, and order data through maps empowers the process of thinking, including thinking visually. In the twenty-first century, synthesis of complex data is a hallmark of critical thinking in all areas of knowledge. organizing information means creating links between chains of data, links between quantitative and qualitative data, and links between ideas through data. Visually organizing data means managing these links at the intersection of visual perception, representation, and the imagination. See for example B. W. Betts’ representations of human psychology through geometrically abstracted figures resembling flowers (Figures 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4). Betts, an architect, was inspired by an analogy Fichte used in The Science of Knowledge, where modes of consciousness correspond to lines and circles.40 Betts attempted to show successive stages of human evolution through symbolical mathematical forms.41 The

10

0.1 This remarkable map compares the surface of an aging hand with a shriveled apple to illustrate the origin of ranges on the moon resulting from the shrinkage of the interior. Produced by an engineer and a gentleman amateur astronomer it didn’t propose a new theory, but underscored a popular belief held at the time that lunar craters are volcanoes. This coincided with a hypothesis that the same geologic forces shaping Earth formed the Moon. Beyond the wonderful map comparing ‘how things age’ with the similar-looking surface of the moon, additionally they made meticulous clay models of the moon then photographed them creating a simulacra of being shot on the moon. It was only when the first moon mission landed, most astrophysicists, educated on Nasmyth and Carpenter, would relinquish the idea volcanism created the moonscape. John Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, 1885; J. Murray, London.

Introduction

0.2, 0.3, 0.4 Shown are three plates from Geometrical Psychology, or, The Science of Representation an Abstract of the Theories and Diagrams of B. W. Betts. Benjamin Betts intended to mathematically model using geometric forms as the evolution of human consciousness. He was trained as an architect, but was unsatisfied with the lack of systemization in architecture and turned to more metaphysical pursuits. Plate 10 represents the real form of a not perfectly ideal conscience. Plate 11 and Plate 12 manifest the polarization of positive and negative elements, say Struggle and Repentance become increasingly evident to our conscious mind as they alternate between internal reflection and outward action. From the Introduction: ‘The symbolic forms which Mr. Betts has evolved through his system of Representation resemble, when developed in two dimensions, conventionalized but very scientifically and beautifully conventionalized leaf-outlines. When in more than two dimensions they approximate to the forms of flowers and crystals…The fact he has accidentally portrayed plant-forms when he was studying human evolution is an assurance to Mr. Betts of the fitness of the symbols he has developed …’.

correspondence between mathematical geometries and nature confirmed for Betts that his abstract mapping of the human psyche was a reasonable representation. Mapmaking conceptualizes relationships between datasets in space as much as actualizes real objects through spatial configurations. Cities are maps at full scale. Watson and Crick weren’t able to understand the structure of the genes’ double helix until they physically modeled it (Figure 0.5). odd, if one considers how very different their crude model is compared to a physical DnA strand. But as robinson and Petchenik note: assuming the knowledge–space–map relationship includes an isomorphism between map and cognitive spatial territory tends to happen with ease in fields concerned with language systems, signs, and meaning where maps are surrogates of space.42 however, to be robust surrogates they need structure. What makes Watson and Crick’s model work as a map is the underlying structure of the model. It is scaled, ordered, with syntax (elements like C, g, A and T) and grammar (their linear organization), a geometric organization, and clear frame

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Introduction 0.5 Working model made in metal used by James Watson and Francis Crick to determine the threedimensional double-helical structure of the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecule present in all living organisms and responsible for transporting in coded form the instructions necessary for passing on hereditary characteristics. Watson and Crick did not discover DNA per se, but they were the first to formulate an accurate description of the molecule’s structure in 1953. The by-now familiar double-helix structure maps the nucleotides making up the molecule which, in turn, carry the forms of organic life. The only way to understand structure was through a three-dimensional map of the complementary bases held together by a pair of hydrogen bonds. James Watson and Francis Crick, Model of DNA, Photo: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

of reference: it describes the animal body of a human being. Alfred korzybski working in the field of general semantics argues what maps retain of the territory is structure: ‘Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness’43 ernst haeckel’s maps (Figures 0.6 and 0.7; see also Figures 0.17 and 0.18) are part of a larger atlas Art Forms of Nature (Kunstformen der Natur, 1904) describing detailed marine and other animal and avian forms. haeckel, a german biologist and naturalist, discovered and made visual catalogues of thousands of new species. his atlas of animals and sea creatures is part of a bigger project mapping a genealogical tree relating all life forms. representations of classes of physically similar types supports his thesis species developed though similar forms (ontogeny). This link between evolutionary descent (phylogeny) and form runs counter to Darwinism and supports the development of non-random form so beautifully illustrated in the Kunstformen. The structure of the atlas imposed by haeckel supports his evolutionary position. The science of the map was ultimately limited: haeckel’s position has since been disproved.44

12

Introduction

0.6 Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig und Wien, 1904, plate 85, Ascidiacea, 10 × 14 in.

0.7 Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig und Wien, 1904, plate 99, Trochilidae, 10 × 14 in.

Similarly, the side-scan sonar map shown (Figure 0.8) uses sound waves projected through water bounced off the surface of the ocean bottom to simulate a view of objects and terrain. Turning sound into a visual map using this technique works because the translation between change in sound waves bounced back from sea-ocean bottom to the surface translates to light and dark areas in a picture our visual apparatus—eye, brain— can ‘see.’ The structure of the map is similar enough to the original territory even if the method of observation involves a translation from sound to sight. Two student maps shown (Figure 0.9) address the problem from a different point. Both maps are the same site, roughly a six by three block area in an urban environment, and both illustrate the same condition: the quality of sunlight in this place. however the results are strikingly different. The territory of the first map is the perceptual experience of light at a particular time of day during a specific season a little after noon on a sunny day in January. The second map overlays all possible shade conditions over the course of a 365-day period. This is the maximum shade

13

0.8 Shown is a side-scan sonar map used to determine the shape of objects on the ocean floor. Sidescan sonar (sound navigation and ranging) continuously records a return echo. This enables the creation of the ‘picture’ of the seafloor. The picture consists of light and dark areas created when the sonar scan hits soft and hard objects respectively. Sonar side-scan maps translate sound data into visual data. Thunder Bay 2001, NOAA-OER.

0.9 The two solar study maps represent the same condition on the same site in two very different ways. Solar analyses help architects visualize the impact of natural light and shadows on a site. The lighter map (left) registers the ‘pooling’ of shadows around buildings on an urban block a little after noon on a sunny day. The second study on the same urban site (right) is a compilation of all possible sun angles over a one-year period. It represents maximum amount of possible shadow in a year. Both maps use a similar planimetric layout, graphic language, coloration and index, yet the focus of the mapmakers’ attention and the time frame—one hour versus a year of time—significantly change the way the site sun condition is represented. Student work, Sun Map, University of Tennessee, 1999, 11 × 17 in., ink and plastic on vellum.

Introduction

Diagram 0.1 Set of figures illustrating the ambiguous nature of the diagram. The series could indicate a number of possibilities including airflow in a building, pedestrian passage through an overpass, or fluid dynamics for an air-conditioning vent. possible for this site given current building and street configuration. Both maps are ‘right’: the first qualitative, the second quantitative. The presence of structure distinguishes maps from diagrams. They are similar in kind but not degree. Diagrams share some of the structure but don’t quantify or qualify spatio-temporal relationships in the same way as maps. They are ‘simplified figures to convey essential meaning,’ whereas maps tend toward robust meaning relative to the subject.45 Symbols in diagrams have multiple possible significations until we specify or point to their meaning through context using an index. Diagrams are indexical, i.e. they point to something, but they aren’t indexed: they don’t order or organize within a larger context nor do they have a spatio-temporal dimension like maps. Diagram 0.1 illustrates the point: at first glance it seems communicative. The sequence suggests a set of operations performed on a simple box. Arrows indicate possible forces, movement, or points at which deformations in the ‘box’ take place. But without a specific context and an index or more structure, meaning is inferred but not secure. First, the box-shape is scale-less. It could be a building, a piece of gum, a special type of material, even a section of a larger entity as yet determined. Second, the arrows could mean a number of possible ideas: people-movement, direction of deformation, direction of wind, water, how a participant is supposed to move the game piece (if indeed this is a game) or any other number of possible combinations. The point is the diagram in itself doesn’t contain enough structure to communicate phenomenal information enabling it as a simulacrum. Designers often confuse diagrams as maps. The danger is diagrams don’t offer much in the way of phenomenal information and aren’t meaningful for hypothesis making for spatio-temporal conditions. Diagrams are best used to communicate simplified figures, ‘caricatures in a way, intended to convey essential meaning.’46 everyday usage may even include using diagram as a synonym for graph, but for our purposes the degree of abstraction from context, phenomenal experience, and spatio-temporal qualia determines the utility of the diagram relative to the context robust map. Finally, collage and montage are two examples of image constructions sharing the idea of structure or a set of rules for assembly and legibility, but they aren’t maps. Collage includes tangible artifacts as pieces or fragments of reality, often photographs or drawings selected by the image-maker. In collage, artifacts retain their references to the

15

Introduction

0.10 As compelling and visually exciting as the image is, it cannot be called a map. It is a collage of photographs taken by a student of an urban street at night. The author was looking at the different patterns of light, but rather than mapping this phenomenon, the image gives an overall impression, not a calibrated, measured, qualitative or quantitative analysis. The difference between the collage and a map is the way the information in the map is structured. Student work, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010, 24 × 24 in., photo collage on museum board.

external reality of the assembled fragments. Montage cuts and reassembles fragments to create new juxtapositions. The final image tends to appear more seamless than a collage. The collage image shown in Figure 0.10 retains identifiable fragments. Both image types share compositional structures: they are assembled from artifacts, retain some referent to reality, can be spatial and have a boundary or frame. What they lack is an index. This is significant because indexicality points to the expected meaning of the assembly. Indexes are contextually dependent references assigning meaning by linking signs to actions, things or ideas. C. S. Peirce’s definition is robust: ‘a sign that is linked to its object by an actual connection or real relation by a reaction, so as to compel attention, in a definite place and time.’47 This is somewhat expanded by French theorists such as Barthes and Baudrillard, but the notion the index will ‘compel attention, in a definite place and time,’ is part of the context function of the map separating the image, even seemingly robust images like collage and montage, from the representational mechanics of maps.48

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Introduction Complexity and Legibility The paradox of the map rests on a fragile pretext: our ability to deceive ourselves about its validity. Up until this point I worked to undermine the appearance of the map. The question remains: how can we use this dialectical awareness of the map’s representation— depending on us to think it and our thoughts about it? herein lies the power of the map. The autonomy of the map is simultaneously illusory and necessary and, just as Adorno suggests, art is the ‘social antithesis of society’ the map is the rational antithesis of reality.49 If true, how then do maps create new knowledge? I don’t want to suggest maps aren’t utilarian, far from it. As one of our two primary means of communication—the other is language (oral and written)—the visual representation of reality through maps has a long and productive history. But maps, more than diagrams or sketches, look like and act like scientific tools.50 Map collections or atlases are a specific case in point. The map in early science offers a way to systematically describe or catalogue geographies, but equally, the map was a substitution for the conditions of a place. The difference is instructive as one assumes a history of the world represented in the map as representations of things as they are, while the second explanation implies a shift: mapping the history of the world, as we understand it becoming.51 In the first instance even a close resemblance between territory and map proves not close enough: the gap between the map and territory exists regardless of how accurate the map is. In mapping as philosophy, the question of being related to the one of becoming predates the digital revolution. Maps tend to do something: show movement from point a to b on a topology or in geography. They construct order and establish relative relations. Map legibility is internally determined. You need only decipher the key or legend and the internal syntax of the map unfolds. In ‘Theories and Maps’, Stephan Toulmin, a philosopher writing about theories in science, argues the efficiency of maps in providing more information than the set of pointobservations constituting their making: This, of course, is the marvel of cartography: the fact that, from a limited number of highly precise and well-chosen measurements and observations, one can produce a map from which can be read off an unlimited number of geographical facts of almost as great a precision.52 This capacity to ‘read off ‘ unlimited facts has interesting implications. It gives the subject of the map the appearance of objective validity and suggests accurate maps could describe everything. Taken to an extreme, the absurdity of this becomes apparent in Jorge luis Borges’ thought experiment about the tragic usefulness of the perfect map: of exactitude in Science ...In that empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the empire that was of the same Scale as the empire and that coincided with it point for point. less attentive

17

Introduction to the Study of Cartography, succeeding generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the rigors of sun and rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of geography.53 Borges’ example illustrates another condition: the complexity of the map is not its legibility—meaning whether it is accurate or clear—but rather its not exact legibility. The map implies or infers spatial organizations projected onto the world. It isn’t exactitude per se but the sufficiency of the model of the world generated by the map. It is clear from Toulmin’s premise, maps do this with little effort. We can’t become enmeshed in the logics of fidelity or mimesis to the lived world when regarding the map. We don’t have to go far to illustrate the point. The map of tesseract by Charles hinton (Figure 0.11) presents a mathematically determined 4-dimensional figure by definition impossible to see in our 3-dimensional world, however; the simulacra hinton creates helps us to imagine then act on this imagined space. This begs the question of the relationship between the map and the territory or idea being mapped. Map-territory relations are key to how designers calibrate observations of place to potential change. The relationship between map and territory describes the correspondence between objects and representations of objects in space. Alfred korzybski’s famous dictum, ‘the map is not the territory,’ points to the essential problem—the representation of the thing is not the thing itself.54 It is easy to confuse models of reality with reality itself, but designers work in the ‘mental world of maps of maps’ where their drawings act as an infinite set of maps describing ‘thoughts about thinking.’ Adding another layer of complexity: the tools of digital thinking extend the possibility of signs and simulacra to their ‘infinite regress.’ Where early maps or mapping appear to describe appearances mimetically, Jean Baudrillard argues we can no longer delude ourselves: ‘Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyper real. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is…the map that precedes the territory…that engenders the territory.’55 The map is a mirror of our gaze—it is what we allow ourselves to see—not what is seen. representations bear similar burdens of inexactitude, but maps are complex because they claim a kind of veracity or accuracy. The scientific traits of the map are obligatory: modeling reality through measurement, reproducibility, dissemination, but as Borges addresses, these refract on us where the fictions of the map reveal our persistent illusion of self: The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: ‘let us imagine that a portion of the soil of england has been leveled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of england. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of england, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to

18

Introduction 0.11 These figures are from a series of images by Charles Howard Hinton, British mathematician and science fiction writer, who coined the term ‘tesseract’ appearing for the first time in his book A New Era of Thought (1888). The image shown describes a procedure for simulating the ‘tesseract’—a four-dimensional analog of the cube. Cubes have six square faces where a tesseract has eight cubical cells. Tesseracts can be constructed but are not possible to experience, as we cannot access four-dimensional space. Hinton pursued ways to map space on a moral basis. An intuitive perception of higher space would, by rights, help us rid ourselves of the directional location in three-dimensional space reinforcing our sense of self. By ‘casting out the self,’ Hinton believed we would be more sympathetic to others and therefore create greater harmony between experiencers of our shared space. Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension (1904), 1912, Ayer Co., Kessinger Press reprint.

infinity.’ Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? The reason may be this: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.56

Problems of Classification A thought-experiment introduced early in my map class asks students to imagine for a moment a map of the world. hold the image in mind. Identify prominent characteristics in

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0.12 Étienne-Jules Marey’s lab, the Station Physiologique, established in 1882 studied human locomotion and measured the effort required in movement. He wanted to seek the favorable conditions for energy use in human and animal motions. His work pioneered establishing the rules governing physical exercise, repetitive motion studies in the workplace, and military exercises for soldiers. His studies are often purposely misread in architecture: rather than being used to understand the amount of energy used in the motions photographically recorded by Marey, they are read as volumetric studies and appreciated for the fluid shapes they create. As a technique for describing motion these maps are unparalleled. Étienne-Jules Marey, Cheval blanc monté, 1886, Locomotion du cheval, expérience 4, chronophotographie sur plaque fixe, negative.

0.13 Similar to Figure 0.12 this map of the movement of a single muscle translates repeated muscular contractions into a graphical trace or index. The data is interpolated by the index and represented over the span of multiple events where each line is equivalent to one pulse or movement. The power of this representation is it takes an isolated event (one movement) and presents it to the viewer as a continuous event with variations over time. This is an early example of what Walter Benjamin called the ‘optical unconscious’ where something otherwise unavailable is revealed for visual perception.59 EtienneJules Marey, ‘Trace of repeated muscular contractions,’ from La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en medicine, Paris 1875, 194.

Introduction the map—answers generally include demarcations of boundaries, differences between land and water, or the grid. next imagine the same map without boundaries or the grid or other classifications. The thought experiment reveals to students a singular idea: organization of the knowledge depends on assumptions made in the map about ordering and how we catalogue the world of objects. This is what lorraine Daston argues as reciprocity in the selection. Addressing the role of cataloguing objects in early natural philosophy she identifies objects refusing any kind of neat cataloguing generating theoretical engagements situated precisely within the confines of their respective disciplines. Thus through a ‘process of reciprocity, our things individualized us as we picked them out of all the possibilities.’57 What defines catalogues and classifications? historians, philosophers, and others often treat classification as an abstract intellectual achievement similar to theory, but separate from social context and discipline practices. klein, lefèvre and others argue classification is a historically situated activity entrenched in social and cultural institutions and informed by perception and cognition, but also goals and interests, meaning, and collective ways of working with and handling objects. It is a ‘practice linked with other practices’ allowing us to bring to the foreground types of material objects, historical actors, and their epistemic approach to these objects. Studies of classification contribute to a historical ontology of the past taking into account the actors’ material culture and their ways of making and knowing.58 Catalogues and taxonomies share systemization. Systematic classification distinguishes this from less robust ‘organizing’ more akin to a logical arrangement. Classification implies objects are grouped in categories: they are identified, differentiated, and reduced. The reduction is one of degree not kind. The example shown in Figure 0.14 demonstrates: the classification of ‘political and criminal revolutionaries’ according to their physiognomy reduces all possible human head shapes and sizes to a few and, in this case, rather questionable criteria for determining if this head-shape indicates political criminality. The particular set was identified as a ‘matroid,’ now typically used in mathematics, but used in the map to imply a non-empty, finite set using a generalized concept satisfying a natural set of properties. The criteria for this map clearly reflects late nineteenth-century society and its naturalized hierarchies of order embedded in Victorian ethical and moral certitudes. A less charged example produced by a student (Figure 0.15) looks at the topology of the human faces in relation to the expression of emotion produced. Map catalogues, taxonomies, sets, clusters, or groupings tend to use the classical categorization approach grouping objects based on similar properties—properties identified by the person imposing the order. These categories are discrete entities with members sharing a set of properties. recent systems of categorization introduce conceptual clustering and prototype theory. In the former not only are the characteristics (data) about an object taken into consideration, but the language of the description used to define the category is considered. There is some reciprocity therefore, between the objects in a set and the boundaries of the set. The Carte du Tendre, or ‘Map of love’ demonstrates how this might work (Figure 0.16). The Carte du Tendre equates emotional states of love with a geographical territory containing a set of possible human responses: jealousy, indifference, desire and so forth. The mapped spatio-cognitive terrain is indeterminate for order or a particular catalogue of emotional states. each sub-type is understood in the context of other sub-

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0.14, 0.15 These maps use the human face as subject to different ends. The first is part of the eighteenth-century tradition of phrenology or the art of discerning the nature of a person’s character from their outer appearance with special focus on the face and head. This technique was used as early as the Greeks but recorded comparisons were not produced until the advent of photography. In 1852 James Redfield published comparative engravings between men and animals ideologically charged to underscore contemporary racial hierarchies. In the late nineteenth century Sir Frances Galton refined physiognomic characteristics of health, disease, beauty and criminality by mapping one face onto another using a method of composite photography. The example shown is by C. Lombroso, from L’Homme Criminal. This is a comparison of ‘révolutionnaires et criminels et politiques—matroïdes et fous moraux (criminal and political revolutionaries—matroid (a finite set) and moral fools). Modern research discredited any scientific value to these studies. However the related area of the study of the human expression of emotions, pioneered by Charles Darwin focusing on the physiological characteristics of expression continues to be debated to this day. The second map made by an architecture student, follows on the Darwinian tradition of capturing the shape of the face during different moments of emotive expression. The Topography of Human Emotion map treats the face as a surface revealing the unique pattern in the topography of a given individual’s face similar to a fingerprint. L’Homme criminal: Étude anthropologique et psychiatrique. Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Baillière et Cie, Félix Alcan, Éditeur, 1887. Joaquin Pineda, Topography of Human Emotion, Florida International University, 2013, 24 × 36 in. printed.

Introduction

0.16 La Carte du Tendre engraved by François Chauveau (1654) and included in the first part of Ciélie (1654–61) by Madeleine de Scudéry. The map was popular in its time. This allegorical map of the stages of love places the start of the journey at the near center top where one can go by way of the Reconaissance River through the various towns named for attributes of beginning love: Constancy, Tenderness, Sensibility and Great Service. You could also travel the most direct route using the Inclination River but beware Negligence on the side of the Lac d’Indifférence or Lake of Indifference. Passion is not privileged in the time period—much too willful, but exists on the map closer to La Mer Dangereuse, or the Dangerous Sea. types. Concept descriptions are generated for each class (jealousy or indifference) in relation to their physical placement or hierarchy in the map. Concept clustering is generally applied to machine learning, but thematic maps like the Carte du Tendre follow similar principles. Introduced in the 1970s by eleanor rosch and george lakoff, prototype theory engages directly with our assumptions of how types are encoded in the mind.60 Prototype theory states we remember differences between objects based on prototypical exemplars, not from the more traditional necessary and sufficient conditions used in classical categorization. Some members of a category are more central than others and models aren’t necessarily definition based. For example, lizard is defined by 1) egg lying, 2) cold-blooded and 3) external ears and feet, but prototype categories are defined by characteristics of unequal status—cold-

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Introduction blooded may bring to mind Gila monsters more often than skink. Cognitive semantics plays a significant role in prototype theory including using metaphor, a powerful linguistic construction relating one idea in terms of another, similar to analogy. Metaphors (like ‘our brains are computers’) determine how we generate and understand information. Mapping as part of the mechanics of making a metaphor establishes systematic correspondence between elements from one domain to another (love is a journey). Prototype theory underscores human cognition as embodied experience of the world—lakoff and Johnson’s primary theory is mind is inherently embodied, thought mostly unconscious and abstract concepts largely metaphorical.61 They assert: our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We can’t think just anything—only what our embodied brains permit.62 Prototypes relate our empirical confrontations with the world into operational, not definitive, categories (Figures 0.17 and 0.18). The similarity to maps is striking as the translation from statistical data to visual representation involves similar interpolation and interpretation Decisions made in mapping population demonstrates this in so far as they determine categories of race, how and what to aggregate, where there is homogeneity, how to interpret outliers, and how to correlate all of this to a visual perception (see Figure 1.33 for an analysis of the disambiguation of ‘race’ in the U.S. census). Moving from an observation about the world to a re-presentation of the world in a map requires mapmakers to categorize content. This seems obvious but, as the previous discussion demonstrates, finding order is also to impose order on the undifferentiated world around us. Designers do this as part of the design process: for every path taken in a given design, countless others aren’t. Assuming informed choices indicates some consideration given in ordering their relative importance. Mapping cognitive structures and their concurrence with possible empirical conditions or conceptual ideation enriches the process enabling designers to manage complex and robust solutions. The Role of the Mapmaker Cartographers and geographers generally agree the current frameworks for organizing relationships in maps are limited. Terms like zoning, boundary condition and set theory aren’t robust enough to usefully describe or catalogue a world characterized by complex and culturally specific contexts, dynamic flows and nascent information networks. new forms of mapping (cognitive mapping) and tools for representation (photogrammetry and gIS) allow hitherto unimagined perspectives. This combination of factors qualifies spatial relationships borrowed freely from alternative historiographies to propose new ideologies in the social sciences, professional practices like architecture, urban design and the humanities. The role of mapmaker as hypothesis-maker is evident as we move toward a fourth paradigm in the humanities and sciences. According to Jim gray, the first three paradigms are empirical science describing natural phenomena, theoretical science using models and generalization, and computational science instigated by computers simulating

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Introduction

0.17, 0.18 A catalogue of the physical characteristics of a subgroups of Radiolaria by Ernst Haeckel from the Kunstformen der Natur. This atlas or map collection of specimens from nature catalogues minuscule differences in genotypes of a subgenus typically described through text, but beautifully displayed like exotic creatures for our visual pleasure by Haeckel. The map bridges the specificity of the grammar of taxonomy and the visceral delight of Haeckel’s composed and exquisitely rendered ideal specimens. Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig und Wien, 1904, plate 31, Cyrtoidea and plate 53, Prosobranchia (obsolete classification).

complex phenomena. The idea of a ‘fourth paradigm’ introduced by gray around eScience emphasizes data exploration.63 gray argues everything about science, and I would add the humanities and social sciences, is changing with the impact of information technology: ‘experimental, theoretical, and computational science are all being affected by the data deluge, and a fourth, “data-intensive” science paradigm is emerging.’64 humanities research is equally affected as new areas of interrogating objects, archives, and theoretical assumptions respond to new modes of knowledge made possible by visualization and data collection technologies. hypothesis-making is less about deductive or inductive reasoning in the new model, but pattern identification of data, data simulations. Techniques for this data-intensive research are so different they supersede computational science and present a new paradigm. Increasingly, cartography and mapmaking is responding. Designers need

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Introduction to address the impact of the increasing amounts of data available from a multiplicity of sources and how this will impact and inform how design decisions are made. Data-intensive research including cartography and mapmaking consists of three basic activities: capture, curation, and analysis.65 Including quantitative and qualitative data collected through instruments to individual observation, objects in hand to remote sensing, data at all scales and shapes gathered using the most structured practices to ad hoc collections. Instrumentation for capturing data is sensitive, capable of adjusting to multiple environments and immediately accessible as digital data. Think about documenting a physical condition using a basic tool like the camera. The phone camera takes, processes, manipulates and shares images in a matter of minutes, accomplishing what previously took days in a physical laboratory with skilled technicians. Although the time to get data is shorter, the complexity and amount of data makes curation more difficult. In design fields this means translating sense data, visual observation, data collected through sensors and others devices into legible output impacting the design process. Maps and mapping are one way of doing this. The graphic index (Figures 0.9 and 0.10) has a short but immensely significant history in the sciences with equally productive misreadings in the arts and humanities. For example, the fascination with speed and movement in the sciences at the end of the nineteenth century shares a well-documented influence on the arts. ÉtienneJules Marey’s studies of animal and human movement meant to examine the amount of caloric energy required to perform certain tasks are echoed in artists like Marcel Duchamp, Umberto Boccioni, and giacomo Balla.66 Finally, analyzing is not only about processing, but entails determining which data to use and what modeling, including data visualization, to perform. looking at all available data in the environment isn’t currently feasible and given predicted growth rates will be impossible without modeling and data visualization technologies to synthesize and organize it. A simple example from building design highlights the problem. Current computer-aided design software can manage aspects of the systems necessary in the documentation of the building process. This replaces a paper-based database, but includes significantly more information from engineers, contractors and manufacturers. This replaces pre-computerage paper-based databases and affords the inclusion of significantly more information from engineers, contractors and manufacturers now embedded in a digital database. Data is used to make simulations that, in turn, generate more data. Most disciplines, including architecture, industrial design, and graphic design are seeing changes as a result of new design software and hardware in two discipline subareas: computational performance and fabrication concerned with collecting, analyzing, simulating and assembling objects and environments, and systems design focused on managing human and social ecologies. ‘Computational thinking,’ an idea borrowed from computer science, quickly radicalized design disciplines and created productive debate around what and how to represent data in the design process. Making complex maps using large datasets is one option enabling designers to bridge the gap between human and machine observation. Maps are efficient, evocative, and indeterminate. They model data well enough for us to infer relations, forecast possibilities, while maintaining data consistency. Additionally, maps are reproducible and transmittable to other designers.

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Introduction Designer as Mapmaker Architects and designers are, historically, mapmakers. This next section looks at maps as social inscriptions producing identity; specifically the way designers use maps to provoke new identities of place. For designers, mapping elucidates the gap between representation and territory or context. neil gaiman describes a similar situation in relation to storytelling: The way you describe the tale is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map … would be the territory and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory (emphasis mine).67 To paraphrase: the drawing is the map is the territory. Designers and architects are storytellers about the set of possible relations between humans and their environments including their social, political, cultural, and scientific selves imagined in the corresponding spatial arrangement. The configuration of spatial orders reflects and projects the social imaginary of a culture. Designers work in abstract and geometrical spaces in their representations to order the world just as cartographers order the terrestrial globe or other territories in the map. As geometrical constructs, all drawing technologies used in architectural representation are based on projections. Projections as drawing technology allow for the translation from a three-dimensional space to a two-dimensional surface. The orthographic set (plans, sections, elevations) used in design are parallel projections where lines of projection are perpendicular or orthogonal to the drawing surface. Some of the earliest orthographic projections from the second century

bc

are used in cartography.68 Projections require

mathematics to rationalize two-dimensional views—they aren’t techniques, rather technologies giving us precise and measured control over our representations of objects or spaces. Axonometric projections include isometrics or parallel-line projections where the angles between the projections of the axes are equal (120°). Axonometric projections are parallel-line projections used to create a three-dimensional pictorial representation of an object. There are three types of axonometric projections each defined by the angle used in the drawing between the projection of the three coordinate axes: isometric, dimetric and trimetric projections. To understand the ‘projection of the axes,’ imagine the intersection of the x, y, and z coordinate axes for a cube. True angles or those in the actual three-dimensional object remain at 90° but in the axonometric drawing space they are represented using other angles. In an isometric drawing the angles at the projection of the axes are 120° which exaggerates the planes of the cube and makes it easer to ‘see’ more of each face of the cube at the same time. In perspective projection parallel lines converge at vanishing points. This projection closely resembles views of the world we see in binocular vision because unlike parallel line projections, perspectival projection lines parallel with the viewer’s line of sight converge at the horizon. Train tracks look this way to us where parallel lines appear to converge in the distance. These drawing technologies are simulations of reality, even perspective: in binocular vision lines are curved, not straight. Designers rarely operate on the thing itself—we use abstract representations of objects to

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Introduction manipulate design, construction and production. Through drawing technologies designers create simulations of reality or maps of the territory of the object. In the case of buildings this is easy to understand: each time a designer re-draws a place or object they re-present an abstraction of a territory to themselves upon which they act. Socialist London(s) The following discussion looks at two very different uses for the map in the design of spatial relationships operating at the scale of a city. The spatial identities of these maps are different even as the geographical locale is the same: post-war london. These map projections are planimetric with similar indices—the functional organization of the city. Patrick Abercrombie’s London: Social and Functional Analysis Map (1944) made in post-war london is a largescale plan for the re-distribution of communities after World War II (Figure 0.19). Pre- and interwar planning tended to emphasize the functional over the communal. The modernist city plans of le Corbusier projected a technocratic world where circulation and movement (mobilité), guaranteeing function, triumphed over ambiguity, and clarity over indeterminacy (see Figure 3.19). The power of Abercrombie’s map is the inclusion of ‘social’ context—the indeterminate communities loosely floating around the city center providing little descriptive information, but suggesting a city consisting of small villages. note there is little other context in the map: no roadways, very little indication of topography and only minimal geographical clues this is london. Abercrombie’s plan is credited with influencing the growth of the outer ring of suburban development and the depopulation of london after the war. The devastated postwar landscape was reimagined as a regional landscape with a blending of housing and industry, new transport and open spaces (Figure 0.20). Abercrombie is considered to be one of the last english visionary architect-planners. one other comment: without the map title I argue it would be difficult to identify what city is being represented. The beauty of maps is their paucity—they can communicate complex ideation through carefully selected and measured but minimal indicators. In contrast the Plan of London (1939–41) by the M.A.r.S. group (Modern Architectural research group) (Figure 0.21) was a mid-century British collaboration of architects and architectural critics. Arthur korn, a german-Jewish architect and urban planner and émigré to england, is the plan’s primary author. The map shows a largely unchanged city center with the addition of a series of linear agglomerations composed of social units based round a rail network. The linear bands contain neighborhoods of communal housing. The spatial organization of the city in the map mirrors the mapmakers’ socialist ideology and hopes for spatial and social equity through mobility. The modernist notion of movement is interpreted as a spatial network of communications and exchange or transactions drawn in greater detail in the accompanying folio. Although the M.A.r.S. group plan wasn’t adopted it was a successful polemic against the rational and orthogonal city plans promoted before the war in Modernism. The map’s programmatic organization was clearly influenced by the modernist agenda of dwelling, work, recreation and transport as the primary urban functions in the city, however; the london plan incorporated these in a new schematic relationship. The linear organization of the housing areas intersecting the transportation spine combined earlier linear city ideas with a ‘theory of contacts’: human contacts and

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0.19 Patrick Abercrombie was an English town planner who trained as an architect. ‘The London Map’ influenced the New Town movement in postwar Europe aimed at redressing overcrowding in the larger industrialized cities. There was an acute need to provide housing after the devastation of the war and create strong identities for these new communities to heal and prevent similar atrocities. Like the Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement of the late 1800s the planners of these new towns wanted to provide citizens with affordable housing, greenspace through parks, and strong community identity, much as Abercrombie imagines within the confines of the city in the London Plan. Patrick Abercrombie, London Plan: Social and Functional Analysis, 1943. 0.20 Patrick Abercrombie, County of London Plan, 1943. This plan is part of the same proposal. It is a more normative representation cataloguing existing post-war conditions.

Introduction 0.21 Arthur Korn and Felix J. Samuely, Master Plan for London, 1942 based on research carried out by the Town Planning Committee of the M.A.R.S. Group: draft plan giving a rough impression of what the map of London would look like with ribbons of open country penetrating the city, from A. Korn and F. J. Samuely ‘A Master Plan for London’, Architectural Review 91: 150, 1942.

transactions of all types, intellectual, social and commercial.69 For korn the isolation created by the amorphous sprawl of london would continue ‘unless there is some organization of social life and its expression in architecture and town planning; for the visual effect on the mind is considerable.’70 The map negotiates the orthogonal planning of modernist cities with similar underlying urban functions reconfigured around the idea of exchange— not dissimilar from the Abercrombie plan but foregrounding transportation technology facilitating how contact would occur presented in a seemingly precise rendition in the map. As english critic Dennis Sharp wrote: That it was unworkable need not detain us here, for what the architects and planners had worked up into a programmatic solution for the future of london was not a concrete scheme but a concept that would by its very nature produce interpretations.71 In the last analysis it was the map’s capacity to produce interpretations for a new kind of urban organization portending its lasting influence. The map did not solve the problem—it was a hypothesis to test how a city could be planned to facilitate human interaction while maintaining a social order. It was a plan to humanize the city without disrupting the agency of the state to preside over civil and civic relationships.

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Introduction Revolutionary France Finally we turn to an earlier set of maps by the French architecture Claude-nicolas ledoux in eighteenth-century France: the plan for the ideal city of Chaux (Figure 0.22) close to the royal saltworks in the Franche-Comté. The layout is along a semicircle with buildings arrayed on the outer arc of the circle and across the mid-point. ledoux’s plan of the saltworks resembles his plan for the ideal city of Chaux (Figure 0.23) executed some twenty years later in post-revolutionary France. Although the ideal city was intended by ledoux as an urban fiction he locates it in the same geographical area as the earlier saltworks. For ledoux architecture was the ‘rival of nature, out of which another nature could be formed.’72 The city of Chaux is not a utopian proposal per se, but a possible future. It is this context in which the plan map for the saltworks must be considered. Arc-et-Senans as built was ledoux’s second proposal for the site. The first organized all of the buildings around the edges of a square connected by covered walkways. The central square courtyard was the location for storing the firewood used to heat the vats for salt extraction foregrounding the importance of this resource in the production of salt.73 This was an ambitious symbology for the spatial imaginary of the modern factory, but louis XV did not approve of the placement of the chapel in the corner of the scheme. The first plan was less hierarchal and ledoux later stated he neglected the symbolic aspects of the plan in favor of the factory. The plan shows a series of individuated buildings dissimilar from the more typical Baroque organizations of a single massing for multiple programs. The plan for the saltworks included separate structures for guardhouses, a chapel, bakery, prison, workshops for the coopers and the director’s house. The whole ensemble (Figure 0.23) is hierarchical with the director’s house at the center, the saltworks to either side 0.22 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Map of the environs of the Saltworks at Chaux, plate 14 from L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art des mœurs et de la legislation, Paris, 1804 (reprinted 1980, G. Olms, Hildesheim).

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Introduction 0.23 The Royal Saltworks (Saline Royal) Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, general plan of the Royal Saltworks at Arcet-Senans, ca. 1778–1804, François-Noël Sellier, engraver.

along the straight sections, quarters for the guards along the arc with bathrooms and vegetable gardens along the backside. Architecture historian emil kaufmann argued the formal physical expression of the plan mirrors the kantian idea of the ‘autonomy’ of the individual as the basis for moral principle. kaufmann links ledoux directly to rousseau’s ‘pacte social,’ his enthusiasm for natural settings, rousseau’s social thought and ledoux’s ideal of a ‘natural’ society, hygiene, physical exercise, education and communal living—all embedded in the program and arrangement of the new saltworks.74 referring to Anthony Vidler’s conclusions about kaufmann’s analysis offers a way for us to understand the intellectual project as a potential spatial identity with a social prescription. Vidler argues the aim of kaufmann’s observations was modest and confined to demonstrating the relations between thought about social form, and thought about architectural form: Thus, similarly, when he speaks of ledoux in the same breath as kant and rousseau, he was perhaps not so much claiming that there is an inner essence in ledoux’s architecture that is kantian, nor certainly that ledoux had read kant or wished to be a kantian architect, but more simply that there seemed to be a homology between, in their different realms, ledoux’s use of separate, independent, geometric forms, and say, kant’s desire for principles of independent critical judgment, and rousseau’s return to the principle of ‘natural man.’ I say ‘more simply,’ but in fact, such relations introduce a complexity in the interpretative structure that is belied by the crude juxtaposition, and that goes well beyond the equally crude ‘social/economic/formal’ postulations of Marxist art historians of the period. here, kaufmann is less a follower of the psychological formalism of the Vienna School than an adherent of the principles of his mentor, Max Dvořák’s, concept of ‘the history of art as the history of ideas.’75

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Introduction 0.24 Aerial view of the saltworks at Arc-et-Senans today.

Following on Vidler from Dvořák we would re-state this as ‘the history of cartography as the history of ideas’ where the cartographic imaginary links civic order and the social imaginary through the agency of individuals disciplining themselves within the dominant power structures of monarchy. The director’s house in the second plan is akin to the all-watching eye and position of the king in relation to subject. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault explores how in modernity the principles of order and control tend to ‘disindividualize’ powers making it inherent in institutions rather than individuals. For Foucault: ‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.76 For French bourgeois society, the king and his representative agents are symbols of power, but in the case of ledoux’s saltworks, this symbolic power becomes a spatial practice expressed and molded by the behaviors of its inhabitants. This is the argument Tom Conley makes. he shows issues of cartographic metaphor run through the heart of Western thought—not only maps shape identities and space, but cartographic imagination influences the structure and content of language and thought.77 Although similar to Foucault’s ‘panoptic machine’ borrowed from seventeenth-century prison reformer Jeremy Bentham, where individuals internalize the technology of the agent, ledoux’s abstraction of the relationship of the individual to power is of another order. To understand how, we need compare the two as metaphor and representation of space. Bentham provided Foucault with an architectural model for disindividualized power: a circular shaped prison with cells open to a central guard tower discussed at length in Chapter 3 (Figure 3.34). In Bentham’s model prisoners don’t see each other and are situated in such way they can’t see if the tower is occupied; their perception is one of being always

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Introduction

surveyed. even though geometrically similar, ledoux’s spatial configuration exercises power through a different agent. In plan the director’s house represents power—not as an observation tower but a temple.78 ledoux illustrates similar symmetrical relationships of power in an engraving for the theater auditorium in Besançon where individuals in the audience view the stage and the room in the same instance (Figure 0.25). The saltworks organizes the gaze of the king through a director who supervises and commands, but in a symmetric structure: everybody sees the center of the circle and his own place in the whole of the social hierarchy. each ‘body’ understands their role in the larger entity where emphasis is an ideal of government as a matter of personal conduct. Borrowing from Foucault, ‘government’ didn’t refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it designated the way the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. As Dino Felluga argues, it covers not only legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but modes of action more or less considered and calculated to act upon the possibilities of the actions of other people.79 In this sense, governance is a

0.25 In L’Architecture considerée sous le rapport de l’art des moeurs et de la législation, 1804, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux says: ‘In order to be a good architect … one must be able to read in the vast circle of human affection. To establish the effects so posterity need not be censured/condemned, the look of the architect is more important than you think. What good is knowledge if it doesn’t make the man better? Usually it generates skeptics, who sow doubt and uncertainty. Why do we insist on learning the irrelevant, that what one is often obliged to forget?. Oh, God of good taste, thus you allow that your sanctuary is profaned.’. Eye Reflecting the Theater of Besançon, (ca. 1784) ClaudeNicolas Ledoux, engraving after Ledoux, 47cm × 28.7 cm; Scanned from exhibition catalogue Revolutionsarcktektur: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu, G. Metken and K. Gallwitz (eds), Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, 1970.

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Introduction structure organizing the possible field of actions of others. The relationship to power isn’t sought in the side of subjugation or pressure nor voluntary linking (at best instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action neither warlike nor juridical which is government80 so ‘power exists only when it is put into action.’81 Foucault therefore makes clear by contrast, a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: ‘the other’ (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up.82 Power always entails a set of actions performed upon another person’s actions and reactions.83 The spatial analogue for ledoux isn’t just a centralized space, but one where the center is empty—it can only be a reflection or mirror of the gaze of the monarch. not as totalitarian oppressor, but as spectator to the wholly ordered social hierarchy giving rational clarity to the social compact. The cartographic imaginary acts at the scale of the royal saltworks but territorializes rousseau’s communitarian principles in the cognitive imagination of the French bourgeoisie. The city of Chaux develops and extends the idea of a community life to a model for a new industrial urbanism. looking at the cemetery ledoux proposed for the city of Chaux complex supports this thesis (Figure 0.26). The cemetery building is a centrally organized plan similar to the saltworks itself. here, though, the center is void; in point of fact it is impossible to physically occupy. The relation to death is purely poetic and cosmic—just as ledoux marks the border between raw nature and the emerging industrial civilization through the articulation of the circle in its larger territory of Chaux, the cemetery is buried underground barely visible, acting as a physical and metaphorical transit between the present and an unknowable future. ledoux draws the ideal plan for the city of Chaux during his imprisonment during the revolution. luc grison argues contrary to most scholarship that ledoux’s ideal city is not the result of an ‘opportunist appropriation by the former king’s architect of his own work in a revolutionary light,’ it is likely ledoux had in mind from the very beginning the project of an ideal city realizing rousseau’s dream of a society in harmony with nature.84 It is an allegorical symbol he used frequently throughout his treaty on architecture. For ledoux the organization of the city could be better than nature, it would bring man’s nature into a rationalized and mapped spatial geometry symbolically and literally structuring our social practices through a spatial imaginary.

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0.26 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Cemetery at Chaux, section and plan, 1804, N. Ransonnette, engraver.

Introduction Notes 1 M. S. Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1991: 1. 2 Stanley Brouwn, This Way Brouwn, 25-2-61.26-2-61. Verlag gebr. könig, Cologne and new York, 1961. 3 These are generally understood as the hallmarks of nineteenth- and twentieth-century cartography. 4 J. B. harley and P. laxton, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Johns hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2001; M. Dodge, r. kitchin and C. r. Perkins, Rethinking Maps, new Frontiers in Cartographic Theory 28, routledge, london, 2009; D. Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, reaktion Books, london, 1999; D. Turnbull and h. Watson, Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1993; J. Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-coded World, routledge, london, 2004. 5 D. Woodward and g. M. lewis, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, volume 2, book 3, of J. B. harley, D. Woodward and M. S. Monmonier, The History of Cartography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1998. 6 Pickles, A History of Spaces, 15. 7 OED Online, oxford University Press, ‘visualize, v. 1. trans. To form a mental vision, image, or picture of (something not visible or present to the sight, or of an abstraction); to make visible to the mind or imagination. 2. absol. or intr. To form a mental picture of something not visible or present, or of an abstract thing, etc.; to construct a visual image or images in the mind. 2. The action or process of rendering visible.’. 8 o. halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945, experimental Futures series, Duke University Press, Durham, nC, 2015. ‘Introduction’: 21. 9 D. Dorling and D. Fairbairn, Mapping: Ways of Representing the World, longman, harlow, 1997: 3. 10 A. h. robinson and B. B. Petchenik, The Nature of Maps, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1976: 2–3. 11 robinson and Petchenik, The Nature of Maps: 4. 12 J. B. harley and D. Woodward, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, vol 1, The History of Cartography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1987: xvi. 13 Pickles, A History of Spaces: 15. 14 Pickles, A History of Spaces: 18. 15 robinson and Petchenik, The Nature of Maps. 16 robinson and Petchenick, The Nature of Maps: 11–14. 17 Michel Foucault predicted the move from historical analysis to increasing need to understand how we are as embodied beings in the world in the social sciences and humanities: ‘We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that

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connects points and intersects with its own sky.’ M. Foucault, ‘of other spaces,’ Diacritics 16(1): 22–27, 1986. he was but one among many including henri lefebvre, The Production of Space (Blackwell, oxford, 1991); gaston Bachelard, La formation de l’esprit scientifique: contribution ‘a une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective,’ (5th edition, J. Vrin ed., Paris, 1967); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1984); David harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell, oxford, 1989); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, nJ, 1991); and edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1996). 18 D. gregory, Geographical Imaginations, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1994: 15; Pickles, A History of Spaces: 6. 19 Pickles, A History of Spaces: 20 (emphasis in original). 20 Pickles, A History of Spaces: 23. 21 F. Farinelli, ‘Did Anaximander ever say (or write) any words? The nature of cartographical reason,’ Ethics, Place, and Environment 1(2): 135–44, 1998: 135; and Pickles, A History of Spaces: 22–23. 22 J. Corner, ‘The agency of mapping: speculation, critique and invention,’ in Cosgrove (ed.) Mappings: 225. 23 r. J. Chorley and P. haggett, Models in Geography, vol. 2, Methuen, london, 1967: 48–49. 24 k. Burke, ‘What are the signs of what? A theory of entitlement,’ Anthropological Linguistics 4 (June), 1–23, 1962. 25 M. Dodge and r. kitchin, Atlas of Cyberspaces, accessed September 2016. http://www. kitchin.org/atlas/index.html. rob kitchin and Martin Dodge pushed the theory of maps to the limits of the ontology where maps aren’t treated as unified representations but constellations of ongoing processes. 26 M. Dodge, r. kitchin, and C. r. Perkin, Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, routledge, london, 2009: 18–20. 27 OED Online, oxford University Press, ‘image, n. … 4. A thing or (now esp.) person in which the aspect, form, or character of another is reproduced; an exact likeness; a counterpart, copy. 5. Psychology: A mental representation of something (esp. a visible object) created not by direct perception but by memory or imagination; a mental picture or impression; an idea, conception. Also: (with modifying adjective) a mental representation due to any of the senses (not only sight) or to organic sensations.’. 28 OED Online. oxford University Press, ‘representation, n.1. … b. Philos. An image, concept, or thought in the mind, esp. as representing an object or state of affairs in the world; spec. a mental image or idea regarded as an object of direct knowledge and as the means by which knowledge of objects in the world may indirectly be acquired (now chiefly hist.). Also: the formation or possession of images, concepts, or thoughts in the mind, esp. as representing, or as a means of acquiring knowledge of, objects or states of affairs in the world.’. 29 OED Online, oxford University Press, ‘image’.

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30 r. n. giere, Understanding Scientific Reasoning, Thomson/Wadsworth, Belmont, CA, 5th edn, 2006: 743. 31 T. Sauer and r. Scholl (eds), The Philosophy of Historical Case Studies, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and history of Science 319. Springer International Publishing, new York, 2016: 126. 32 r. n. giere, Understanding Scientific Reasoning, Thomson/Wadsworth, Belmont, CA, 5th edition, 2006: 743. 33 B. Molyneaux, The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, routledge, london, 1997: 84–86. 34 lucia nuti, ‘Mapping places: Chorography and visions in the renaissance’ in Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings: 90. 35 S. P. hanna and V. J. Del Casino, Mapping Tourism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Mn, 2003. 36 Deleuze and guatarri write explicitly about maps: ‘The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a mediation.’ g. Deleuze and F. guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone Press, london, 1987: 12. 37 V. J. Del Casino and S. P. hanna, ‘representations and identities in tourism map spaces,’ Progress in Human Geography 24(1): 23–46, 2000. 38 Cosgrove, Mappings: 15. 39 J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1994. 40 J. g. Fichte, P. heath, and J. lachs, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with the first and second introductions, Century Philosophy Sourcebooks, Appleton-Century-Crofts, new York, 1970. 41 Fichte et al., Science of Knowledge: 9. 42 robinson and Petchenik, The Nature of Maps: 22. 43 A. korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, International non-Aristotelian library, The International non-Aristotelian library Publishing Company, lancaster, PA., 2nd edn, 1941: 58. 44 e. haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, Bibliographisches Institut, leipzig and Vienna, 1094. extending haeckel’s thesis leads to some rather strange and disturbing conclusions. of the ten races he divided human beings into, haeckel claimed the Caucasian group associated with Proto-Uralic and Indo-germanic groups is superior to all others. haeckel’s racism was, according to Stephen Jay gould, harvard paleontologist, a contributor to the rise of nazism (S. J. gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Belknap Press of harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1977: 77–78). 45 B. S. hall, ‘The didactic and the elegant: Some thoughts on scientific and technological illustrations in the Middle Ages and renaissance,’ in B. Braigie (ed.), Picturing Knowledge:

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Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1996: 9. 46 hall, ‘The didactic and the elegant’: 11. 47 Commens Dictionary of Peirce’s Terms under ‘Index,’ http://www.commens.org/dictionary/ term/index. 48 Commens Dictionary of Peirce’s Terms under ‘Index’. 49 T. W. Adorno, g. Adorno and r. Tiedemann, Aesthetic Theory, routledge and kegan Paul, london, 1984. 50 ‘If galileo’s scientific attitude is held to have influenced his aesthetic judgment, his aesthetic attitude may just as well be held to have influenced his scientific convictions; to be more precise: both as a scientist and as a critic of the arts he may be said to have obeyed the same controlling tendencies.’ e. Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, Martinus nijhoff, The hague, 1954: 20. 51 W. e. newman, ‘Space, place and the ideology of the map,’ Master’s thesis, harvard University, May 1998: 147. 52 S. Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction, hutchinson’s University library, hutchinson, london, 1953, 111. 53 J. l. Borges, ‘Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda,’ in Jorge luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares (eds), A Universal History of Infamy, Dutton, new York, 1972. 54 Alfred korzybski introduces the expression in ‘A non-Aristotelian system and its necessity for rigor in mathematics and physics,’ presented to the American Mathematical Society at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, new orleans, lA, December 28,1931. reprinted in korzybski, Science and Sanity, 747–761. 55 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation: 1. 56 J. l. Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, augmented edn, new Directions, new York, 1964: 195–196. 57 l. Daston, Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, zone Books, new York, 2004. 58 U. klein and W. lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-century Science: A Historical Ontology, Transformations, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007: 9. 59 W. Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility,’ in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, M. Jennings, B. Doherty and T. levin (eds), Cambridge, MA, 2008: 37. 60 rosch is a cognitive psychologist whose research focuses on categorization. See e. h. rosch, ‘natural categories,’ Cognitive Psychology 4(3): 328–50, 1973, and e. h. rosch and C. B. Mervis, ‘Categorization of natural objects,’ Annual Review of Psychology 32: 89–11, 1981. 61 g. lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books, new York, 1999. 62 lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: 2.

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63 T. hey, S. Tansley and k. Tolle, ‘Jim gray on eScience: a transformed scientific method,’ in A. J. g. hey (ed.), The Fourth Paradigm: Data-intensive Scientific Discovery, Microsoft research, redmond, WA, 2009: xvii–xxxi. 64 hey et al., ‘Jim gray on eScience’: xiii. 65 hey et al., ‘Jim gray on eScience’: xiii. 66 These artists are part of the Futurism, Dada and Cubist movements in the early twentieth century. Boccioni’s sculpture masterpiece, ‘Unique Forms of Continuity in Space’ (1913) depicts a ‘synthetic continuity’ of motion similar to Duchamp’s work, but in a threedimensional space. Boccioni critiqued Duchamp and František kupka claiming that their work was about ‘analytical discontinuity.’ 67 n. gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, William Morrow, new York, 2006. 68 hipparchus used this kind of projection to make drawings of star charts. 69 J. r. gold, ‘The MArS Plans for london, 1933–1942: Plurality and experimentation in the city plans of the early British Modern Movement,’ The Town Planning Review 66(3): 243–67, 1995. 70 A. korn, M. Fry and D. Sharp, ‘The M.A.r.S. Plan for london.’ Perspecta 13/14: 163–73, 1971. 71 korn et al. ‘The M.A.r.S. Plan for london.’ 72 C. n. ledoux, L’architecture considerée sous le rapport de l’art, des murs et de la législation: volume I. g. olms, hildesheim, 1980: 135. 73 Unlike previous royal saltworks located close to the source of the salt, ledoux proposes his close to the source of the lumber, the Chaux massif, necessary for the heating to extract salt from brine. Art historian emil kaufmann used the second plan of Arc-et-Senans to sustain an argument for ledoux as the first modern architect. 74 A. Vidler, ‘The ledoux effect: emil kaufmann and the claims of kantian autonomy,’ Perspecta 33 (Mining Autonomy): 16–29, 2002: 21. 75 Schapiro argued that kaufmann in fact had succeeded only in joining an architectural principle to a social principle, one found in ledoux’s writings. ‘The correlation,’ Schapiro wrote, ‘is with bourgeois ideology, not with the actual class structure and conditions of bourgeois society, and depends more on quotations than on a study of social and economic history.’ A. Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Utopia in the Era of the French Revolution, Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture, Basel, 2006: 43. 76 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, new York: Pantheon, 1977: 215. 77 T. Conley, The Self-made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Mn, 1996. 78 l. gruson. ‘Claude nicolas ledoux, Visionary Architecture and Social Utopia,’ pages 299– 307, oct. 2009. International Conference of Territorial Intelligence, hAl Archives-ouvertes. fr. 303/653. 79 D. Felluga, ‘Modules on Foucault: on power’. ‘Introductory guide to Critical Theory’ 2011, Purdue University accessed 14 June 2016. https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/ newhistoricism/modules/foucaultpower.html.

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80 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: 221. 81 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: 219. 82 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: 220. 83 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: 220. 84 gruson, ‘Claude-nicolas ledoux.’

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Chapter 1: Maps as Objects of Explanation

When on high the heaven had not been named, Firm ground below had not been called by name, naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, (And) Mummu Tiamat, she who bore them all, Their waters commingling as a single body, no reed but had been matted, no marsh land had appeared, When no gods whatever had been brought into being, Un-named, their destinies yet undetermined— Then it was that the gods were emerged from within them. lahmu and lahamu were came forth, were called by name, Before they had grown in age and stature. Enuma Elish1 And now good-morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere. let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown, let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. excerpt from ‘The good-Morrow’ by John Donne, 1572–1631

The Map as Artifact and Process There was a great cartographic moment some years back on a television program called The West Wing. I often make students watch this particular bit from the show, which doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes. In this episode several White house staff members meet with the organization of Cartographers for Social equity who request that an inverted version of the gall–Peters projection replace the Mercator projection (see Figures 3.12 and 3.13). The conversation is rather funny and worth giving in full:

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Maps as Objects of Explanation —Why are we changing maps? —Because, C.J., the Mercator projection has fostered european imperialist attitudes for centuries and created an ethnic bias against the Third World. The map enlarges areas at the poles to create straight lines of constant bearing or geographic direction. So, it makes it easier to cross an ocean. But … It distorts the relative size of nations and continents. —Are you saying the map is wrong? —oh, dear, yes. Uh, look at greenland. now look at Africa. Would it blow your mind if I told you that Africa is in reality fourteen times larger? —Yes. —here we have europe drawn considerably larger than South America when at 6.9 million square miles South America is almost double the size of europe’s 3.8 million. germany appears in the middle of the map when it’s in the northernmost quarter of the earth. —Wait, wait. relative size is one thing, but you’re telling me germany isn’t where we think it is? —nothing’s where you think it is. —Where is it? —I’m glad you asked. [brings up a new map, which has its continents significantly squished northward] The Peters Projection. —What the hell is that? —It’s where you’ve been living this whole time. Should we continue? —When Third World countries are misrepresented they’re likely to be valued less. When Mercator maps exaggerate the importance of Western civilization, when the top of the map is given to the northern hemisphere and the bottom is given to the southern … then people will tend to adopt top and bottom attitudes. —But … wait. how … Where else could you put the northern hemisphere but on the top? —on the bottom. —how? —like this. [The map is flipped over.] —Yeah, but you can’t do that. —Why not? —’Cause it’s freaking me out.2 The chapter explores maps as artifacts: semiotic, representational, social, historical and otherwise. Moving beyond the map as picture or representation (however constructed) we explore maps as process: what James Corner refers to as the creative agency of mapping ‘unfolds potential’ connecting cartographer and map reader to their cognitive and perceptual contexts with new and diverse consequences: ‘maps do not represent geographies or ideas; rather they effect their actualization’ (emphasis in original).3 As in the West Wing quote, we are ‘freaked out’ when the picture changes, but unpacking

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Maps as Objects of Explanation what it means to think cartographically allows the agency of the map to be ‘a productive and liberating instrument’4—particularly in the world of design of the built environment. But first—why are we unsettled when the picture changes? Maps are after all abstractions of spatial organization—we don’t confuse the map for the thing entirely, but answering the why suggests we need to look carefully at just what we are confusing for what. The example using the gall–Peters and Mercator maps uses terrestrial geography to demonstrate the point, but we could have easily used scientific models of the atomic universe from newtonian space and time compared to the einstein–Minkowski space-time revolution.5 one model offered a view of the universe in which time is absolute; the other makes time and space relative and contingent. robert harbison suggests maps and the picture of the world they provide link to our sense of self in that world: we do not imagine the land out from ourselves flexibly in all directions, but are always standing in the same place when we think of it and facing the same way like a statue. Maps sedulously reinforce and protect our sense of where we are, a sense which can be very elaborate without being deliberately worked out, and derange artificially by obliterating the reference point east or west to which we habitually look.6 The map of the United States along a Datum (Figure 1.1) by Brad Cooke is a translation between distance and geography presenting a ‘map’ of the US in a completely unfamiliar way. Cooke’s map redraws the geography as pure distance represented as a single scaled line with a few familiar cities. This is the space of a single straight line drawn from coast to coast crossing through St. louis. Similarly, the Beatus or Beatine map (Figure 1.2) is a medieval mappa mundi presenting a view of the world unfamiliar to modern sensibilities. The map depicts the geography associated with the diaspora of the apostles from accounts given by Ptolemy, St. Isidore of Seville and biblical text. The Beatus is one of the earliest representations of the T and o map (T-o map). These maps are drawn according to the physical characteristics of the world described by Isidore where the inhabited part of dry land is round with a circular ocean dividing it into three parts, Asia, europe and Africa. The circular ocean or ‘o’ is inscribed with the ‘T’ of intersecting channels made between the landmasses. Jerusalem, the umbilicus mundi, is placed as the literal and spiritual center of the world. The garden of eden is located in the eastern end of Asia. This particular map orients eastward rather than the familiar northward. The earth was thought to be a plane sustaining the vault of heaven where the Sun, Moon and other luminaries moved. The waters above the firmament occasionally fell to earth in the form of rain and waters below nurtured the rivers, oceans and seas. however, before you judge the map a representation of a flat world, it should be noted Beatus-type maps are based on the principle the earth is globular, an idea largely accepted by scholars from the time of Aristotle. The T-o maps represent one half of the spherical earth because it was thought impossible to cross the equatorial clime and reach the antipodes, as the unknown lands were called. The map operates on several levels of understanding: 1) a physical description, 2) an itinerary map identifying the travels of the apostles, 3) a map of important biblical events, and 4) a reminder the spiritual center of the earth is Jerusalem. For the medieval mind Jerusalem is the physical

45

1.1 Map of United States along a Datum translates the linear travel distance from the east to west coast through St. Louis, Missouri, into a graphic table of 141 20-mile line segments totaling 2950 miles scaled to 1 in equals 1 mile. Brad Cooke, Washington University in St. Louis, 2012.

Maps as Objects of Explanation 1.2 The Manchester (a.k.a. Rylands) Beatus mappa mundi, ca. 1175 ascribed to the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña in the region of Toledo. It is part of a larger family of maps based on a map originally drawn by the Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana. Unknown author, Ryland Beatus, ca. 1175, Toledo, Spain, 32 × 43 cm (12.6 × 16.9 in) and is one of the best preserved of all the Beatus group.

and metaphysical center of the known terrestrial world. The Beatus isn’t a lesser world map for lack of what we might consider concrete geographical evidence, but a robust way of representing a complex of ideas and places encompassing a rich world view. This map like all maps represents a mode of knowledge as much as an epistemology. If the meaning of the map symbolism is unfamiliar it is because we do not share the same semiotic context as the mapmaker. David harvey notes maps are replete with the values, beliefs, and judgments of the cultures producing them.7 his neo-Marxist reading of maps tends to equate map symbology with power structures in a post-modern worldview, but this applies equally to the pre-modern world where spiritual ideologies color cosmology. early maps similarly are social constructions instantiating and supporting dominant socio-political cadres. David harvey along with Brian harley, Denis Cosgrove, Denis Wood, Jeremy Crampton and John krygier are part of a larger movement in cartographical discourse termed ‘critical cartography’ which entails new mapping practices and a theoretical critique linking geographic knowledge and power.8 harley specifically linked power, ideology and surveillance. Arguably this isn’t a new use of the map. For Vauban, louis XIV’s principal military engineer, cartography was an aid to the science of siege whose maps and the fortifications they represented were part of stabilizing France’s national borders.9 As Armand Mattelart shows, for Vauban, building fortifications and drawing up the map were part of the same process ultimately linking networks, communication and state. harley and colleagues theorizing in a post-structuralist manner situate maps as social documents

47

Maps as Objects of Explanation understood in their historical context. harley even argues that for new maps, mapmakers are ethically responsible for the effects their maps have on society, albeit they may not be the only agents deciding what is included or excluded from a given map. For critical cartographers, maps actively construct knowledge as ‘graphic representations that facilitate spatial understanding’ across multiple disciplines. J. B harley is one of the first of the critical cartographers to recognize maps are part of a larger problem in the representation of space and the space of representation. he moved beyond the history of the science of mapmaking to consider the practices and social relations underlying the discipline. As Vincent Del Casino notes, ‘harley presents a way of understanding the map and cartography as both parts and products of social discourses and, therefore, employments of power’ where ‘social power is inscribed in maps by cartographers operating within dominant discourses and institutions.’10 one of the techniques harley introduces is analysis of the entire map including titles, legends, pictures and descriptive text usually placed at the margins of the page.11 The critique leveled at harley is his assumption the space represented in the map is unproblematic. There are few ambiguities in harley’s view of cartography, ‘no possibility the meaning of the spaces and identities represented in maps may be continually reproduced with changes in context.’12 however, as Del Casino notes, maps are ‘intertextual’: they are made and used in a broad range of existing representations of the place being mapped—I would add this includes histories, cultural biases (unconscious and otherwise), technologies and medias associated with the time and place being mapped.13 Maps, like cities, are what orit halpern calls: an assembling of densities and forms … sites of accumulation in the way Bruno latour speaks of producing ‘immutable’ mobiles and assimilating agents into facts in actor networks, or the way Foucault speaks of visibility—those spaces where representation, practice, technology accumulate—to show things in the world, whether subjects or objects to power. In unpacking these assemblages the present can become an unknown territory of accumulated densities rather than a natural and inevitable future.”14 Part of the challenge in using maps as tools in design is paying attention to their intertextuality broadly considered in so far as the terms of a given map allow. Mapmakers shouldn’t be expected to manage this with ease or as a syncretic procedure without residual traces, but designers making effective maps hone their observations and direct their desires. The Ontology of the Map Since the late 1990s when critical cartography introduced the idea of a political analysis of maps using semiotics, map theorists moved toward the idea maps may not be representations at all. Jeremy Crampton and others suggested the critical cartographers did not go far enough in questioning the ontology of the map.15 An underlying assumption in harley for instance is maps still have the capacity to tell some kind of truth about a geography—maps aren’t the problem per se, but the people using them.16 Crampton, who turns to heidegger, proposes a ‘non-confessional understanding of spatial representation’ wherein maps instead of ‘being interpreted as objects at a distance from the work, regarding

48

Maps as Objects of Explanation the world from nowhere, understood as being in the world, as open to the disclosure of things.’17 Invoking heidegger’s notion of ‘being-in-the-world’ suppressing rationality in favor of experience—where being in space and place is like being present (Dasein): not as a subject or object of consciousness, but as a projection of possibilities. This openness to the world is a kind of ‘mood’ for heidegger, like the activity of existing that allows us to have a relationship to the world. heidegger resorts to the idea of ‘dwelling’ to explain: to dwell in a house isn’t just to live there, it is to belong there, to be familiar with that place.18 For Crampton maps represent being-in-space where they codify and give authority to some views, but not others; they write history to the present—‘mapping is a struggle over how to remember the past and to write its biography in maps.’19 The struggle to remember means power is instilled through the mapping of one condition, place, idea, and not another. one way of thinking through the idea of the ‘openness to the world’ in design is to consider for a moment the number of possible paths to a solution to any given design problem, be it for a building or industrial object. one way to consider the choice-path assumes a rational set of moves from a raw solution to more refined development making optimal sets of choices until the project is complete. This kind of reductive thinking suggests 1) there are optimal solutions and 2) they are obtained through a rational process, if only the designer can intuit the ‘thingness’ of the object. Being-in-the-world refuses any such directness—the thingness of the objects we encounter isn’t like a Platonic ideal available to us if only we could channel it (see Figures 4.54 and 4.55). rather it’s our relationship with the world through our representations, including maps, we question—the ontology of the map is at issue, not just the ideologies presented through the map. With respect to maps, the foundational ontology is: the world can be objectively, truthfully and scientifically managed using tools and technologies to capture and display spatial information.20 Assuming, of course, we know what ‘truth’ we are looking for before the initiation of the design process—this is rarely the case in design and certainly more rare now, given the volume of information available. rather than basing the ontological value of the map on its capacity to reflect back to us what we see, we should use the map’s capacity to absorb our varied and ambiguous relationships to the world as process, not representation. Space and place in the work of edward Casey offers another approach to the ontology problem in the map. Casey addresses the philosophical problems of aesthetics, perception, specifically in the discussion of space versus place. Casey debates ‘place over space,’ in that where as much as when matters in history, philosophy, cultural studies and so forth. In Representing Place, Casey proposes that the heideggerian notion of Gebild, or what makes the world ‘a structured image that restructures the world of which it is an image’21 reveals a fundamental tension between the abstract geometry of space and the phenomenology of place. he critiques the friction between the abstract and universalizing tendencies of modern life and the healing potential of topos within the context of an enlightenment-era worldview extending Cartesian space and time outward from the modern subject. Casey claims there is a loss of a sense of place in modernity, an experience he associates with a pre-modern medieval cosmology. he proposes we recover our lost intuition of place through a careful reading of representations like landscape painting and maps.22 Casey considers how ‘representation bears on place’23 and the potential representations of landscapes in paintings and maps have to recover or as Casey terms it ‘re-emplace the human subject in

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Maps as Objects of Explanation the lifeworld.’ he proposes early maps re-present and in heideggerian terms enframe the lived world and the measured site thus offering a model for how to think about place. In this he makes a general assumption about the unique role of space as a universal precondition for human experience. Casey turns specifically to maps and reminds us the idea of land or ‘landscape,’ as represented in the map is, as William James argues in Essays in Radical Empiricism, a ‘palmary instance of the ambiguous.’24 landscape maps are ambiguous because as a thing in itself, the mapped space can’t be grasped in one instance: not through history or prose, nor through imagination or sense or experience. Casey presents four conditions for representation in the modern era, an age where ‘everything exists together in order to be represented: indeed, exists only as represented.’25 First, the world-as-picture is the same as the world-as-image, and is malleable and makeable. Second, the image world is framed or frameable; and as with maps and paintings, the viewer determines the limits and inclusions. even the sequence of narratives and ordering of memories is determined. Third, objects stand in continual reference to a horizon, either as an event-horizon as the objects’ history or a visual horizon literally or the axis around which perception unfolds. Finally, human beings are the source of all representations; as kant writes in the Critique of Pure Reason, ‘appearances in general are nothing outside our representations.’26 Maps are an approximation of reality, a radical notion when we consider heidegger’s assertion that what we believe is reality itself is only an approximation, an image we construct for ourselves.27 Interestingly Casey’s argument also reveals an ontological bias; he assumes a shared and universal sense of place contrary to the notion of being in the world where representation mirrors this sense back to us. In his desire to reclaim a phenomenological ground for place, by inference he claims (like harley) there is a transcendental notion of placeness to which the human condition is intersubjectively sensitive. If we follow his logic in order to register the effect of the map we must have an a priori awareness, in the kantian sense, that there is such a thing as ‘place’ and the map reflects back to us our innate experience of the differences between space and place. This doesn’t undermine his argument that maps aren’t mirrors of reality, but the map’s approximations partially reinforce our cognitive projections of inherent orders in the world. Some of those orders relate to language and semiotics. It is to these we turn next given they are constitutive elements of maps. Semiotics and Communication Armand Mattelart identifies the convergence between maps, networks and communication as an early concern in the French context starting with the ‘reticular body’ or the network of veins visible on the body.28 It is part of the link between communication, networks and maps in early modernism arguably continuing to the present in our belief in the salutary effects of telematics or the convergence of computers, television, and telecommunications.29 Mattelart gives as example the military engineer Vauban who imagined a similar kind of reticular representation in the twin mine and countermine technique for assaulting fortified towns. The visible mines or trenches were mapped along with a series of underground tunnels leading to chambers filled with gunpowder detonated to implode the foundations above. By 1825 the Corps of engineers sanctioned the use of the term ‘network’ to describe an articulated system of fortifications, underground passages and communication lines.30

50

Maps as Objects of Explanation

1.3 ENPC competition map Trompe l’oeil with the Knave of Spades and the King of Diamonds, map for a 1792 competition held at the French engineering school, the ENPC. The map is a play on the many meanings of the word carte in French: invitation card (carton), map, playing cards. The map (carte) charts the cognitive dissonance of the symbol and sign. The gap between the precision of the visual sign and the arbitrariness of the meaning is often exploited in maps. It is a way maps communicate, as Toulmin suggested, an almost unlimited set of precise observations from a limited number of well-chosen measurements and observations. Ink, wash, watercolor; 33 × 44.5 cm.

Implicit in the network notion is the idea of exchange. The engineers of the École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (enPC) were tasked with creating a national infrastructure centered on the organization of national space through canals, roads and, later, the railway. As Mattelart through Antoine Picon argues, by ‘designing bridges and planning roads, they sought to achieve the goals of reason.’ In: taming ‘evil nature’—the irrational—which separates people and prevents them from ‘helping one another,’ they believed they were assisting the triumph of a ‘good nature’— the rational—which links, unites and guarantees the free flow of people and goods.31 The trompe l’oeil student map from the enPC annual map competition (Figure 1.3) is a play on a parallel concern in communication: the arbitrariness of the symbol and the sign emphasized by the gap between image and meaning possible in the map, in this case the word carte in French has multiple meanings including map, playing card, and invitation. rousseau like Descartes held human beings were superior to animals in their capacity to generate and use language, minimally defined as a set of ‘articulated’ and arbitrary signs to which we assign ideas.32 rousseau, following Condillac, believed the transition from the passive reception of sensible objects experienced by the child to the adult’s active engagement with the environment is signaled by the capacity to communicate: As this happens, we can observe what we do in thinking, we can render account of it to ourselves; we can consequently learn to conduct our reflection. Thinking becomes an art, and it is the art of speaking.”33

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Maps as Objects of Explanation In a similar way the language of signs in the map allows us to observe what we are thinking, if not quite the unbiased mode rousseau imagined. The same engineers from the enPC built the densest optical telegraph network in the world in the late eighteenth century. The link between networks, communication and ideology was instantiated in the map through territories of paths, roads, canals, telegraphs, railways, and in the present, digital optical cables and their attendant infrastructure. For design of the built environment, the wonderfully evocative map of words relating to carte stimulates associations across multiple indices. Spatializing the relationships between words and objects as is possible in maps suggests both a rational order and an erudite act of reading into possibilities that may or may not be rational. To quote robert harbison in Eccentric Spaces: A map seems the type of conceptual object, yet the interesting thing is the grotesquely token foot it keeps in the world of the physical, having the unreality without the far-fetched appropriateness of the edibles in Communion, being a picture to the degree that the sacrament is a meal. For a feeling of thorough transcendence such unobvious relations between the model and the representation seem essential, and the flimsy connection between acres of soil and their image on the map makes reading one an erudite act.34 Thinking loosened in this way often produces unexpected insights and connections. Maps highlight the gap between the signifier and signified: what seems stable and natural is made unnatural and strange to us and asks we consider how we are thinking about thinking. What am I looking at versus what I am seeing? The latter being a product of sensible perception and former a cognitive and apperceptive leap giving us access to meaning and second-level signification in the same way ‘house’ means more than a functional place to reside: house also evokes stability, security, family and safety. robin evans made the same claim for architectural drawings (projections) leading to an awareness of the duality of nature and the mental and drawn image representing and misrepresenting it.35 In the case of the architecture drawings evans consistently demonstrates the ambiguity of the drawing to the completed building or environment—the appeal to geometry being mostly metaphoric, what is represented in the drawing and what is actualized differ in perceptual, experiential and cognitive dimensions. like Monmonier’s dictum ‘all maps lie,’ evans writes ‘An architecture meaningful in this sense must stand under the cloud that has hung over painting and poetry for millennia: the closer it aligns itself with truth, the more mendacious it becomes.’36 gunnar olsson called the gap between what goes on within the human mind and what goes on in the world an ‘abyss.’ olsson argued all human reasoning is geographic so in some sense, all reason is also cartographic. he beautifully enumerates his point citing the oldest creation epic yet to be discovered, the Babylonian version of the Sumerian creation story told in the Enuma Elish: For the moment, however, all one needs to note is that the very first words of the first line of Enuma Elish—the two words that give the epic its name—are usually translated as ‘When above,’ while the beginning of the second line means ‘And below.’ It is these fix-points of time and place—above, below, when and and—that form the meshes of

52

Maps as Objects of Explanation the coordinate net in which the world is both captured and created. As edward Casey loves to put it: ‘There is not creation without place.’ (emphasis in original)37 not to make too fine a point, but making a map begins with an observation as thought about thinking and the object of thought itself. The undifferentiated world cannot be apprehended— it is ‘unnamed’ and undetermined like the Enuma Elish. like the fix-points of time and place given above, the map isolates data without fully disrupting the imbedded relationship of some particular data to all other data. The map allows us to slip between whole and part, object and subject, point and field, or identity and non-identity on a continuum, rather than as sets or categories which are necessarily defined by contrast, or difference. This positions mapping and mapmaking as effective tools for managing the complexity of observations often associated with design in the spatial disciplines. Maps organize qualitative and quantitative data according to the theoretical framework of the mapmaker. Therefore mapping is the collective set of practices structuring correspondence between physical phenomena, lived experience, or conceptual frameworks. To paraphrase lord kelvin who famously noted that to measure something is to understand it: to map something is to structure it. Unmapped Example of Artifact and Process one way of understanding how the underlying cognitive, perceptual and social intuitions inform structure and ideology in the map is to unmap an existing map and remap the contents using a different frame. The Ars Memoria and Theoria (2008) map shown by gia Wolff (Figure 1.4) is part of a series of unmappings shown throughout this book made by my students. The unmapping is an assignment in map class. It asks students to take an existing map (they are given a few options), deconstruct it and then reconstruct it as a new map using the same form or contents. Wolff deconstructed and then remapped robert 1.4 Re-mapped version of Robert Fludd’s Map of Consciousness from the Utrusuque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (1617–18). Gia Wolff, Harvard, 2006.

Fludd’s ‘Map of Consciousness’ (Figure 1.5) from the Utrusuque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (1617–18). her map is a thematic map describing Fludd’s understanding of the relationship between phenomenal experiences and rational thought derived from seventeenth-century metaphysics. The remapping suggests an alternative to the strict separation of mind, body, and spirit assumed by Fludd. Wolff’s

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Maps as Objects of Explanation

1.5 The Microcosm by Fludd maps relationships between the senses, the intellect and the spiritual realm. Fludd was an English Rosicrucian and Paracelsian physicist and mystic. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, vol. II, 1619.

map posits an infinite set of possible associative combinations of sense perception, memory, and imagination organized by affiliations in a random set of possibilities. The procedure of deconstructing the map and reconstructing it using the same constitutive parts, but a different projection, alters meaning significantly. The Fludd original uses a perceptual axis of translation. The figure in the map and the surrounding bubbles suggest where in relation to the brain thought and memory occur and in turn the relative position of the brain in the body. This structure gives the parts a hierarchy in relation to each other underscoring Fludd’s metaphysical argument about the order of the relationship between imagination, memory and the spiritual realm. In contrast, Wolff’s map displaces the components into a non-hierarchical field (on the left). They are removed from the pictorial context of the body and treated as icons and the spiritual realm subsumed entirely. The completed map (on the right) is the assembly of all possible combinations of associations. Correspondence reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.38

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Maps as Objects of Explanation Mapping is based on our perceptions of what we are experiencing and our conceptions framing how we interpret sensorial input. The map isn’t ‘real’ but the objects in the map are at some point in the world or of the world. Just as we have to disabuse ourselves of the idea maps, as semiotic texts are value neutral, similarly mapping calls into question how we interpret perceptions. The map shown by evan Barrett (Figures 1.6 through 1.12) helps explain. When asked to map a potential building site Barrett opted to explore the site through the sense of touch rather than the sense of sight. The map atlas he created includes qualia, not quanta, related to temperature, pressure, and shape apprehended 1.6 This map and those in Figures 1.7–1.12 are part of an atlas Sense of Touch, see overleaf for more details. Evan Barrett, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011, original plates 11 × 17 in., printed on matte bond.

through a haptic engagement with place. haptic feedback involves movement to engage proprioceptive systems. Touch isn’t like other senses; the nerve receptors in the skin carry information about pain and itch. At a physiological level it is difficult to resolve the different affects of the nerves associated with pain and those associated with discriminative touch. The map made by Barrett is really a brain map of the way he perceived and interpreted the

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WARM HARD SCALEY SOIL

COOL WET MUDDY

COOL SANDY DIRTY PEBBLES

MODERATE ROUGH HARD

MODERATE PRICKLY DENSE SAND

COOL GRAINY SOFT

LARGE TREES SFMI

COOL POINTY TICKLING ASPHALT WARM HARD COARSE

COOL WOODY HARD BROWN GRASS

MODERATE PRICKLY POINTY

1

WARM HARD TEXTURED WATER

COOL VELVETY WET

IQUEQ SMALL TREES

COC BUSF.. TANGLED

COOL WOODY SEMI-HARD

I "'"'"""^"

TE:gkD

"OLD CHAIN O F ROCKS BRIDGE"

1.7–1.12 These maps are part of an atlas Sense of Touch describing a 500 × 500 square foot site. The map is an attempt to convey through select detail the texture of the place. The key correlates elements of the site with sensory qualities like cool, grainy and soft. Evan Barrett, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011, original plates 11 × 17 in., printed on matte bond.

Maps as Objects of Explanation site through touch. What is shown in the atlas may not agree with the average of a larger sample of subjects categorizing the site by touch, but revealed to Barrett his ‘reality’ and enabled him to act. These irreconcilable differences about the general ‘viewpoints’ of the nature on consciousness and objective reality make accounting for the correspondence between them particularly difficult. Mathematical Correspondence one of the means to understand how the map and mapping context reflect and respond is through questions relating to the idea of correspondence. often cartographers use correspondence and index as synonyms referring generally to the key in a map. or they refer to the ‘correspondence of statistical surfaces’ of first- and second-order elements in a geographical map.39 A robust definition of correspondence admits to a special complexity when correspondence is applied to a spatial milieu.40 In order not to get caught in the web of relativism where agreement is possible, or realism/materialism where a general rule of nature is given priority over mind (physical over the biological), I opted for a mathematical and then proto-phenomenological approach looking carefully at husserl on the problem of correspondence and intersubjectivity. At one level this applies to the semiotics of the map, the map symbols and signs and, at another, the statistical data or geometric ordering systems. Addressing the first is relatively easy. Dissimilar to language, the spatial and visual symbols assembled in the map are ambiguous. A simple example is symbols denoting ‘city’ on large-scale geographic maps likely don’t indicate the actual size, character or qualities of a given city—they are a substitute for the idea of city and lack specificity. This indeterminacy allows map-signs to operate as qualitative and/or quantitative data, but it begs the question of how correspondence functions in maps. In general mathematics, correspondence is a relation between two nominal values (x, y). Architectural drawings rely on mathematical correspondence. Map projections similarly use projective geometry in which mappings are correspondences between projective ranges. There are many projections in the architectural drawing forms. All projections (perspective, isometric, planimetric) are mathematical transformations creating a new set of x, y (or r, ϕ) points from a three-dimensional space to a two-dimensional surface (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of projections). In the case of map projections these define positions on the terrestrial sphere in relation to the real-world points of latitude and longitude. Values for x and y are determined by the mathematical function used to control them. Creating a projection means selecting a mathematical function and considering how this applies to realworld locations in order to obtain plotted coordinates.41 Although there is an implicit oneto-one correspondence, it isn’t explicit: there is an abstraction of relations, not a denotation of relations. The points x and y are operational in the function, but their correspondence isn’t necessarily represented in the projection. Plotting the map of a waterfront shoreline illustrates the point. The map indicates a correspondence between the line demarcating the shoreline on the map and the relation of the body of water to land determined by empirical evidence—yet that line is a fiction: the rise and fall of tides, shifting land mass, and change at the geologic scale constantly and consistently move the line. It is impossible to ‘draw’ a line in the literal sand and say: ‘This line corresponds to the map.’

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Maps as Objects of Explanation The remapped versions of Étienne-Jules Marey’s smoke maps (Figure 1.14) use digital photographic processes to exaggerate the spatiality of the original image. The original image is a fiction bearing an illusion of precision while being subject to variables in equipment, temperature, air currents, quality of smoke, etc. An early example of a mediated image of Marey’s ‘chronophotographs’ used a new technology, photography, to capture movement human eyesight can’t discern. Images of smoke were made using a camera he designed capturing 100 images per second. This is an early version of ‘beautiful data,’ a term used in media studies today to describe the fetish of making data useful and aesthetic. The danger is to ignore the implicit set of choices: the directed presentation—the parenthesis around the data crafting it or what orit halpern calls ‘an aesthetic crafting to this knowledge, a performance necessary to produce value.’42 Modern digital image processing isolates minute parts of images as pixels. Figure 1.14 exaggerates the z-axis of the pixels based on tonal values in the original photograph from light (higher z-value) to dark (lower z-value). The new quasi three-dimensional representation translates an aspect of the original into a new set of values with a new focus: depth. Similarly another remapping of the Marey original (Figure 1.15) calibrates energy expended in the muscles of a subject jumping off a chair but makes the intention of the original explicit. often a reader needs additional information to understand Marey’s chronophotographs, but in this remapped version the graphic index makes the data legible.

1.13 Étienne-Jules Marey, Fourth and last version of the smoke machine equipped with 57 channels, 1901, modern extension as the negative plate to dry plate on glass. From, Laurent Monnoni and George DidiHuberman Mouvements de l’air, Étienne-Jules Marey, photographe des fluides, joint edition Gallimard, Paris / Réunion des musées nationaux, Collection ‘Art et artistes,’ 2004.

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Maps as Objects of Explanation

1.14 Remapped versions of the Étienne-Jules Marey smoke maps based on the original series of configurations for Marey’s smoke machine used to create various patterns. The triangular prism presenting one of its bases to the air stream, fourth and last version of the smoke machine equipped with 57 channels. The smoke photographs were created at 100 images per second. This produces a very refined static image capturing the flux of movements of the air. Marey referred to these as ‘chronophotographs.’ The lines emphasize the iconography of the graphic method with white lines on a black background. Emanuel Ferro, Depth Interpolation, Florida International University, 2013. Phase Map (Figure 1.16) is based on another Marey map showing how a horse’s pace is affected by the shape of its limbs. Marey thought this knowledge absolutely necessary for the study of comparative anatomy ‘for it explains the real significance of the various shapes of the bones and muscles.’43 The remapping builds on the idea of phase portraits: a term used to describe the behavior of chaotic attractors or the set of numerical values toward which any chaotic or dynamical system may evolve. Phase portraits describe time as a continuous curvilinear flow. The student map translates muscle groups and changes in position into a color-coded system highlighting phases of the movement. The map can be read from top to bottom or right to left breaking information into smaller packets of color or pattern identifying the stages of the movement, muscle groups used, and the overlapping flow of movement. What isn’t shown in the revised map is the original subject: the horse. The data in the remapping, like Marey’s original, is aesthetic in the way maps as assemblages of knowledge and perception reorganize how we see and project possible futures. The smoke maps are a digital version of these possible futures as enhanced sensual experience—literally better than the eye sees. The confluence of vision, perception, and representation as a dance between technology and its capacity to produce data about data undermines what we take for granted in correspondence. These maps illustrate attention and observation are dependent

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1.15, 1.16 The two maps shown are remapped versions of Étienne-Jules Marey maps calibrating energy expended in muscle movement. The first map Energy Expended in Head Shoulder and Hip (original shown to the right) needs additional interpretation for the reader to understand Marey is calibrating the amount of energy expended when a human subject jumps from a stool by measuring the change in position of each muscle group according to the change in position of the white dots. The new map (to the left) adds a proportional symbol part of the lexicon of thematic maps. The diameter of the circles indicates the amount of caloric energy used to move each muscle group. The new map conveys the information much faster than the original. The second map illustrates a similar principle whereby representing the data-content in the map with a different index highlights a larger context where the data is still legible, but may offer other information. Energy Expended in Head, Shoulder and Hip, Joaquin Pineda, Florida International University, 2012. Phase Map, Priscilla Pagan, Florida International University, 2013.

1.17 The map by Elisa Kim Mirror Moves looks at the figure and void of a site in Venice, Italy. The visual distortions of views in the Venetian lagoon are exaggerated by the reflections of buildings in water. The map isolates the figure of the voids made possible between buildings by the canals both for the actual structure and its mirrored image. The visual landscape of Venice is doubly complicated by its imaginary ‘other.’ Elisa Kim, Washington University in St. Louis, 2009, digital print, 36 × 42 in.

Maps as Objects of Explanation on perception and cognition—change one part of the equation and all is modified. To help us think through how this might work outside of the question of a functional agreement between perception and cognition we look to a history of correspondence in philosophy. Philosophical Correspondence There is an underlying tendency toward phenomenology emerging in recent cartographical theory. Making inscriptions is a physical and cognitive activity taking place equally in the explorer’s hut, the lab, or at a desk with a computer. This is to say: maps are produced in physical places where the scratching of a tree branch against the window, the roughness of the table, or the poor quality of light belies an illusion of a hermetically sealed space in our minds, removed from the experience of the experience. histories of cartography are only beginning, like histories of science and technology, to address what Peter galison identified as one of the ten problems in the history and philosophy of science: context. For galison the best of the recent work in history of science focuses on the practice of science in the field, the laboratory, classroom or shop floor and offers: ‘the opportunity to address … concepts and comportment in specific sites and circumstances without hewing to a vision of what is “truly scientific” or “merely exterior.”’44 he goes on to question what historians actually mean when they invoke context: the context of the text, the nontextual environment be it political, social or ideological. For mapping I would add the perceptual frame of reference for the mapmaker and the map-receiver. This echoes and expands on similar debates in art history from Jonathan Crary’s ‘techniques’ of the observer to Panofsky’s iconology and Arnheim’s notion that vision and perception are active understanding. Including the following discussion of correspondence as an idea in philosophy addresses similar questions about context as a perceptual modality at the core of an ontology of mapping. The desire to inform how we encounter the world and re-present it through the map. how does what is shown in the map correspond to the objects we experience? In other words: what of context is mapped? The traditional definition of correspondence in philosophy is the adequation of mind to thing. husserl describes this as a correspondence of meaning-intention to meaningfulfillment. our concern is narrowly speaking with the idea that truth exists in relation to reality. In this case, truth is a relational property involving a to-be-specified characteristic related to some specified portion of reality. In traditional cartographic theory this was the mirror principle where maps were assumed to mirror with a high degree of truthfulness the existing usually geographic condition to which they refer. Another way to think about this considered in the early twentieth century by Bertrand russell and g. e. Moore was truth as a correspondence to, or with, a fact. In relation to the way maps are received this is interpreted as the notion of an isomorphism between the inner natures of the corresponding items where the structure of the corresponding items needs to be sufficiently similar or the same.45 Mapping as a cognitive skill suggests that this is the case. What I am examining and re-presenting as a mapmaker is sufficiently similar for me to recognize, communicate, and disseminate it to others. Much as Bruno latour ‘holds the focus steady’ on visualization and cognition in the lab, map makers hold steady to the idea there is a correspondence between what is seen and what is mapped. But given what is known about the complexity of perception and the relativism of the experience of the world, looking at correspondence

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Maps as Objects of Explanation begs the question of how sufficiently similar items are to each other for the mapped condition to be valuable enough for us to act on it. Turning again to husserl offers insight. looking to the experiential qualities of bringing together thought and objects, husserl uses the term ‘fulfillment’ (Erfullungssynthesis). The synthesis of fulfillment does not give us access to truth itself, but does make truth intuitively present to reflective consciousness.46 however correspondence isn’t matching the perception and the conception of the object—the thing-in-itself is radically different from our perception of it. As Dallas Willard explains, ‘The “match up” here between the consciousness and the object is not between the thought of the object and the perception of the object, but an identity of the partial intentions or meanings.’ This is an intentionalistic correlation between the meanings in the encompassing act through which the object is bodily present as are its constituents (parts, properties, structures), so ‘It is this correspondence that husserl determines to be a kind of truth, and which can be made “bodily present” by reflection on cases where the synthesis of fulfillment is carried out.’47 To understand how this would work, imagine making the observation ‘There is a mountain in the landscape.’ The thought is separate from the object (reality). It could be a big, small, green, or snow-capped mountain—not included in the thought, but included in the embodied perception. The perception is the same as the thought but with the added information of the bodily presence of the parts, properties, and structures of the object—once this is brought to consciousness the intention of cognition is fulfilled. For husserl perception will in every case be a process developing through time under the guidance of thought. Finally there is reality or what he calls the ‘state of affairs’ consisting of there being a mountain in the landscape. For husserl this four-part definition of truth as correspondence constitutes the living synthesis of fulfillment or the correspondence between thought and object. Consciousness that the state of affairs is being perceived as the corresponding thought ‘represents’ it opens the mind to the ‘bodily presence’ of, as husserl terms it, the ‘thing itself.’ For husserl, as with the map, the truth of a thought about an object is always the same—it does not depend on whether we bring it before abstract consciousness through the concrete experience of fulfillment or not—truth isn’t a matter of consciousness at all.48 The map in Figure 1.18 by Samantha Stein exemplifies how correspondence works in the domain of cartographical thinking. The map is entitled ‘perspective transformation + distortion.’ The map data is a series of photos staged at precise intervals taken from a vehicular approach to a site along highway I-70 in downtown St. louis. Using James J. gibson’s theory of ecological perception the video clip was analyzed frame-by-frame (Figures 1.19, 1.20 and 1.21) gibson characterizes perception as direct where perceiving is considered a process in the human–environment system not solely in the cognition of the observer. Perception is detecting information without inference, memories, or representations. In his model of perception, stimulation is assumed especially rich—the perceiver doesn’t need to elaborate it. We develop an understanding of the environment because ‘constancy is the tendency to perceive an object as the same despite changing sense-impressions.’49 gibson argues that although we as observers constantly move, our field of view undergoes a perspective transformation rending the phenomenal world

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1.18 The map explores our changing perceptions as we drive HWY I-70 along the riverfront in St. Louis, Missouri. The site of the design project was adjacent to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial by Eero Saarinen. From the text in the map: ‘Constancy is the tendency to perceive an object as the same despite changing sense-impressions,’ wrote James Gibson the psychologist and author. Gibson said observers are constantly moving so our field of view undergoes a perspective transformation rendering the phenomenal world as rigid despite our movements. As we move through and the site itself doesn’t change size, but we perceive it as constantly changing. Original map is a set of thirteen prints, 11 × 17 in. printed on matte linen/cotton heavy weight paper. Samantha Stein, perspective transformation + distortion, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011, folio, 13 × 19 in.

1.19, 1.20, 1.21 Details of perspective transformation + distortion. The map details show the isolation of several variables of perspective transformation. The first filter is attention. A tilt/shift effect is applied to each instance focusing the captured view on what is directly ahead. A graded blur pulls back from the center of the image referencing even more than still images a sense of motion and perception of forms directly ahead. The map isolated the conditions of texture, weight and contrast. One sequence identifies the ground plan to establish a datum. Samantha Stein, perspective transformation + distortion, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011, folio, 13 × 19 in.

Maps as Objects of Explanation rigid despite our movements. The ecological approach asks what an organism (human organism) needs to know about their environment and how it might be known. Stein’s map isolates characteristics of transformational invariants identified by gibson such as attention, weighting and contrast. A transformational invariant is the kind of change in the proximal stimulus specifying the change to us, as it seems to occur in the object (spinning, walking, jumping, etc.). Thus from Michaels and Carello: if an event is something happening to something, the ‘something happening’ is presumed specified by transformational invariants while the ‘something’ is presumed described by structural invariants.50 The ‘something happening’ in the map is the way the observer experiences the view from the road. gibson’s ecological perception is akin to husserl’s fulfillment where objects brought to bear on consciousness through concrete experience are made bodily present through reflection. Stein’s map isolates specific characteristics of reflection letting her ‘slow’ the process of reflection down in order to make conscious a perceptual experience of the site. If correspondence addresses how mapping helps organize relationships between objects including objects in the world and human-as-object in the world, the next question is how do we characterize these relationships in themselves? how do we constitute ourselves as objectively existing subjects in relation to other experiencing subjects or the objective spatio-temporal world? Again, the discussion turns to philosophy and we borrow from husserl and transcendental phenomenology to unpack the problem, but using map examples should help make the applications to the problems in cartographical thinking accessible. Intersubjectivity and the Relationship of Things or Ideas We will take a phenomenological turn and borrow husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity in order to understand how maps activate a relationship between two discrete conditions, sets, or domains. Intersubjectivity is a main theme in phenomenology.51 For husserl, the term applies to the indeterminate relation between the subjective worlds of appearances for the individual-self and the shared subjectivities of other embodied subjects.52 The world as a field of appearances isn’t a solitary realm, but a shared realm inhabited by multiple bodies in space. The objects that are the subject of the map are rich, varied and difficult to categorize. The problem becomes apparent in the atlas. Is the atlas a collection of ideal conditions or exemplar conditions? Ideal conditions imply an average or mean of various types where the exemplar is a single specimen used to demonstrate typical characteristics. Intersubjective relations occurring as spatially dependent phenomena between bodies are characterized as identities. Identities are always constructed in relation to something else. This idea comes to the fore in a map made by Colin Sieburg. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Figure 1.22) goes frame by frame through a film of the same name identifying the perceptual space in the film. It highlights the strangeness implicit in the film experience: the space of the cinema is fixed, but the projective space the viewer experiences constantly shifts in a non-linear sequence in contrast to the linear narrative. The viewer is thrown into the space of the film without

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Maps as Objects of Explanation

Alternative Education PlanPlan Alternative Education 1.22 The map by Colin Sieburg illustrates how the two perceptual worlds present in cinematic experience: 1) the space of the theater, and 2) the space perceived in the film. Colin Sieburg, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Harvard, 2006, digital print on heavy bond, 23 × 36 in. questioning the logic of the continuity of spatial experience even as they assume a progressive and logical continuity for the film narrative. Throwing the viewer’s subjectivity into a new spatial arrangement shared by nonembodied others and their space in the film highlights the difference between the space of the theater and the perceptual space in the film. When considered in person-to-person relations, intersubjective experience is empathetic experience as when we project ourselves into another person’s position. This is the conscious attribution of intentional acts to other subjects that allows us to project what we see in others into our conscious view.53 For husserl this subjective ‘lifeworld’ is the basis for the objective world of science.54 he argues this can be true because in order for me to be able to empathize with someone else, I have to assume their world coincides with mine with the understanding their world is located from an equally egocentric but different viewpoint. Spatio-temporal objects must exist separately from my own subjective experience and be part of an objective reality. In husserl perceptual objects are transcendent: they display an infinite number of possible features only some of which at any given moment are available to observation. This is similar to mapping where any given representation presents limited aspects of objective reality. rudolf Arnheim similarly said, ‘All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.’55 This isn’t to suggest the objective world constituted through intersubjective experience is understood independent

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Maps as Objects of Explanation of the way we represent the world, but the shared world assumes other subjects structure objects similarly enough that we use them as a basis for action. Mapping mirrors not the world qua reality, but the process of apprehending the world whereby objects are perceived. A map example (Figure 1.23) by Anthony zephyr presents an intersubjective experience of sitting under a bridge. The experience presented in the map is diffuse and open— it isn’t clear if you occupy the chair or if the chair is placed in the landscape to suggest ‘empty-ness.’ landscape is rendered impressionistically with little color through a subtle series of overlays very similar to the photograms or light impressions of abstracted objects made by lázló Moholy-nagy. Colin rowe and robert Slutsky following on Sigfried giedeon’s notion of interpenetration or ‘transparent simultaneity’ termed this phenomenal

1.23 The map focuses on a singular set of moments experienced by sitting in a chair beneath a bridge. The thematic map addresses the question of solitary sitting. Anthony Zephyr, A Temporal Segmented Experience Beneath a Bridge, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011, digital print on heavy bond, 36 × 42 in.

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Maps as Objects of Explanation transparency.56 In built environments this happens when axes, grids and spatial orders are superimposed to produce an ambiguous spatial condition—something like the views of the railway infrastructure. This contrasts with literal transparency where physical material is layered. Phenomenal transparency is a conceptual mode where transparency means a ‘simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Space not only recedes but fluctuates in a continuous activity.’57 however, in the map shown, the notion of intersubjectivity isn’t between human-made objects, but human and environment more akin to roger Caillois’ notion of ‘legendary psychesthenia’ where there is a confusion of self with the environment: is the viewer occupying the chair or witnessing the chair?58 Caillois, a social theorist, compared the biological phenomenon of insect camouflage to the psychological experiences of subjects who perceive themselves becoming absorbed by or mirrored in their physical environment. Mimicry becomes for Caillois an exception to the rule of distinction: of self from other, insect from its other and the environment. he first observes the phenomenon in the insect world but extrapolates the concept to the human psyche in what he calls a reciprocal topography noted in the case of insects causing them to confuse their own kind with the landscapes they inhabit. Similarly in mapping, subjects are simultaneously the ‘subject’ and object of the map. This ‘cartographical psychesthenia’ isn’t representational mirroring, but a confusion of self, described by Caillois where: The feeling of personality, considered as the organism’s feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space, can’t fail under these conditions to be seriously undermined; one enters into the psychology of psychasthenia, specifically of legendary psychasthenia, if we agree to use this name for the disturbance in the above relations between personality and space.59 This assimilation to the surroundings is compounded when the view in the map is remote. When we are no longer the origin of the coordinates but one possible point among many— when we no longer know where to place ourselves. The pair of maps shown, Surface Points and Canopy Topography (Figure 1.27), illustrate how intersubjectivity or what I am calling a kind of cartographical psychesthenia in the map operates in a remote view. The subject in both maps is the shape of the tree canopy in the Florida everglade bordering Biscayne Bay, shown in the original USgS map (Figure 1.26). Similar to ocean surface topography or dynamic topography mapping an ocean surface relative to the earth’s shape (geoid), Surface Points shows the surface topography of the vegetation relative to the ground condition. Mapping this condition makes it possible to imagine it as another surface relative to the ground plane of the site. This perception of the bay environment became the starting point for the design approach. Another map of the same site, Canopy Topography shows the condition mapped as an open cellular structure. A series of maps Surface as Lattice2 and Skin2 (Figure 1.28) show the variety of possible interpretations of a surface emphasizing a multiplicity of characteristics evident in discreet conditions. The four interpolations of the surface use fish scales as a lattice and as a skin characterized by two different structures to understand geometric properties of

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1.24, 1.25 The map shown Event-Space(s) maps a series of events in an existing building as a set of space–time intersections. The student mapped the existing terrain between buildings as a potential new field condition on the site understood as a remapped field. The matrix was created based on nominal building conditions: the primary building structure, secondary building structure of adjacent buildings, and all building context conditions. Using Maya, a software program allowing users to script a set of moves to be enacted on a three-dimensional model, Hossain programmed key parameters for the program to identity and then connect based on a hierarchy of importance. The maps are not to be read as a potential building form, but rather the mapping of a set of conditions based on the values given to the preset parameters; for instance, number and location of structural columns in relation to openings in the façade. The lower images show the final mapping of all conditions. Mohammed Hossain, Event-Space(s), Harvard, 2006, submitted as a report with all data sets.

Maps as Objects of Explanation 1.26 USGS Biscayne Bay map, Biscayne Bay National Park, Florida.

each representation. In a similar way Density + Movement and Seafoam Density Analysis (Figure 1.28) isolate the properties of sea foam. The first map represents possible types of density simulated in ideal conditions in the lab. These maps look for correspondences between conditions with like characteristics. This close analysis of phenomenon in a place highlights what James Corner identifies as the ‘experience of spatial life’ that ‘is as much immaterial as it is physical, as much bound into time and relational connections as it is to traditional notions of enclosure and “place.”’60 relational connections are mediated through telescoping technologies exaggerating and enhancing our senses—we ‘see’ and, therefore, experience, more. This means we can consider how the micro to the macro view of an environment changes what we design for that environment as a kind of cartographical psychesthenia. James Corner writes about the potential for maps to effect new conditions for design:

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1.27 Students working on an architecture and landscape architecture project made a series of maps by collecting a single item or example of an environmental system or process from Biscayne Bay, a national park outside of Miami, Florida. The selection of maps concentrates on conditions changing over time either short- or long-term durations. The project was a competition for the ‘Parks for the 21st Century’ sponsored by the U.S. Parks and Wildlife Service. The maps Surface Points and Canopy Topography ask questions about plant material as surface topography. For Lucille Malacouti the park experience consisted of a variety of green surfaces along the edges. The surface envelopes of the park were 1) the vegetation, 2) the surface topography of the land, and 3) the surface topography of the water. Connecting and extending the park surfaces ‘offers an opportunity for the visitor to witness, explore and become a part of these surfaces.’ She wanted park users to ‘see’ this ephemeral green surface of this otherwise hidden topography and the ‘volume of space existing between the ground and the canopy of the tress where new experiences (could) take place.’ For her, ‘the programs (would) engage at a sense level and bring out these qualities…. the two surfaces (would) start to blur.’ Graduate student Lucille Malacouti, Florida International University, 2012. In R. Rovira, W.E. Newman and J. Stuart, Atlas Mar, Florida International University, Advanced Studio: Parks for the People, 2012, sponsored by the Van Alen Institute and the National Parks Service. Copyright permission sent separately.

1.28 The maps address phenomenological conditions in Biscayne Bay National Park: simulation of density and movement, analysis of the action of sea foam over a seven-second period, and an analysis of a surface layer of sea foam. Students identified a specific condition and location or distribution throughout the site. They were required to map the specific characteristics based on careful observation or additional research to locate the needed data. In one instance, the student formulated an experimental model mimicking the specific attributes the observed phenomenon (Seafoam Density Analysis). In Density + Movement, Daniela Motta used the ‘concept of density and movement to create a series of interventions encouraging the interaction between people and nature.’ Her ‘interventions’ were envisioned to be ‘temporary and have ephemeral qualities.’ Part of identifying the conditions of density was examining specific properties in the sea foam. Similarly, Seafoam Density Analysis by Valentina Nahon analyzes the qualities of surface of an object as well as a particular condition of the site: sea foam. This resulted for her in ‘two classification methods for the interventions, the tangible and the intangible through technology.’ In R. Rovira, W. E. Newman and J. Stuart, Atlas Mar, Florida International University, Advanced Studio: Parks for the People, 2012, sponsored by the Van Alen Institute and the National Parks Service. Copyright permission sent separately.

Maps as Objects of Explanation 1.29 The map Morphed Field by Fiorella Mavares looks at the manipulation and transformation of the topology of the park surface using a mesh to calibrate surface deformations. Using topographic maps of the park Mavares identified key points of expansion and contraction represented by the ridges and valleys in the coral field of Elliot Key. In R. Rovira, W. E. Newman and J. Stuart, Atlas Mar, Florida International University, Advanced Studio: Parks for the People, 2012, sponsored by the Van Alen Institute and the National Parks Service. Copyright permission sent separately.

If maps are essentially subjective, interpretative, and fictional constructs of facts, constructs that influence decisions, actions, and cultural values generally, then why not embrace the profound efficacy of mapping in exploring and shaping new realities? Why not embrace the fact that the potentially infinite capacity of mapping to find and found new conditions might enable more socially engaging modes of exchange within larger milieux?61 The idea modes of representation effect new cultures of knowledge and knowledge exchange isn’t new.62 The history of the atlas as a collection of place maps is a case in point. The two first atlases differ significantly in the way they organize knowledge: the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570) assembled by the Flemish Abraham ortelius and gerhard Mercator’s Atlas of 1585. The atlases represent two different modalities. ortelius’ ‘theater of the world’ collects the world like rare coins and displays it as a series of places. Where Mercator’s atlas re-tells the world through a modality akin to the modern sciences: the maps are cartographical projections reconstructing the world is through a mathematically idealized construction of space. neither modality privileges one at the expense of the other—both are a necessary fiction.

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1.30, 1.31 In addition to the maps of particular phenomena in the park, students were also required to analyze specific objects. The object selected by Louis Bardi was a coiled rope. In another map of the undersea terrain, Depth Perception, Martina Gonzalez mapped the topography of some of the particular characteristics of terrain: sea grass, coral reef, boat circulation, and the breeding grounds of the spiny lobster. The map abstracts and disassembles the area attempting to find new relationships between the component connections through a new technology: the tablet. Key areas would be GPS marked and coded with information so as you traverse the area by boat, you track changes in landscape below the surface of the water. In each case, examining processes of disassembling or simulating and reframing constituent elements allowed for new understanding about actions at the micro and macro scale of the park. In R. Rovira, W. E. Newman and J. Stuart, Atlas Mar, Florida International University, Advanced Studio: Parks for the People, 2012, sponsored by the Van Alen Institute and the National Parks Service. Copyright permission sent separately.

Maps as Objects of Explanation

The ‘Neutral Domain’ in the Map We return to the idea of context briefly mentioned earlier. Context used in the map means ‘subjects’ in the map the mapmaker brings into focus and the subjects used at the periphery to sustain the totality of the mapped representation. The ‘neutral domain’ is the empty place on the map: the area not filled with text or visual imagery. In terrestrial maps this is the middle of the ocean, the edges of the map left seemingly empty by the mapmaker, or the imaginary space indicated but not framed by the map. Context as neutral domain is both theoretical and applied. For a historian, the intellectual history of context covers ground in many disciplines and generally refers to sources. For disciplines addressing the built environment, context is an applied problem referring specifically to the conditions of place. But rather than think of theory and application in opposition, mapping as a mode of knowledge offers an alternative intellectual construct where context is a kind of neutral domain. neither the internalist versus externalist opposition framed in the history of science or solely a question of a literal physical place, but interplay between any and all of the actors and their psychology, geography and environments. We return to Peter galison’s argument about context in the history and philosophy of science.63 he posed the question to challenge how historians use context—this isn’t as dissimilar to the way the neutral domain works in the map as one might think. For history, context includes texts, nontextual sources, intellectual, historical and periodic content, but a list of resources alone can’t answer the question of how a contextual explanation works. Theoretical constructs for the content of context outline the same condition of context in the map, namely it’s use as a framework to support ideological content indexed through explicit markers. remember however the map is a product of the mapmakers’ and mapreaders’ psychological, physical, and perceptual cognitive references. There isn’t internality or externality in the map—there is only a correspondence. Contextual explanations work because they help us point to the subject. If we want to talk about a particular painting we might explore the intellectual, social, and material area around it: what genre or style, the immediate circumstances and aesthetic conditions (what do the paintings from that time period look like, who wrote about them), physical media and constraints, local conditions, who bought them— these questions are our initial frame. once frame is established you eliminate or add supports to shore up a historical explanation. This reminds me of Michael Baxandall’s exhortation that we don’t explain pictures: we explain remarks about pictures, or rather, we explain pictures only in so far as we have considered them under some verbal description or specification.64 Description is the mediating object of explanation and the neutral domain acts as description does to mediate the theoretical and literal contexts of the map. The Timeline of Race and Ethnicity in the US Census (Figure 1.33) illustrates the problematic of the neutral domain when looking at historical conditions surrounding the construction of race. The map charts the changing categories of ‘race’ as described in the United States census questions. The vertical axis is ‘race by categories’ and the horizontal axis is year. The numbers of possible categories by year are indicated with a number adjacent to the small blue boxes. Categories used an as abstraction of race and ethnicity are identified by year with red circles. In the 1930s, surveyors were instructed not to use ‘Mulatto’ documenting people of mixed race, instead they listed people with a

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1.32 The map of the origins of language and identity in the Caribbean is organized chronologically by time. It charts changes in sovereignty in South American countries with a focus on the island nations in the Caribbean. Colonization is charted against major world events and the geographical distribution of territories by colonizers. Marsha McDonald, Decolonization in the Caribbean: the Path to Independence, Florida International University, 2013, digital print on heavy bond, 18 × 24 in.

white and a black parent as ‘Black.’ The map demonstrates race is a socially constructed category dependent on historically contingent perceptions and mores including our current understanding that race is a social fiction with little or no basis in biology, but linked directly to categories of classification determined through the social calculus of ‘otherness’ including notions of difference fallaciously based on skin color or better yet, our parents’ skin color. When applied to issues of social equity in the built environment this kind of mapping project helps undermine and explain how social inequalities constructed through data become spatial and geographical realities. The map shows the census divided ‘Slave Inhabitants’ from Indian and White inhabitants, just as red-lining, the practice of keeping these same inhabitants out of certain urban neighborhoods by denying them loans for houses, created similar geographical ghettos. In this example, the map context is social and spatial. Place theory—or the question of context in architecture and landscape architecture gained popularity in the 1970s with phenomenology, introduced through heidegger, kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism (1983), Christian norberg Schultz’ Genius Loci (1980), and the French phenomenologists gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The critical

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Maps as Objects of Explanation TIMELINE OF RACE AND ETHNICITY IN THE US CENSUS 54''"

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Note The 2010 Survey only listed 10 questions; race was still asked; option for hispanic origin; more detailed questions are now conducted in the annual American Community Survey

CENSUS BY YEAR

1.33 The map uses census data from 1790 to 2010 and includes additional files as part of a series of plates. Graduate student Hernan Guerero Applewhite, Census Data Map, Florida International University, 2013, original map part of a larger report, 8.5 × 11 in. stance ran counter to the concept of space as 1) an abstract precondition of being in the world, or 2) part of the apparatus by which the mind makes the world intelligible. Instead, the phenomenon of space results from the being-in or living-in space. This concept has profound consequences for architecture as the focus shifts from the geometry of spatial relations to the social, environmental, and geographical character of specific locales and the psychoanalytic and somatic relationships between our daily built environment and the body. For example, Bachelard emphasizes the ‘poetics’ of space embedded in memory and body awareness. The horizontal/vertical dialectic is identified with the upright stance of our body, the relationship between earth and sky, and the dynamic effect of diagonal forms that pull against these axes. opposed to this is the inside/outside dialectic ordered along the lines of enclosure/openness, safety/danger, familiar/strange, and private/public. These spatial constructs organize the outer world with the conceptual/mental world. Architecture and its allied disciplines embody possible relations between bodies and minds but do not strictly represent them. In disciplines addressing built environments the literal idea of context implies a physical place paired with a poetic power like Christian norberg-Schultz ‘genius loci’ and the idea

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Maps as Objects of Explanation of the sacred grove. In modernism the notion of context tended to mean a set of principles and systems linked to the physical place. later concerns shift to the environmental issues of Ian Mcharg, post-structuralist ahistorical interpretations of place with new Urbanism, and kenneth Frampton’s reading of context as the appropriate critical response to local design traditions and vernacular as ‘critical regionalism.’ Postmodernist theory in architecture moves from the idea of space to the sociolinguistic idea of place. Context reads as a text with the formal organization of building mass and the articulation of parts either as ornament or an amalgam of objects-as-signs (roof = shed + vernacular farm building + shelter, column = point + classical order + structure).65 The remapping of the City of Boston 1879 (Figure 1.34) map by Manuel lam entitled, Economy for the City of Boston in 1879 (Figure 1.35) reduces the city to a series of signs—in this case, the signs of commerce. The map identifies the productive landscape in the city associated with the ports, railways and ships. The signs in the map stand in for the actual buildings, railway and port—even the strange cutout portions of lands shown in the upper left-hand corner of the map show areas used to store goods are only stand-ins or signifiers for things-that-make-money at the scale of the city. By eliminating all other context and erasing familiar markers, the map-reader is asked to see the Boston landscape as a ‘space of flows.’ The terminology is from Manuel Castells, a sociologist writing about the ‘new forms of spatial arrangements under the new technological paradigm’ allowing synchronous, realtime interaction at a distance.66 Castells imagined the digital age with its instantaneous and ubiquitous exchange of goods, money, and data, but the map shows the network of flows between ports, ships, goods and land that characterized the city during the mid-Industrial revolution. Using maps to convey the complex social and spatial totality of the city isn’t new. The original Boston map is a birds-eye view map type popularized in the renaissance. These maps were intended not as way-finding instruments but either as exemplars of man’s imposition of order illustrated by the street grid or as portraits detailing the characteristics,

1.34 The City of Boston 1879 by O. H. Bailey et al., A bird’s-eye view of Boston in perspective, not drawn to scale, 68 × 111 cm., color, Armstrong & Co., Boston, MA, Riverside Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Maps as Objects of Explanation 1.35 The map, Economy for the City of Boston 1879 is a reconfigured map based on an original map of Boston from 1879 (see Figure 1.34). The new version reduces the contents of the map to include only the productive landscape or those areas in the city where the natural landscape including the port are income producing and linked to infrastructure (such as ships, ports and the railway station). City Hall is indicated on the new map with the wireframe cube. Manuel Lam, Economy for the City of Boston 1879, Harvard University, 2006, digital print on heavy bond, 24 in. × 36 in.

including landmarks, or well-known structures of a particular place. Denis Cosgrove shows in nineteenth-century United States these ‘prospect views’ were celebratory urban images meant to demonstrate the order, elegance, and prosperity of cities in the new land.67 The map is a sign of ‘place’ as part of a larger conurbation of cities, nation-states and components of a genteel civilization. The Garfield Boulevard (Figures 1.36 and 1.37) map by Valerie Michalek is another example of a map highlighting the neutral domain as a semiotic problem in relation to the physical place. her map is all ‘domain’ where what is typically considered background in the geographical representation of a place becomes the subject of the map: ground color, texture, and tree color, texture. The map indexes and isolates these neutral spaces creating a new perceptual landscape of textures and color. The representation vacillates between literal context and a theoretical stance about context as a site for acting out a set of principles and systems in the same way landscape urbanism uses landscape (sometimes literal, sometimes conceptual) as a developable surface of qualitative and quantitative data. As James Corner argues: mapping is not the indiscriminate, blinkered accumulation and endless array of data, but rather an extremely shrewd and tactical enterprise, a practice of relational reasoning that intelligently unfolds new realities out of existing constraints, quantities, facts and conditions.68 existing constraints in Michalek’s site weren’t notable until the neutral domain became the subject of the map.

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1.36, 1.37 Part of a project addressing the urban food deserts in south Chicago, this map Garfield Boulevard identified characteristics of the existing urban landscape along Garfield Boulevard part of Chicago’s Emerald Necklace. As a network these boulevards work together to connect many of Chicago’s parks. To better understand and reimagine improved connections within this network the map was an important tool to understand the way the density of the neighborhood landscape related to the corresponding density of the surrounding landscape. The following characteristics were examined in the map: ground scape color and texture, tree color and texture, and natural paths. Valerie Michalek, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010, original map is a set of six prints, 11 × 17 in. printed on matte linen/cotton heavyweight paper.

Maps as Objects of Explanation Finally, a map by Margaret Cooke, Lens Venetie, exemplifies another significant twentiethcentury approach to place using the ideas of kevin lynch. lynch drew on e. C. Tolman, James J. gibson and kenneth Boulding to reimagine cities through the cognitive map in The Image of the City.69 Mental maps or mental models are created as the individual acquires, codes, stores and recalls images or information about specific phenomena and locations in everyday environments. Tolman hypothesized legibility in this mental schema produced well-adjusted human beings—a legible and clearly defined environment engenders better cognitive maps in its inhabitants. lynch applied this theory to the image of the city stating clearly defined boundaries between districts, edges, paths, and landmarks contribute to the clarity of the cityscape. The designer’s role is to organize the city by managing legibility for the user. Cities like Boston with clear edges are naturally more legible than places like los Angeles or newark, nJ. Similarly Boulding argued that behavior, especially of humans, is not a product of a particular stimulus but of the whole image of the world in the mind of the behaving person.70 Cooke’s map (Figure 1.38) catalogues a dérive, or rapid passage through varied ambiences taken by the mapmaker through a public plaza in Venice, Italy. The map is a series of tourist photos taken at random, based on objects that drew the mapmaker’s attention—in effect their cognitive map. The map charts the path in plan and then reconfigures the plaza based on the perception of the space tracking locations where photographs were taken. The photos act as placeholders for the things noticed or catalogued in the mental model of the mapmaker. Cooke’s map inverts this relationship to show how distorted the space of the images would be if you redrew the plaza according to the order of the ‘image’ of the place represented by the photographs. While the experience is ordered— it makes sense based on the relative location of the attributes of the perceptual phenomena, a geometrically rationalized space of these same phenomena would not present itself as an ordered spatial configuration. The disjunction between the two modes, the cognitive map on the one hand and the spatial map on the other, highlight the complexity of mapping places. Places, context or what I call the neutral domain in the map refuse to yield to any one ‘operational technique.’ A problem identified by James Corner regarding planning and urban design is: while there is no shortage of theory and ideas for addressing this condition critically, there has been very little development of new operational techniques for actualizing them. The difficulty today isn’t a crisis of what to do than of how to do anything at all. It is precisely at the strategic and rhetorical level of operation, then, that mappings hold great value.71 Cosgrove remarks on our awareness that cartographic images can never be innocent vehicles of information dissolving our previously neat distinctions between celebratory and regulatory maps. Alternatively we think of this as the dissolution of the rhetorical difference between an internalist versus externalist historical context—the careful set of dichotomies established to clarify but that often obscure the complexity of the inbetweeness and cognitive intersubjectivity possible in the mapped condition versus the one ‘imaged.’

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1.38 Margaret Cooke, Lens Venetie, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011, digital print on heavy bond, 12 in. × 32 in.

Maps as Objects of Explanation Notes 1 The Enuma Elish is a sacred Babylonian text dating from the 18th to 16th century

bce.

named after the opening words, it describes the creation of the world beginning with the naming of the gods. There are seven tablets including the creation of the world and a great battle fought by the gods. W. g. lambert and S. B. Parker, Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation, Clarendon Press, oxford, 1966: 2. 2 ‘West Wing Transcripts’ http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search. php?flag=getTranscript&id=38 (accessed May 2015). 3 J. Corner, ‘The agency of mapping: Speculation, critique and invention,’ in D Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, reaktion Books, london, 1999: 213–252. 4 Corner, ‘The agency of mapping’. 5 This story has been told numerous times from different perspectives (Crampton, J. W. Cartography’s defining moment: The Peters Projection controversy, 1974–1990. Cartographica 31 (1994), 16–32; Monmonier, M. S. Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy, 1st ed, ed. h. holt, new York, 1995; robinson, A. h. Arno Peters and his new cartography. The American Cartographer 12 (1985), 103–111), but suffice it to say Peters was brought up in an activist household during the 1930s when the nazis imprisoned his father. Their family was no stranger to politically active foreign visitors like William Pickens, nAACP activist and field secretary. After gaining his doctorate in history, Peters felt global maps like the Mercator were racist: it was ‘a fully false picture, particularly regarding the non-white-peopled lands … it over-values the white man and distorts the picture of the world to the advantage of the colonial masters of the time’ (Morris 1973: 15). robinson led the response: ‘cleverly contrived, cunningly deceptive attack against the “outmoded theories” and “myths” of cartography [it] misrepresents, is illogical and erroneous, and one’s initial reaction is simply to dismiss it as being worthless…[Peters is a] skillful merchandiser, and his self-serving campaign can do the image of cartography great harm.’ (robinson 1985: 103), from J. W. Crampton and J. krygier, ‘An introduction to critical cartography,’ ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4(1): 11–33, 2006. 6 r. harbison, Eccentric Spaces, nonpareil Books 52, D. r. godine, Boston, MA, 1977: 124. 7 D. harvey, ‘From space to place and back again: reflections on the condition of postmodernity,’ Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, routledge, london, 1993: 2–29. 8 Crampton and krygier, ‘An introduction to critical cartography’: 15. 9 A. Mattelart, ‘Mapping modernity: Utopia and communications networks,’ in Cosgrove (ed.) Mappings: 170–171. 10 V. J. Del Casino and S. P. hanna, ‘representations and identities in tourism map spaces,’ Progress in Human Geography 24(1): 23–46, 2000. 11 J. B. harley and k. zandveliet, ‘Art, science, and power in sixteenth-century Dutch cartography,’ Cartographica 29: 10–19, 1992. 12 Del Casino and hanna, ‘representations and identities’: 27.

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13 V. J. Del Casino and S. P. hanna, ‘Beyond the “binaries”: A methodological intervention for interrogating maps as representational practices,’ ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4(1): 34–56, 2005. 14 o. halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945, experimental Futures series, Duke University Press, Duham, nC: 37–38. 15 See, J. W. Crampton, The Political Mapping of Cyberspace. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il 2003: 7; D. Wood, ‘The fine line between mapping and map-making,’ Cartographica 30(4): 50–60, 1993. 16 M. Dodge, r. kitchin and C. r. Perkins, Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, routledge, london, 2009: 11. 17 Crampton, The Political Mapping of Cyberspace: 7. 18 M. heidegger and D. F. krell, Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), harperSanFrancisco, San Francisco, CA, 1993. 19 Crampton, The Political Mapping of Cyberspace. 20 Dodge et al., Rethinking Maps: 11. 21 Dodge et al., Rethinking Maps: 234. 22 W. e. newman, ‘review of Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps,’ CCA Reviews, october, 2005. http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/766#.WIPYerYrlWY (accessed 2 February 2017). 23 e. S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Mn, 2002: xvii. 24 W. James and r. B. Perry, Essays in Radical Empiricism, longmans, green and Co., new York, 1912: 153. 25 Casey, Representing Place: 273. 26 I. kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, norman k. Smith (trans.), St. Martin’s Press, new York, 1965: 443. 27 newman ‘review of e. S. Casey, Representing Place.’ 28 Ibid. 187. 29 See for example the report by Simon nora and Alain Mine, L’Information de la société (1978). The report was commissioned by French president Valéry giscard d’estang to aid in understanding ‘how best to handle the computerization of society.’ ‘The authors projected telematics as the technological tool to help resolve not only the political and economic crisis in France, but the crisis of civilization in general through a new global mode of “social regulation.” Any country lacking the capacity for “organizing this collective memory” risks being deprived of the “capacity to control its destiny.”’ (Mattelart ‘Mapping Modernity’: 186). 30 P. A Allent, Histoire du Corps Impérial du Génie, des sieges et des travaux qu’il a dirigés depuis l’origine de la fortification jusqu’ à nos jours, Magimel, Paris, 1805; A. guillerme, Genése du concept de réseau, territoire et génie en Europe de l’ouest (1760–1815), Université de Paris VIII, Paris, 1988.

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31 Y. Chicoteau and A. Picon, ‘Forme, technique et idéologie: les ingeniéurs des Ponts et Chaussées à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,’ Culture Technique 7: 176–177, March, 1982; Mattelart, ‘Mapping Modernity.’ 32 T. o’hagan. Rousseau, routledge, london, 1999: 143. 33 É. B. de Condillac, Discours préliminaire, I.403b, quoted by h. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Mn, 1982: 164 and o’hagan, Rousseau: 143. 34 harbison, Introduction, Eccentric Spaces. 35 J. Ackerman, ‘review of The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries,’ Journal of Architectural Education 56(1): 96–98 March, 1997. 36 r. evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995: 37. 37 g. olsson, Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 2007: 8–9. 38 1977 Berkeley lecture by David Bohm, quoted in M. ricard and X. T. Trinh, The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet, Crown Publishers, new York, 2001. 39 A. h. robinson, ‘Mapping the correspondence of isarithmic maps,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 52(4): 414–425, 1962. 40 W. e. newman, ‘Mapping as applied research,’ in n. S. C. Jarrett and k.-h. kim (eds), The Visibility of Research, Architectural research Centers Consortium, University of north Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, nC, 2013: 228–236. 41 D. Dorling and D. Fairbairn, Mapping: Ways of Representing the World. longman, harlow, 1997: 28–29. 42 halpern, Beautiful Data: 5. 43 e.-J. Marey and e. Pritchard, Movement, D. Appleton and Company, new York, 1895: 210. 44 P. galison, ‘Ten problems in the history and philosophy of science,’ Isis 99(1): 111–124, 2008. 45 C. Beyer, ‘edmund husserl,’ in e. n. zalta (ed.) The Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/ husserl/ (accessed January 2015). 46 e. husserl, h. l. v. Breda, S. IJsseling, S. and r. Boehm, Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke. Martinus. nijhoff, The hague, 2003. 47 D. Willard, ‘Verso una teoria fenomenologica della verità come corrispondenza [Toward a phenomenology for the correspondence theory of truth appears],’ Discipline Filosofiche 1: 125–147, 1991. 48 Willard, ‘Verso una teoria,’ 132. 49 J. J. gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1979. 50 C. F. Michaels and C. Carello, Direct Perception, Century Psychology Series, Prentice-hall, englewood Cliffs, n.J., 1981: 26. 51 one of the main themes of transcendental phenomenology is intersubjectivity. Among other things, it is discussed in considerable detail in the fifth of the Cartesian meditations and in

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the manuscripts published in vols. XIII–XV of Husserliana. A particularly important critique of husserl’s view on intersubjectivity from a sociological viewpoint is found in A. Schütz, Alfred, ‘The problem of transcendental intersubjectivity in husserl,’ in Collected Papers III, Martinus nijhoff, The hague, 1966. 52 e. husserl, Cartesian Meditations, Martinus nijhoff, The hague, 1964. 53 ‘Intersubjective experience is empathic experience; it occurs in the course of our conscious attribution of intentional acts to other subjects, in the course of which we put ourselves into the other shoes. In order to study this kind of experience from the phenomenological attitude, we bracket our belief in the existence of the respective target of our act – ascription qua experiencing subject and ask ourselves which of our further beliefs justify existence – belief as well as our act-ascription. It is these further beliefs making-up the rational structure underlying our intersubjective experience.’ Beyer, ‘edmund husserl’. 54 on husserl’s view, it is precisely this ‘subjective-relative lifeworld’ or environment, providing the ‘grounding soil’ of the objective world of science, in the twofold sense (i) scientific conceptions owe their (sub-) propositional content and thus their reference to reality to the prescientific notions they are supposed to ‘naturalize’ and consequently, (ii) when things get into flux in science, when a crisis occurs, all that is left to appeal to in order to defend new scientific approaches against their rivals is the prescientific lifeworld, as manifested in our according intuitive acceptances (for references cf. D. Føllesdal, ‘The lebenswelt in husserl’ in leila haaparanta, Martin kusch and Ilkka hiiniluoto (eds), Language, Knowledge, and Intentionality: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka (Acta Philosophica Fennica 49). helsinki, 1990: 139 ff). This view offers an alternative to the ‘naturalistic’ stance taken by many analytic philosophers today. husserl et al., Husserliana, vol. VI: 134. 55 r. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, Universirty of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1954: viii. 56 S. giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, J. Duncan Berry (trans.), getty Center for the history of Art and the humanities, Santa Monica, CA, 1995. The following quote from giedion is explicit: ‘there is only one indivisible space where the shell falls away between interior and exterior – spatial interpenetration.’ 57 györgy kepes quoted in C. rowe and r. Slutzky, ’Transparency: literal and phenomenal,’ The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982: 160–161. 58 Caillois, r., ‘Mimicry and legendary psychesthenia,’ in C. Frank and C. naish (eds), The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, Duke University Press, Durham, nC, 2003: 89. 59 Frank and naish, The Edge of Surrealism: 28. 60 ‘In other words, the experience of spatial life today is as much immaterial as it is physical, as much bound into time and relational connections as it is to traditional notions of enclosure and “place.”’ Corner, ‘The agency of mapping’: 249. 61 Corner, ‘The agency of mapping’: 252. 62 See M. Castells, ‘Conclusion,’ The Information Age: Economy, Society & Culture, Volume 1, Blackwell, oxford, 1996: 469–478; C. van del heuvel, ‘Mapping knowledge exchange in early modern europe: Intellectual and technological geographies and network representations,’ International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 9(1): 95–114, 2015.

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63 galison, ‘Ten problems in the history and philosophy of science.’ 64 M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, Yale University Press, new haven, CT, 1985: 1. 65 newman, W. e., ‘Twentieth-century Theory in Architecture,’ in James Mattingly, ed. SAGE Encyclopaedia of Theory, SAge Publication, forthcoming 2018. 66 The ‘space of flows’ was first mentioned in M. Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process,1989; M. Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, vol. 1. The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2010: 146. 67 D. e. Cosgrove, ‘Carto-city’ in D. e. Cosgrove (ed.) Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World, International library of human geography 12. I.B. Tauris, london, 2008: 177–178. 68 J. Corner, ‘landscape and ecology as agents of creativity,’ in g. F. Thompson and F. r. Steiner (eds), Ecological Design and Planning, John Wiley, new York, 1997: 80–108. 69 e. C. Tolman, ‘Cognitive maps in rats and men,’ Psychological Review 55(4): 189–208, 1948. See r. M. kitchin, ‘Cognitive maps: What are they and why study them?,’ Journal of Environmental Psychology 14(1): 1–19, 1994. k lynch, The Image of the City, Technology Press, Cambridge, 1960. 70 k. Boulding, ‘general systems theory: the skeleton of science,’ Management Science 2(3): 197–208, 1956; this paper was written especially for Management Science and was reprinted in General Systems, Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research, vol. 1, 1956. 71 Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: 251.

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Chapter 2: Terms of the Map

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. … Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum. gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind

How Maps Communicate: Ordering, Weighting, Reducing Although built on the messiness of nature, the map as a graphic representation of the milieu communicates ways in which societies around the world and throughout time interpret their known world. even if we imagine, as gregory Bateson does,1 an infinite regress where maps are built upon maps—at any given time we share versions of these messy and complex interpretations of our world. Maps are one of Bruno latour’s immutable mobiles or representations scaling down and inscribing places, ideas, or things so they can be transported back to the center and combined with other objects.2 The map is latour’s favorite example of a scientific representation. Acknowledging that for latour maps are generally understood as geographical representations and not, as I am arguing, representations of any possible milieu (as place, idea or thing); following on his explanation we can apply the same conceptual structure to the map broadly considered. For latour the cycle of mapmaking starts with the explorer who sets out in a ship laden with equipment to draw a new land, and then returns home and shares the knowledge captured in the map with other explorers who in turn make new maps. repeated explorations render additional and refined maps brought back to the center of scientific and political inquiry. The map reinforces an imperialistic relationship between the authority requesting the map and the territories at the periphery. This example identifies several levels of ordering: the way the graphic representation orders information about place, literally, identifying places and features; and the way the map as an object of explanation orders the social relationships represented by the mapmaker and places and people the mapmaker records. The order of the map as the mapmaker conceives

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Terms of the Map it projected onto the territory or place while the map itself orders our knowledge of it. This highlights maps as social as well as scientific productions and as graham Burnett points out, painstakingly crafted through ‘the explorer’s active engagement with the land.’3 This active engagement is literal and embodied: the explorer comes from somewhere and goes to measure something, but it is also symbolic—an active perceptual or cognitive engagement on the part of the mapmaker reveals as much about what is included as excluded from the contents of the map. Maps are objects of historical explanation encoding the context of their making. To extend latour’s example, his explorer ate something for lunch, brought with him beliefs and biases, and engaged in measuring using tools produced from the materials of his own context. Scientific tools, technology, cultural morays and bias are but a few conditions shaping how maps are made or transmitted. It is important to emphasize because maps are constructed using instruments and particular representational technologies like projection and perspective lending them scientific authority. Maps are mostly mobile but they are not as immutable as latour suggests. Although latour was using maps to exemplify an argument about the cycles of accumulation in science and engineering it is the subject of another book to determine if the analogy would hold both ways. The claim here is mapmaking is a contextdependent activity similar to any semiotic practice dealing with signs and symbols shifting according to time and place.4 one question is how do maps weigh or assess and reduce or limit information to convey knowledge about a place or idea? This asks what is different about the way a map conveys information than other kinds of graphical tools. Consider first that maps articulate information about space and location, ideas and concepts and any possible combination of data sets in a given milieu through form and content. Form is made up of the characteristics of type used in its core symbolizing activity. erwin Panofsky uses the example of perspective as a core symbolizing activity in art.5 Perspective drawing is a form based in the rules of

Diagram 2.1 Perspective drawing diagram.

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Terms of the Map geometry allowing us to represent spatial depth on a two-dimensional surface, in short, a map. In fact all technologies of representation are subsets of the general category of maps.6 This particular form has a specific set of rules—visual rays drawn from a single point (not two, as one might assume given we see using two points), all straight lines remain straight in perspective, vertical lines remain vertical and the picture plane must be vertical and perpendicular to the ground or horizontal plan. The content of the perspective is the milieu: city view, landscape or inside of a coffee cup. The contents of the map (perspective) may change—index different information, but the formal rules determining the way this view is constructed will be the same regardless of what is represented. Joan Blaeu’s map of enkhuisen (Figure 2.8) is a good example. The map uses perspective form and a kind of extruded view similar to an isometric form with the same contents. other map forms or types include thematic maps or choropleths in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, to planimetric maps that flatten topographic differences in a landscape to show plane measurements including angles, distances and areas. Form and map type are not synonymous. A map may include several forms as the Blaeu map does, and map types may share formal similarities as a planimetric map shares with orthographic projections—the plan, section and elevation drawings in architecture. What is important is the mapmaker considers that different formal structures convey differing aspects of the same data, e.g. a tree in plan looks very different from a tree shown in perspective or the quantity of tree leaves shown as a graphic bar in a choropleth. looking at North America in Eight Projections and Three Map Projections Centered at 39 N and 96 W (Figures 2.1 and 2.2) demonstrates how the form of the map can change the way the contents are understood by the map reader. The map shows eight possible representations of the outlines of the north American continent using eight different mathematically constructed projections or form-types. Content is equally correct in each of the possible outlines. There isn’t a definitive representation, given the sense perception of the shape of the world is apperceived in a three-dimensional construct impossible to accurately recreate on a twodimensional drawing surface. each representation is correct or incorrect relative to its utility: in 2.1 The map shows eight different projections of North America overlaid. The projections are the same scale and center. It demonstrates the discrepancy in the translation from threedimensional world objects to two-dimensional surfaces. John Branigan (Azavea), North America in 8 Projections.

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2.2 The map focuses on the continental USA asking the same question about the relative accuracy of map projections as Figure 2.1. At this scale it is possible to see the extent of the differences in the outlines of the United States. John Branigan (Azavea), Continental USA in Eight Projections.

effect no single representation of the north American continent is ‘right.’ each representation shows some aspect of the situation, but not all that is possible to know about it. Maps project possible worlds masquerading as naturally determined facts because they look like a priori artifacts with scientific validity. The ‘geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the lower Mississippi river’ (Figure 2.3) by harold Fisk is a good example.7 Fisk mapped the tracks of the Mississippi river as part of a 1944 US Army Corp of engineers report. given the complexity of mapping 2,000 miles of river and its various possible structures over time on physical evidence it seems likely Fisk relied on a high degree of speculation, interpolation, interpretation and extrapolation—the power of this map isn’t accuracy per se, but the power it has to suggest the idea of the morphology of the great river, its shape and flow over time through the alluvial planes. It is a powerful visualization of a dynamic and living system. nelson goodman writing in Ways of Worldmaking challenged us to think about what constitutes making a world.8 This can be applied in some sense to the idea of making a map as a world is made ‘by making a world version.’9 For goodman there are no possible worlds: all worlds are actual.10 Worlds are made by answering to right versions adhering to a strict set of constraints. Similar to the sincere explorer who travels to an unknown place to record it and thereby make it known, the mapmaker must start from a known world—we can’t just create things, ‘Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand: the making is a remaking.’11 Science, art and philosophy contribute to our understanding as they all help to create worlds. According to goodman we are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. The substructures or terms describing the probable ways we create worlds are similar and applicable to making maps: a.

Composition and decomposition: repetition, identification and organization including taxonomy, kinds, categories

b.

Weighting: contracts of interests, differences in emphasis and relevant kinds, evaluating utilities or value

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2.3 The Mississippi River Commission appointed Harold Fisk to undertake a geological survey of the Lower Mississippi Valley in 1941. When complete, the report contained 15 maps illustrating the course of the river over time. Covering over 2,000 miles, the maps track the meanderings of the river’s present and past bends. Given the size of the project and impossibility of tracking each change, many of the colorful curves are a product of speculation, extrapolation and interpolation. More importantly, the choice to let the geography drive the presentation meant time is shown in the map simply through the overlay of the different colors representing unique bar migration, chute cut-offs and avulusions of the river as it changed course. H. N. Fisk, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, U.S. Department of the Army and Mississippi River Commission, Vicksburg, MO, 1944, Plate 2.

1783 The United States in North Ame.-ica (Mitchell Map) Below is a modem map on the Mercator projection showing the configuration of the eastern portion of North America with major drainage features. The grid is arbitrary, designed to facilitate comparison between present-day knowledge of the geography of North America and what was known in the mid-18th century when John Mitchell's famous map was made (simplified and re-drawn here about 115 width of original). To show the deformation of the earth's surface Mitchell incorporated into his map (from ignorance or error), a grid was contructed on Mitchell 's map correponding to the rectangular grid on the contenporary map. Since each labeled square on the Mitchell map has a counterpart on the modem map, the relative stretching, compressing, and twisting of the surface can be perceived. I

-Boundary Une, Trraty of Paris, 1783

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1975 Tbe United States In Nm1h America

- - Modern boundary behvetn Canada and US

2.4 The maps compare two representations of U.S. territory in 1783 made in the mid-eighteenth century by John Mitchell (shown simplified and redrawn at one-fifth the width of the original). The grid constructed on the Mitchell Map (upper left map) corresponds (square by square) with the rectangular grid on the current day map. Given the labeled squares on the Mitchell Map have a counterpart on the modern map, the relative stretching, compressing and twisting of the topological surface on the Mitchell Map can be understood. Lester J. Cappon, Barbara Petchenik, and John Hamilton Long, Atlas of Early American History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1976, 58.

Terms of the Map

2.5 Relief maps are able to convey the distortions of the surface, but not actual linear distance. Relief Map, U.S. Geological Survey.

c.

Ordering: periodicity and proximity, patterns or changes under different orderings

d.

Deletion and supplementation: reduction characteristic in art making

e.

Deformation: involves changes reshaping or corrections and distortions.12 If we understand that it’s possible to project worlds through the map using goodman’s

structural rules we see worlds are not made anew, but from existing worlds, and models of organization are built into a world not found in the world. The Mitchell Map underscores this idea (Figure 2.4). Shown are two possible maps of the eastern seaboard in the United States in north America. The first is a generalized sense of the shape of the topography; the second is a generalized representation of the outlines of the original boundaries. Projections used to create both views are literally geometries built into the representations reducing the representation from all possible information available (type of soils, number of people, roadways, smell of the grass) to two particular conditions: topography and boundary. If we accept maps engage in reordering the world, then they are implicated in how we construct our identity in the world. By default they order the world according to man’s relationship to man, nature and society as these are the only points of view the human species can adopt—we wouldn’t be very good at seeing the world from the perspective of a

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Terms of the Map beetle. Maps fix geographic, social, political, material and cultural boundaries—in short they mediate between thought and the objects of thought. Bring to mind a map of the world—if you imagine countries checkered across a sheet with pinks and blues, you are thinking the place and boundary defining the place at the same time. Say you imagine the shape of the countries within a continent: it is hard to think one (shape) without naming the other, to say “African continent” without thinking the place/shape. But on reflection, these are not stable entities—country boundaries, even names of continents, are socially, not naturally constructed. Maps represent the thoughts we project about the way the world is organized, not the actual world. Using an example from architecture or urbanism: the word-thought ‘city’ reaches a crisis when the boundaries of cities are no longer clear—when the modern metropolis includes physical, social and culturally amorphous boundaries between nature, digital information, economic influence, and political resonance. As representations of the world as we perceive it, maps are symbolic forms. ernst Cassirer suggested symbolic forms might be open and active.13 According to Cassirer

Alternative

Alternative

Alternative

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2.6 The diagram illustrates the difference between ideal and actual space. The mesh threedimensional model on the right represents computational space or the numerical representation. The physical space closely represents the physical dimensions of the threedimensional object. Model space is the mathematics of geometry used to represent the shapes of a three-dimensional object in an idealized visualization space. All three representations are true, but each offers unique information. Nicholas Wise, University of Arkansas, 2015.

Terms of the Map symbolic forms are the product of the representative function of thought bringing a world of stable and enduring images we communicate through language. This is the world constructed out of our sense perceptions in relation to our spatio-temporal position in the world. Another way to think about this is how maps communicate what we draw from our memories, desires and observations. on the one hand the map is a representation of a place or idea, a catalogue of the hills, valleys, plains, cities, streets and names used to communicate something or some idea to someone else. on the other it is a projection or representation, not a recreation. The map ‘precedes the territory’ in so far as it fixes the possible against the probable especially in memory. The map points to a world we determined from our sense perception and recomposed into a representation. Just like our perceptions and memories maps won’t include everything. World maps don’t include the world, but a simulacra of the world: a representation of the shadow of the world—a bare outline of the mapmaker’s reduction of three-dimensional world-elements onto a twodimensional plane. The important characteristic is not that maps reduce the world, but how. What is included, excluded, emphasized or muted reveals how the cartographer thinks-theworld. When the mapmaker is a designer, this means what is mapped is what is thought in relation to the design-hypothesis. Data Visualization, Mapping, and Measuring Measuring from the latin mens means to ascertain quanta—size, amount, and degree—of something generally using instruments calibrated with standard units. In the sciences, the accuracy of a measurement system is the degree of closeness of a measurements quantity to that quantity’s true value.14 It may be correct to think of the precision of the map: the degree to which repeated measurements under unchanged conditions show the same results, but with the added caveat a high degree of precision cannot be expected under most circumstances. Maps measure in the same way photography captures the image. Very convincing to the eye, but upon closer inspection they are a construction of reality not a replication. Denis Cosgrove stressed ‘the measure of mapping is not restricted to the mathematical; it may equally be spiritual, political or moral.’15 When working with a map it is important to consider what is being measured and why as much as when. If you imagine trying to draw the high tide watermark as precisely as possible the problem becomes clear. Where to fix the line, in relation to what, and which line to consider the definitive wave are subjective decisions—made through observation even using calibrated instruments. They can never be definitive given for a terrestrial map the curvature of the earth makes locating any point by a single two-dimensional grid impossible. Why is mapping useful in making decisions when collecting, calibrating, organizing and acting on information about the world? The utility of mapping as a form of data visualization isn’t in accuracy or precision, but rather the map’s capacity to help us make and organize hypothesis about the world of ideas and things. hypothesis-making through the map isn’t strictly inductive or deductive, although it can use the thought process of either, but it is often based on general observations. The observation, for instance for a painter, will likely be sense oriented and perceptual, but for a scientist, mathematical and rational. The data is a set of quantitative values in the latter and qualitative variables in the former. natural signs and

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Terms of the Map language operate along a continuum between what is quantifiable and what is qualifiable. Qualia may be determined by just noticeable differences or the amount something must be changed for a difference to be noticeable, say between yellow and yellower, or pretty and prettier. For the map these relative differences are easy to convey and adequate to show some kind of difference. Similarly, ideas like justice or love can be mapped as relations between sets of ideas or actions if the internal logic of the relations is maintained in the map. love may include jealousy, passion or desire, but likely does not include all cats in your neighborhood with yellow tails. Any observation may be mapped if the mapmaker is willing to index it or create a relationship between one set of data and another. Visualizing data in the map can be done using any kind of data, but there are some distinctions between types of data that are important. Data in the sciences appear to be concrete and empirical, for instance the speed and direction of a particle, whereas data in the humanities tend to be ‘situated, partial and constitutive.’16 Closer examination shows data should be considered in relation to the context of the observation along a continuum including or excluding modifier information as needed. For example, maps used primarily for road travel include data points for roads represented as simple lines whose width may indicate, but not mathematically represent actual road widths. This perceptual ‘distance between’ drawn into the map is less rational, more psychological, individual, particular, but often less consciously apparent. This distance is the relative relationships internal to the drawn map-world that must be consistent. Quanta and qualia depend on context for legibility: the figure shown in Diagram 2.2 could pertain to time, but could also be chapter and verse of a psalm, a part of a series, or even the title of a movie. Without context in which to contemplate the data, the meaning is impossible to determine. The numbers ‘12:01’ are quantitative when they indicate a numerical value, but qualitative when used as a title of a thing, like a movie. Maps contain multiple instances of packets of data that must be characterized in a context before they are legible to the reader. The presence of a structure also distinguishes maps from diagrams, similar to maps in kind, but not degree.17 Diagrams don’t quantify or qualify spatio-temporal relationships.18 The specific tools used to manage and contextualize data in the map, the relationship between the form and content of the map, and how they communicate to the map-reader is what we turn to next. General Determination of the Four Elements and Two Functions The four operative terms and two functions necessary to the organization of the map are: 1) frame, 2) axis of translation, 3) projection or relative scale, 4) index; and the two functions: Diagram 2.2

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Terms of the Map time and place. In previous work I considered time a fifth term, but understanding time as a function controlling relations between a set of inputs and a set of permissible outputs lets us think of time as a modifier to the map content. For example time can be: the function of the time of the map; the function of time in the map; or the function of the time the map is studied by the map-reader. Place operates in a similar way. To explain the terms I use examples from different maps. The Case Studies section of the book looks at specific examples of maps in depth. As the content in any given map is complex and at times ambiguous, the four terms and two functions can be used first to think about how the map instrumentalizes content and then as guides to help construct a map. They are universal structures replicated in all maps to varying degree. Map types may differ—world maps, celestial maps, subway maps— but their DnA uses these same building blocks. The mechanics of the visual apparatus constituting the tools of cartography are surprisingly replicable for all maps. Different authors use varying terminology, scale instead of projection or legend instead of index, but general agreement about the characteristics of maps prevails.19 not all maps have every term but every map has at least two: frame and index, without these they present a mere picture not a representation of a milieu. A caution, even relatively innocuous terms can be difficult: for instance scale which puts things in relative relationship can also be means to include or exclude content, similarly, time has a number of variables across several levels of meaning in the map. Frame Maps are parenthetical—maps frame what you want to hold apart from the real in the world. Maps do this by creating conceptual representations of the milieu using symbols and relations between symbols. Cartographers call this symbol correspondence the index, but it is the same representational strategy as spatial correspondence, the difference only becoming evident when the map describes a spatial milieu.20 Unlike the symbols in language the map is a code derived from graphic symbols and it is from these it’s particular ambiguity or indeterminacy derives. This indeterminacy allows maps to operate as qualitative and/or quantitative research instruments.21 Maps, any map and every map, begin with a frame. This is the literal and conceptual demarcation between what is in the map and what is not. Making a map begins with an observation which is both a thought about thinking and the object of thought itself. The undifferentiated world cannot be apprehended, therefore; all maps have a frame whether a concept or a cosmography. This is one of the first principles of the map identified by the Milesian philosopher Anaximander (c.610–c.546

bce).

To map the world Anaximander

suggested beginning with a frame twice as long as high—within which the known world or oikoumene would be demarcated; everything else, the ge, or remainder, would be outside the map. enframing parenthetically marks content, whether the subject is physical, as in human DnA, cities or the cosmos, or metaphorical, as maps of desire, or the road less traveled. To begin to think about an object, you must separate, identify and somehow contain it. like the Kunstkammer or cabinet of curiosities framing a particular collection of objects removed from the world, the mapmaker enframes the data they want to observe (Figure 2.7).

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Terms of the Map Diagram 2.3 The 2:1 ratio of the oikoumene or ‘frame’ of the world according to Herodotus.

2.7 Kunstkammern or cabinets of curiosities were popular from the sixteenth century to roughly the 1740s. As the name implies, a specialized collection of objects displayed in cabinets or a room with cabinets. Comparing this to the procedure of collecting when using map and text together or more literally in the sense of the book as a ‘cabinet that collects’ it is possible to apply the analogy to the map in general, particularly the atlas. Domenico Remps, A Cabinet of Curiosity, 1690s, from W. E. Newman, ‘Space and/or place in early atlases,’ Environment, Space and Place 1: 125–151, 2014.

To extend the comparison, the data framed by the map, like the cabinet, can be added to, subtracted, re-ordered, multiplied and divided—but the frame identifies the contents as part of this order, not another. These objects (data) are in this cabinet, not another cabinet. The map of enkhuisen by Joan Blaeu (Figure 2.8) is part of an atlas, Toneel der Steden, [Dutch City Maps] (1652), itself like a cabinet of curiosities; a collection in this case of maps representing cities in holland.22 In the map shown, an actual frame neatly circumscribes the extent of the city. The frame is obvious, but in other kinds of maps it may not be as evident. For instance the frame for the map of human DnA is the human body. There are

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Terms of the Map

2.8 The Map of Amsterdam by Bleau at first appears to be a straightforward geographical map of the city. A second examination reveals a subtle shift in the map from planimetric view to a perspectival view—see the boats in the water. Joan Bleau, Map of Amsterdam, Amstelodami Celeberrimi Hollandiae Emporii Delineatio Nova, 1649.

other possible kinds of DnA maps—say frogs or lilacs—and for each the frame would be what the mapmaker wants to observe using content included in that milieu. returning to the Blaeu map, at another level the map also frames an ideological position through its strategy of signification. Blaeu controls the data in the map (city streets, buildings, sea, boats, boundaries) using several formal structures in order to highlight the concept, or argument, of the map. notice city streets and buildings are shown planimetrically with some extrusion to indicate their volumetric characteristics so the map-reader will be able to use the map to understand the general organization of the city. But areas where there are ships (the sea and the larger canals) the image is in perspective. This distortion of the picture space is handled deftly so the map is read seamlessly between these two axes but the effect is to highlight the importance of the port or places the ships travel to and from. In a Dutch municipality of the time this would have been of especial importance. The map is a claim about the relative value of this city as part of a larger collection of cities critical to Dutch sea trade in the mid-seventeenth century. Axis of Translation The second term is the axis of translation or the rotational plane about which the mapped representation is viewed. This is usually either a horizontal or vertical viewing plane. The cabinet of curiosities is again a useful analogy. Just as the cabinet is viewed in the vertical or perceptual field, the map can work in this dimension or in the familiar horizontally viewed cognitive plane rationalized and ordered onto a two-dimensional surface. This axis of orientation is associated with spatial ordering like the orthographic geometries (plan, section and elevation), planimetric and topographic maps. We look at specific map projection types next but suffice it to say a horizontal axis of translation appears in any map using a parallel

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Terms of the Map

Diagram 2.4 Diagram illustrating the horizontal and vertical axes of translation.

projection where projection lines are orthogonal to the picture plane (Diagram 2.4). This kind of projection creates a rationalized space where the point of perspective of the map viewer is at infinite distance from the picture plane. In an orthographic projection all light rays or projection lines remain parallel to each other and perpendicular to the picture plane. The vertical axis of translation is a perceptual axis associated with perspectival views.23 This projection is most often a constructed perspective projection or a view seen through the lens of a camera. Unlike orthogonal projections light rays in perspective projection converge at the horizon for the map viewer. As seen in Figure 2.18, the horizon line passes through the eye of the two standing figures in this early illustration of the rules of perspective. Shown is a one-point perspective in which all lines converge at the vanishing point, in this case, the eyepoint of the figure at the back door. note the human figures are themselves not in perspective, but simply placed into a perspectival space. Their size is determined according to rules of relative scale, but the compound curves constituting their bodies are approximations, not calibrated geometries. The camera is a special case of perspectival projection where the camera lens is very similar to the human eye, but the type of lens curvature, convex or concave, is a synthetic operation with view types unique to each. The field of focus is controlled by the relationship between the focal length of the lens, the distance from the object, the placement of the focal plane and the amount of light. The relationship between the visual field relative to the distance from the object (Figure 2.9) literally where the camera is placed and the focal length or focus function of the camera and resulting image registering on the picture plane was mapped by one of my undergraduate students. not all maps include every term. For example genetic maps don’t depend on the axis of translation, they rely on the idea of indexing, in their case indexing protein sequences to organic genomes. Maps showing us a measured view of objects in space like perspective are of the vertical plane variety. Maps assuming an infinite number of possible points of view, as most street maps do, are of the horizontal plane variety. Both views in the same map are shown in a map made by a University of Tennessee undergraduate (Figure 2.10).

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2.9 The map shows the change in the scale of an object relative to the viewing field. The effect is familiar to any bipedal animal with binocular vision and easily forgotten, but it is made explicit in this student map. Student, Washington University in St. Louis, 2001.

2.10 This relatively simple map uses two axes of translation. The map is presented in plan and perspectival view. The location of the building site is noted as a red dot. Elevated above the perspectival map is the river and major transportation routes. These are rotated and reprojected to convey the perceptual change in the users’ cognitive map depending on their approach to the site. Student, University of Tennessee, 1999.

2.11 Maria Lorena Reyes Bahomon and Jennifer Sandoval, Variable Grain, Florida International University, 2013, digital print on heavy bond, 36 × 42 in. 2.12 Detail, Maria Lorena Reyes Bahomon, Jennifer Sandoval, Variable Grain.

Terms of the Map

2.13 Eileen Nunes Koo, Aileen Zeigen, Monumental and Abandoned: A Psychogeographic Mapping, Florida International University, 2013, digital print on heavy bond, 36 × 42 in.

Figures 2.11–2.13 These maps are from a workshop led by the author and Shahin Vassigh with Florida International University students in Genova, Italy. The week-long workshop was offered in the first quarter of the semester for students in studio whose projects were underway, but whose observations about site and locale were indeterminate. The maps Variable Grain and A Psychogeographic Mapping used similar datasets, namely photographs of the city taken while walking. In Variable Grain, the distance between points is measured in time (Figure 2.11). The map highlights the constant change in topography along any given path through the city and the time of the movement from one view to the next. The filmic quality of spatial experience is emphasized by the images presented to the viewer. Psychogeographic Mapping (Figure 2.13) uses the same premise as the eponymous Psychogeographic Map of Paris by Guy Debord (see Figure 3.23). But rather than offering a planimetric view of any possible unplanned journey or Situationist dérive through the city, as Debord does, this map focuses on the continuum of the experience of one possible path and the sense of disorientation experienced due to the constant change in topography in Genova.

The negotiation between these two axes reveals our assumptions about the ‘spaceness’ of space both in the map and in our thinking. In this example, the student mapmaker wanted to highlight the relationship of natural and built infrastructure, a large river, and the roadways respectively. The plan view helps you locate them in space while the perspectival view highlights their relationship to a particular place: the red dot marking the location of the building site. A series of maps illustrates how students adapted the perceptual plane as a

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Terms of the Map starting point for their observations. In the two maps, Variable Grain and A Psychogeographic Mapping of Genoa, student teams collected images with cameras walking through the city, however, their interpretations of the data are distinct. In Variable Grain students tracked the changes in the horizon based on single frames from camera photographs (Figure 2.11). Photos were organized sequentially to graphically highlight the changes in the horizon as indicated by the red lattice (Figure 2.12). The movement from one place to another is tracked and noted based on walking times. The effect on the observer is a sense of the general flow of the change in topography and the associated views in the perceptual field. The Psychogeographic Mapping of Genoa uses the same initial idea of walking in the city to develop a general understanding of place but the students opted to emphasize the sense of disorientation by shifting the photographic stills against a consistent datum, in this case the horizon (Figure 2.13). The horizon line drawn in red is contrasted to the actual change in topography (black line) and the continuous shift in view highlights the strange and phantasmagoric quality of walking through an unfamiliar territory. Both maps highlight the use of the idea of the frame. The frame of the route or path is clearly identified in the maps and the photographic stills frame fixed views re-assembled according to a new set of rules created by the mapmakers. Projection and Relative Scale The third term is projection used to control relative scale. Projection is a systematic transformation of information from a three-dimensional condition into locations on a twodimensional plane. The myth of the origin of painting begins with Dibutades outlining the projection of the image of her departing beloved (Figure 2.14). She traces his profile on a

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2.14 According to a tradition documented by Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder, ad23–79) a potter’s daughter from Corinth named Dibutades was the first person to make a projected drawing. Dibutades was distraught over her beloved’s departure on a long trip and wanted an impression by which to remember him. She marked the contour of his head on a wall following along the shadow outline produced by lamplight. She asked her father to make a ceramic vase following the contours of the profile. From the myth we actually understand two procedures. The first is projection, where all drawing is a form of shadow casting or ‘light blocking’ with the tip of a drawing tool. The second is the translation back to three dimensions using the measured projection allows for an object of relative proportion to the original. Both procedures are fundamental to the process of mapping or the mental act of projecting a map. Jean-Baptiste Regnault, The Origin of Painting: Dibutades Tracing the Portrait of a Shepherd, 1785.

Terms of the Map surface (the picture plane) from the shadow or projection cast by the light of a candle. This is the essence of projection: you imagine a light source passing through a grid placed over a three-dimensional object and registering onto a two-dimensional plane (Figures 2.15, 2.16 and 2.17). If we imagine wrapping a cone or cylinder (like the one shown in Figure 2.17) around an object, the surface can be unrolled to a plane. The resulting grid allows a cartographer to extrapolate coordinates corresponding to features of the original object. You can project onto a plane tangent to the object, but must select a point of perspective from outside of the object. This is the same procedure used to create perspective views where an imaginary plane is placed between the observer’s viewpoint and the object being viewed. The aspect or orientation of the plane is the angle at which a plane, cone, or cylinder is placed relative to the object. In perspective this is always perpendicular at a 90-degree angle to the surface of the object or view. For world maps the aspect may be normal so the axis of symmetry coincides with the earth’s axis, transverse at right angles, or oblique, any angle between these two. In terrestrial maps the graticule or grid of longitudes and latitudes controls the transformation of locations from the geode or ellipsoid representing the earth on a plane. longitude and latitude are geographic coordinates transformed to Cartesian (x, y) or polar plane (r, ϕ) coordinates. Imagine slicing an orange skin so you could press it onto a piece of paper. The problem is how to manage a measured set of relationships between the parts of the orange skin as you tear it in order to flatten it. The most common device used to control the relationships between objects in the map is the grid. This divides the frame in such way as to scale objects relative to each other within the world of the map. The grid is akin to an atomist structure: it is the building block for the order of the map. The power of the grid is best explored using a perspectival grid. Perspective depth can be created relatively easily. If two objects are overlapped in a picture plane and one is larger than the other, distance is implied between the two. But distance is unknown: I can’t calibrate the distance between the observer and objects without taking into account the location of the observer. In order to take into account the observer’s location in space relative to the objects I must impose an invisible grid over the picture plane locating each point in relation to another point—suddenly the space is fixed through a set of mathematical terms (Figure 2.18). The perspectival space is measured and, therefore, mapped. Projected perspectival grids allow us to place objects in relative relationship to each other on a two-dimensional plane. Perspective and mirror anamorphosis create interesting visual effects by distorting the perspective view so the viewer is required to occupy a particular vantage point or use a special device to reconstitute the view. leonardo da Vinci used oblique anamorphosis very soon after leon Battista Alberti introduced the formal rules of perspectiva artificialis in 1425.24 Mirror or catoptric anamorphosis uses a mirror placed on the drawing to transform a distorted image into a legible picture (Figure 2.19). Using rules of perspective to distort the visual field reveals how the normative use of this technology whether drawn, or created using the lens of a camera, is a constructed or mapped view of the world. An interesting mapping made by a student shows how this works (Figures 2.20 and 2.21). employing the principle that projection from a panoramic photograph distorts the perceptual view his map uses coordinates from the perspectival view to re-project a similarly distorted view of the site plan. The site plan mirrors what would be true in a plan view projected from

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2.15 Shown is an explanation for cartographic projection. Imagine the earth as a wire-frame model with a light source at the center. If you place a paper cylinder around the globe to register shadows cast by the wire-frame it is a cylindrical projection; using a paper cone it is a conic projection; with the paper tangential to the globe it is a planar or orthographic projection if the light rays remain parallel. The Mercator projection is a cylinder projection. If the cylinder is rotated 90° it is a transverse cylindrical projection. Nicholas Wise, University of Arkansas, 2015.

2.16 In a planar projection the plane of projection can be either vertical or tilted relative to the location of the point of perspective. Nicholas Wise, University of Arkansas, 2015.

2.17 The diagram illustrates that the actual 23.5° tilt of the Earth’s axis must be accounted for in an oblique cylindrical projection. Map projections are complex mathematical problems. The three projections described in Figures 2.15 to 2.17, based on their developable surfaces (plane, cylinder, cone), provide useful models for describing and understanding map projections. These models are limited: most projections do not fall into these categories and cannot be obtained through physical projection. They are only possible using mathematical equations. Nicholas Wise, University of Arkansas, 2015.

2.18 Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527–1606), Perspektive, interior with figures, doors and windows, explaining the principles of foreshortening. De Vries was a Dutch painter and architect who wrote and illustrated one of the guides on perspective for designers, painters, and architects. Hans Vredeman de Vries, The Book of Perspective, Parts I & II, Latin edition, 1604–5, plate 28, H. 547i (of ii), engraving, 186/191 × 292/300 mm.

2.19 An example of cylindrical mirror anamorphosis. Anamorphosis is a particular perspectival projection in which the standing point for the view occurs at an extreme angle causing the image to be distorted unless viewed from the same position or using a special device such as a mirrored cylinder.

2.20 The site map made by undergraduate student Andrew Butler explores the geometry of projection. Using polar coordinates Butler re-projected the site plan and interpolated the view. When starting he worked in the distorted site and reprojected the results first into the perceptual view and then into an undistorted site plan. Architect Zaha Hadid similarly used anamorphosis to create ‘stretched’ building form (see Figure 3.36). Andrew Butler, Anamorphic Site/Sight, Washington University in St. Louis, 1999, digital print, 24 × 24 in.

2.21 Reprojected view of the project site. Andrew Butler, Anamorphic Site/Sight, Washington University in St. Louis, 1999, digital print, 14 × 36 in.

Terms of the Map the panorama view. The design of the building proceeded by using the newly created site plan not the undistorted version. The final project was a long, horizontal building whose bounds was impossible to view in its entirety from any single vantage point. It was always presented to the viewer as a distortion. The design allowed for this and responded directly to this particular spatial perception of the building by the user. other types of projection include isometric, trimetric, dimetric, and architectural axonometric projections. These projections similar to the orthographic projections of plan, elevation, and section assume all light rays are parallel from an infinite viewing distance (Figure 2.22). World or cosmographic map projections, unlike other projections having direct geometric interpretations, can only be defined in terms of mathematical formulations. And as there are an infinite number of possible projections the mathematics of each unique projection decidedly privileges one aspect of the actual object over another. This means our original point-of-light analogy only works up to the point that the complexity of the relationship between the geographic points doesn’t require a mathematical transformation between the coordinates. Map projections always distort something. Maps can distort up to five specific geographic relationships: areas, angles, gross shapes, distances, and directions.25 What is distorted depends on choices made by the cartographer, the context, what is intended, and how the projection is used to convey knowledge. As with all mapping terms projection is fundamentally a rhetorical device shaped by ‘specifiable social circumstances arising only within certain social structures.’26 Because a funny thing happens: it is hard to think ‘not grid’ once it is created. once I frame a space with this grid and not another, it is hard to shake and hard to remember the grid does not exist a priori: my own parenthetical frame around a lived-world I am imagining from within my own social imaginary. In effect we project worlds within a world and, depending on the structure of the representation controlled through the projection or grid, we can present very different images. Index Index—the fourth term—at its most basic level refers to the legend or key of the map. every map must have an index—giving the map-reader a dictionary or key to translate the content in the map. Similar to the grid, the index calibrates the graphic language of the map, but unlike the grid which is geometry, the index is syntax and akin to language. Indexing takes the signs of one system and draws parallels or analogies to other systems. The journey, a familiar trope in literature, works this way and serves as a simple example. The narration of a story chronologically organized along a path or road parallels or indexes the events of a character’s life at one level and at another the significance of those events relative to the author’s thesis. like journey to adulthood, that brings lessons learned and shapes a character’s nature. To understand how this works with a visual representation it is instructive to look at the idea of the sign. There are three kinds of signs: the icon, the index and the symbol. All signs have a signal aspect for either a sound or visible shape and a meaning or the semantic content they imply. Icons are patterns physically resembling what they stand for—a picture of a dog with a diagonal bar across the picture is an icon representing, ‘Dog—not allowed.’ In

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2.22 The diagram shows the relationship between three different projections and the angle at which an object is viewed. The key is to remember that for the orthographic views there is correspondence between image and the threedimensional object. This is not true in the axonometric view— the geometry of the projection does not correspond to the object in the real world (see also Figure 3.35). Nicholas Wise, University of Arkansas, 2015. 2.23–2.34 The selection of map projections illustrates the conundrum of representing the globe on a flat surface. Inevitably there is a loss of position, area, or distance through distortions created by the impossibility of displaying a spherical Earth (really an oblate spheroid or ellipsoid) in a map. One projection is not better than another: the point is multiple projections are necessary to describe a myriad of possible spatial relationships. Projection shapes our perceptions of these relationships and can be used to influence how we position ourselves as part of the geographical space in our socio-cultural territories.

2.24 Polyconic projection, with shorelines (world map), 30° graticule, central meridian 90° W., U.S. Geological Survey.

2.23 Gall projection with shorelines, 15° graticule, central meridian 90° W., U.S. Geological Survey.

2.25 Oblique gnomonic projection with shorelines, 10° graticule, central latitude 40° N., central meridian 90° W., range 60°, U.S. Geological Survey.

2.27 Oblique Lambert conformal conic projection with shorelines, 15°graticule, U.S. Geological Survey.

2.26 Central cylindrical projection with shorelines, 15° graticule, central meridian 90° W., U.S. Geological Survey.

2.28 Mollweide projection, ‘Atlantis’ projections, a transverse Mollweide used by Jon Bartholomew to highlight the Atlantic Ocean with shorelines, 15° graticule, central meridian 30° W., North Pole at –45° longitude on base projection, U.S. Geological Survey.

2.29 Littrow projection, one hemisphere, with shorelines, 10° graticule, central meridian 90° W., U.S. Geological Survey.

2.31 Guyou projection, with shorelines, 10° graticule, central meridian 90° W, U.S. Geological Survey.

2.30 GS50 projection, with shorelines, 5° graticule, U.S. Geological Survey.

2.32 Peirce quincuncial projection, with shorelines, 15° graticule, central meridian 105° W., U.S. Geological Survey.

2.33 Berghaus star projection, with shorelines, 18° graticule, central meridian 90° W., world map, U.S. Geological Survey.

2.34 Tilted Perspective projection. Eastern U.S. seaboard, viewed from a point about 160 km above Newburgh, N.Y., 1° graticule. Center of projection latitude 41°30’ N, longitude 74° W., tilt 55°, rotation 210°, U.S. Geological Survey.

2.35 The model of House X by Peter Eisenman exposes the fiction of the axonometric drawing. The spatial relationships in an axonometric are distorted by the geometry of the projection. This gap between the projection and the illusion of the threedimensional object created by the image is significant. Image courtesy of Eisenman Architects, House X Project, 1975.

2.36 When first introduced in the early 1990s, Zaha Hadid’s drawings were difficult to read and critics accused her of being more artist than architect. Her drawings, however, were part of a grand tradition in architecture using the geometry of projection as a design tool— think of Bernini’s Scala Regia at the Vatican. He used forced perspective to exaggerate the length of a relatively short physical passageway. Using anamorphic perspective, Hadid ‘discovers’ new and dynamic forms from relatively simple geometries actualized as the final architecture. The Peak project is one of the earlier works using this technique. The Peak, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China, exterior perspective, 1991, synthetic polymer on paper mounted on canvas, 51 × 72 in (129.5 × 182.9 cm). David Rockefeller, Jr. Fund. (108.1992), courtesy of the Office of Zaha Hadid.

Terms of the Map maps icons tend to occur as part of the graphic language of the map. examples include generic town-like icons for ‘this is a town’ or trees to indicate ‘this is a tree area.’ There are word symbols and nonword symbols. Throughout the discussion of maps I tend to focus on nonword symbols, but some maps play with word symbols. Word symbols link to the sounds made in spoken language and are intelligible to us orally and textually. Maps playing with word meanings by showing multiple visual examples for the same word exemplify this idea (Figure 1.3). nonword symbols share some of the same semantic complexity of word symbols, but lack a phonetic form: the bald eagle for the U.S., the font for a specific product (Coca-Cola), and the lion for england. like all signs, symbols are socially and contextually contingent on their time, place, and cultural legibility. If you can’t ‘read’ the symbol-meaning, the references will be lost to you and their use in the map opaque. The index in some ways is the most complicated sign in a map. It is defined by a sensory feature (sound or image) correlating with or ‘pointing to something else’ such that to be successful, indices depend on some regularity between the sensory feature and the correlate. But this is often an artificially constructed (not natural) relationship. In sonar maps, sound is used to index topography. Thematic maps highlight the role of the index. They focus on a specific idea, concept, or theme often relying on a combination of signs to communicate. The Carte de Tendre (1654–61) (Figure 0.16) is a thematic map using the trope of journey to describe the territory of love by pointing to or indexing geography of rivers, seas, and mountains with seventeenth-century mores. Its contemporary equivalent is guy Debord’s Guide Psychogeographique de Paris: Discours sur les Passions de L’Amour (1957) [Discourse on the Passions of Love] (Figure 3.23) using graphic arrows and bits of a Parisian tourist map describing a territory of aimless wandering practiced by the Situationist.27 Debord’s map is also an example of a cognitive map. But instead of an image of the city reinforcing a sense of place his map suggests a resistance to the underlying ordering structures of the city. The maps by Charles Joseph Minard, a French engineer and military strategist, contributed to the field of information graphics and demonstrate the role of the index in thematic maps. Minard developed a language of symbols to index complex sets of data into statistical graphs (Figures 2.37 and 2.38). Minard’s thematic maps convey a particular theme, say wine consumption in connection with a geographic area in France. Thematic maps tend to use geographical or spatial data only as point of reference for the phenomenon being mapped. This map type (form) has a long history with some of the earliest examples extant from the early 1600s. Minard’s thematic maps are a subset of map types called choropleths in which the measurement of the statistical variable being shown in the map is shaded or patterned to enhance the graphic communication of the data. In the maps shown, the different colors and widths of the arrows indicate quantity, type and direction. A complex thematic map of this type is Minard’s map of napoleon’s doomed russian campaign of 1812, the Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812– 1813 (Figures 2.39 and 2.40). Minard juxtaposed six types of data in the map: the size of the army, its geographic location, direction of movement, and temperature.28 one of Minard’s contributions to data visualization is the use of thick and thin band graphs to illustrate quantity, in this case, the number of soldiers. This type of graphic band is called a Sankey diagram after Matthew Sankey who used a similar visualization technique after Minard. The map reveals,

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2.37 Emigrants of the World (1858) by Charles Joseph Minard shows the movement of emigrants from Europe, Africa, Asia and China. The map indicates points of origin and direction of travel. C. J. Minard, Carte figurative et approximative représentant pour l’année 1858 émigrants du globe, 26 September 1862, lithograph 685 × 508 mm. ENPC: 3384/C161; LC: G3201.E27 1858.M5 TIL (989687134/MAPS).

as no other document could, the reason for napoleon’s failure: the russian winter. Minard created close to 51 thematic maps. Many information scientists consider Minard’s map of napoleon’s russian Campaign one of the best statistical maps ever.29 over time, several students in the map class focused their final projects on thematic mapping. Taejun kim’s map, Interrelationships in Current Washington University Research, is a good example of a thematic map using a geographic base to spatialize data (Figures 2.41 and 2.42). The map asks where research funding concentrates at Washington University in St. louis. The same set of data is translated into a bar graph and projected onto a map of the university campus. The result shows while research dollars are typically attributed to the primary investigator on a grant (here the majority in the medical school), most co-

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2.38 Map of Cotton Imports into Europe 1858–1862 (1863) by Charles Joseph Minard is a comparative map of the quantities of raw cotton imported to Europe in 1858 and 1861 demonstrating why the Confederate threat to stop cotton exports to the European continent during the Civil War failed to force Europe to side with the South. The European Continent ramped up cotton imports from South Asian exporters by the time ‘Cotton Diplomacy’ was enacted by the South. C. J. Minard, Carte figurative et approximative des quantités de coton en laine importées en Europe en 1858 et de leur circulation depuis leur origine jusqu’à leur arrive, 20 April 1861, lithograph 716 x 425. ENPC: Fol 10975.

investigators come from other departments. The results are not surprising but the impact of the spatio-visual distribution is undeniable. Multiple departments spread throughout the campus are responsible for grants. This kind of analysis potentially overturns some of the way monies would be distributed to departments. The cartographers Arthur h. robertson and Barbara Petchenik term the map a ‘graphic representation of the milieu.’30 In this example, because translating one set of conditions to another shifts meaning, making the new map alters any original meaning by placing it in another context. Perhaps another way to state this is: maps are a translation from milieu/subject to map/object. As with kim’s map, it is one thing to imagine other departments at the University contribute to research dollars, but quite another to understand it in relation to actual distribution between the medical school and humanities and to the degree indicated by the map.

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Terms of the Map Functions: Time (and/or Movement) and Place There are two additional variables in maps, time and place. Because they are not singular, but result from their interaction with specific information in the map and the other terms, I am characterizing them as functions. Maps in general imply both as all artifacts are made at some time and in some place, but certain kinds of maps—itinerary maps, maps indicating morphological change or geographic maps—highlight time and place. Time (and/or Movement) Time occurs as a synchronic or a diachronic function, and sometimes both in maps. The synchrony of time is the date of the map’s creation and the time in the map, but it may also work diachronically where the map describes an event. At a basic level every map comes into existence at some time. More elusive is the time within the map indicating movement or a displacement in space of individual(s), ideas or objects. In the Minard example (Figure 2.39) this would be the army’s movements from the beginning of the journey to the point they turn around and collapse back at the beginning. The map illustrates mobility or the change location or position. We typically think of this as relation between time and distance; in fact you can only understand the map by moving along the army’s path and adjusting

2.39 Charles Joseph Minard, Figurative Map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1813 (1862). Considered by many historians of cartography to be one of the finest figurative maps of the nineteenth century. Edward Tufte, in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) identified six different variables: the width of the line marks the size of the army, longitude and latitude are indicated by the position of the line. The direction of travel is indicated by the change in color and sequence of the position of the army in time is indicated by dates on the map and finally, the temperature coordinates with the line of retreat. C. J. Minard, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l‘armée française dans la campagne de Russie, 1812–1813, 20 November 1862. (624 × 207mm, 624 × 245mm), ENPC: Fol 10975, 10974/C612.

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2.40 Eduardo Garcia mapped the ‘shape of the song.’ He assumed the use of the vector equilibrium (VE). Buckminster Fuller discovered the significance of vector symmetry in 1917 and called it the Vector Equilibrium in 1940. The vector equilibrium (VE) is one of the primary geometric energy arrays in the cosmos. The VE is the only geometric form where all vectors are of equal length including its center point out to its circumferential vertices, and the edges (vectors) connecting all of those vertices. It has the same form as a cuboctahedron. According to Fuller the VE is more appropriately referred to as a ‘system’ than a structure given the square faces are inherently unstable and, therefore, non-structural. Fuller defined the VE as the ‘zero starting point for happenings or nonhappenings: it is the empty theater and empty circus and empty Universe ready to accommodate any act and any audience.’ (Synergetics, (2nd edn) at Sec. 503.03; 11 Dec. 1975). Eduardo’s procedure was methodical and worth giving in whole: 1) select sheet music; 2) combine a vector equilibrium with the circle of fifths; 3) record every note or chord change for both treble and bass clef, if a note or chord is played more than once consecutively do not plot it; 4) plot the notes on the vector equilibrium using red for the bass clef and green for the treble, use a line for a chord and circle for a single note; 5) plot notes on the three-dimensional model of the VE; 6) create surfaces from the plotted chords. Eduardo Garcia, The Shape of Music, Florida International University, 2012, digital print, 36 × 42 in.

2.41 Taejun James Kim, Interrelationships in Current Washington University Research, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011.

Terms of the Map

2.42 Taejun James Kim, Interrelationships in Current Washington University Research, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011. your thinking accordingly.31 There are some interesting characteristics to time in the Minard example: time is indicated by the dates from one condition to another, the months tracking the change in temperature shown at the bottom of the map, but also through a general sense of change linked to movement indicated by the graphics—the change in the color and width of the lines moving from one side of the map to the other side. In other itinerary maps it is accomplished by scrolling from one side of the map to the other where the map literally unfolds as the time in the map unfolds. These reminders of our physical engagement with the map, scanning and unfolding, link some of the cognitive procedures of mapping or the understanding of an abstract representation of idea of a place with the embodied sensation of movement. It is as though the cartographer said, ‘Move from here to there and imagine you are following along with the army as it crosses the russian plain to Moscow.’ rudolf Arnheim argued that not only could perceptual problems (movement) be solved by perceptual operations but ‘productive thinking solves any kind of problem in the perceptual realm because there exist no other arena in which true thinking can take place.’ he linked perception to an intuitive mode of thinking structuring the relationship between part and whole, in this case graphic lines with arrows or an unfolding scroll. This takes place to some extent below the level of consciousness so what a viewer ‘sees’ in a picture is

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Terms of the Map already the outcome of organizational process. Viewing maps implying movement tends to underscore this by revealing through our bodily movement the cognitive process required to understand the contents of the map. or as Arnheim suggests, it is ‘only when someone struggles to discover the order of a complicated composition does he experience within himself something of the shaping process in search of the final image.’32 Minard did not publish his analysis of the 1812–13 campaign until 1861, well after the end of napoleon’s empire, when he was safe from political retribution or worse. In this case the difference between the two times, the time in the map and the time of the map, reveals a socio-political context qualifies the meaning of the map. kevin lynch’s cognitive maps from a View from the Road work similarly in that they convey a sense of progression through time from the point of view of the observer. This type of temporal displacement is of a particular type. It is a cognitive map or a mental model/representation of the phenomena we encode from our everyday spatial environment. The cognitive map lynch draws in the Boston highway project unfolds through the perceptual space of the viewer as they move through the city on the highway (Figures 4.62 and 4.63). This is a linear progression of experience through time documenting what is seen in the environment and reduced by the mapmaker to a series of familiar signs. Text-based accounts employ the same disassociated temporal frame but the map’s unique property as a documentation of something assumed to be true or real exposes the dialectic of the unreal or falsely constructed. If the map is a projection of place but at the same time is of a place or from a time, the assumed structural sense of ‘timelessness’ discloses its own impossibility. Time as an idealized condition in the map can only exist as a possible metaphor rather than probable prescription. Place The second function is context, place, or what I call the neutral domain in the map: the blank bits, the area covered with trees, the so-called junk DnA on the double-helix which asserts itself only in contrast to the part of the map to which we are giving attention. Place is a difficult term. on the one hand it presents itself as a given—in the map is a world, but this world is only part of a number of possible worlds. here I want to make a distinction between the logic of mapping and a methodology. In practice, the knowledge contained by the map can be applied and used. But as a procedure for making changes to a given condition, posing a solution to what appears to be given, the logic of mapping qua mapping casts light on the assumptions we make in the instance of choosing what to focus attention on and what to neutralize. The neutral domain or ‘placeness’ is what comes forward when we peer from the side toward the map. It is analogous to the lacanian ‘real’ that isn’t synonymous with reality, but an undifferentiated condition without qualification. Placeness in the map resists symbolization. It underlines the gap between map and territory cannot be bridged, but only imagined or dreamed at the edges of the map. one of the oldest world maps, the medieval hereford Mappa Mundi (ca.1285), illustrates the point (Figure 2.45). The map is drawn on a single sheet of vellum and shows over four hundred towns, fifteen biblical events, animals, plants, fantastical peoples and scenes from classical mythology.33 The known world radiates out from Jerusalem at the center of the map to the unknown territories circumscribing the edges. The mapmaker does not

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2.43 This is an analytical map isolating and identifying the colors used in the Edison Movies short film Annabelle Serpentine Dance from 1895. This was one of the first hand tinted films. The short features Annabelle Moore dancing the serpentine dance. Trevino wanted to understand the color gradient used in the film to enhance the effect of the ambient occlusion used on the shapes made by the dancer. Angelica Trevino, Color Mapping, Harvard, original film by Edison’s Black Maria Studios, William K. L. Dickson and Thomas Edison, hand-tinted film.

2.44 The Evolution of the Web by Hyperakt for Google Chrome, online at: http://www.evolutionoftheweb.com/, made with some friends from the Google Chrome team, 2011 & 2012 versions by Hyperakt and Vizzuality, 2010 version by mgmt design and GOOD.

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2.45 The Hereford map is a mappa mundi deriving from the T and O form. The circular shape used for the ‘great ocean’ encircling the three major continents of Asia, Africa and Europe distinguishes these medieval maps. The resulting T inscribed in the circle gives this map type its name. It dates from c. 1300 located at the Hereford Cathedral in Hereford, England. The contents of the map reflect traditional Biblical accounts, classical mythology, travelers’ stories and other maps. The map locates the Garden of Eden at the edge of the world surrounded by a ring of fire, and Jerusalem at the center. The continents and major geographical features are included along with fabled lands (Gog and Magog), people (Lot’s wife) and objects (Noah’s Ark). Hereford Mappa Mundi, courtesy of Hereford Cathedral, drawn on a single sheet of vellum or sheep’s skin, 158 × 133 cm.

differentiate between the categories of things: biblical events, classical mythology, or towns in england. They are held in relationship to each other by the neutrality of the background, the context of ‘mappa mundi’ or ‘map of the world’ implies completeness without being over-determined. Example Maps Several student maps use time and place instrumentally in the map to create a friction between a fixed concept of context or place and its ephemerality or otherness. Delayed Moments by Catty Dan zhang converts temporal slices of time along a highway into literal slices or views of a site according to the lag time from when the site appears in the driver’s view to the time the driver passes it (Figure 2.46). Views are taken at ten-second intervals and represented using distinct colors. The exercise is repeated at different speeds from 10mph to 70 mph. The map includes views going in both directions on the roadway. The effect is an exaggeration of the subtle changes in the topography or shape of the site. What may seem static when drawn in plan view, the topography, is suddenly pulsating and chimerical when all possible view slices are aggregated. her design project responded to this fleeting site, not the supposed neutrality of a predominantly flat terrain.

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2.46 Catty Dan Zhang, Delayed Moments, Washington University in St. Louis, 2012, digital print on heavy bond, 36 × 52 in.

2.47 This lovely map by Valerie Michalek breaks down positions of the pirouette, a dance move wherein the dancer spins 360° for multiple rotations on one foot. Michalek’s map expands the time of the pirouette so we can see the subtle differences in body position over the course of three full rotations. Valerie Michalek, Pirouette × 3, Washington University in St. Louis, 2012.

2.48 The map by Elisa Kim is a tongue-in-cheek look at the splatter patterns made by Willow Smith’s hair in a music video for Whip My Hair. Similar to Pirouette × 3 (Figure 2.48) this map breaks the splatter pattern into isolated segments. The challenge of the map was technique, not hypothesis. Kim was working with discontinuous video segments to create a fluid sequence of action. She mapped the splatter from the angle at which the video was shot, but also extrapolated an overview. Elisa Kim, Mapping Willow Smith’s Hair, Washington University in St. Louis, 2012.

2.49 The initial study by Michael Pope shows how children move. The project was for a kindergarten and Pope observed the joyful and exuberant way children play. His analysis yielded a particular flow of movements including running, jumping, turning and skipping. After using a chronophotographic technique borrowed from J.-E. Marey to analyze the flow of the movements, he created a controlled environment replicating the observed motions (top right). These were moderately successful, but variables proved more difficult to control and the motion of the ‘waves’ did not replicate the original observed patterns. Pope worked with the original patterns to create a floor acting as a ‘play surface’ in the final proposal for the kindergarten. One of the challenges was translating an understanding of the initial observation into an architectural language. The final proposal was evocative, but it was a literal interpolation of the initial ‘children flow map.’ This was Pope’s third studio and thus understandable that making the translation to an architecture would prove challenging. Less direct than the floor was the rhythmic patterning of the wall surface. Michael Pope, Kindergarten Moves, Washington University in St. Louis, 1999.

2.50 Xi Chen, Gary Chang’s Apartment, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011, digital print, 24 × 36 in.

2.51 Alejandro Torres, Cyclist POV, Florida International University, 2013, digital print, 36 × 48 in.

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2.52 Kosuke Bando, İstiklal Street, Harvard University, 2006.

Terms of the Map Xi Chen’s map, Gary Chang’s Apartment, uses data posted by the architect gary Chang about his hong kong apartment (Figure 2.50). Chang has lived in the same 32 square metres (344 square feet) for over forty years. At one time his parents, three younger sisters and a tenant shared this micro-apartment. he bought the apartment after his parents moved out and began a series of experiments designing the small space. Gary Chang’s Apartment is a temporal clock of the activities or events and where they occur throughout the day. The apartment transforms into 24 different rooms to accommodate daily activities. The map effectively helps the mapreader move between time and its spatial correlate in the apartment. A second example, Cyclist POV by Alejandro Torres, shows an impossible relationship between the sidewalk and the street elevation from the point of view of a cyclist (Figure 2.51). The map is subtle. relationships in the photographic images running along the bottom of each section of the map are distorted to capture the experience of the rider whose peripheral view can encompass the sides of the path. lines are drawn to indicate the position of the rider relative to the elevation, the plan and the distorted view. Again, the fragility of an image of constancy in place is challenged by the multiplicity of points of view shown in the map. Finally a map of the souks along İstiklal Street, an important avenue in Istanbul, Turkey by kosuke Bando documents the size and extent of the views along the street (Figure 2.52). highlighted on the map is only what is seen as you move along the street. The space of the street is expanded and contracted by the map. expanded because the views can extend quite far at specific points, contracted because the map focuses the reader’s attention to the extents of the city perceived from this one street. The city becomes a neutral domain suppressed for the sake of one particular route. The neutral domain or context is a category of in-between-ness present literally, metaphorically, and figuratively in the map. It can produce an effect, an idea, or an illusion of completeness creating a sense of place—those ideas-objects-territories are there but not here—they look and act like the world the mapmaker wants us to believe in brought forth by the representation. neutral domains convince us of the incarnation of the particular context of every map. Place or context is always a constructed notion not a given fact in the map. The neutral domain is akin to edges needed to define a center: it helps point to the way the mapmaker is constructing a representation of the whole and, when instrumentalized, the neutral domain reveals how. Notes 1 g. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chandler Publishing, San Francisco, CA, 1972: 461. 2 B. latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987. 3 D. g. Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 2000: 6–13. 4 The International Cartographic Association include in the definition of map semantics a number of other socially constructed terms: map syntactics linking the graphical representation with aesthetics and other parameters of design, map sigmatics or the study of the ontological

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structures of the map, and map pragmatics covers the entire area of human experiences with maps. http://icaci.org/research-agenda/cartographic-theory/ (accessed 30 January 2017). 5 ‘The essence of Cassirer’s theory of symbolic form (as Panofsky read it) was the notion of a core symbolizing activity. The different spheres of human creativity were the “forms” produced by this activity,’ in Christopher Wood, ‘Introduction’ to e. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, zone Books, new York, 1991: 14. 6 Map as a general category includes representational formats that: 1) translate threedimensional information to a two-dimensional surface (e.g. isometric drawing, ichnographic drawing, photogrammetry) and 2) model two-dimensional data into a three-dimensional representational digital or analog object (brain mapping, globes). They can be static or dynamic. 7 l. A. Donaldsonville, Geological Investigation of Mississippi River Alluvial Valley: Ancient Courses Mississippi River Meander Belt, office of the President, Mississippi river Commission, Cape girardeau, Mo, 1944. To accompany report of h. n. Fisk, PhD, Consultant louisiana State University, Baton rouge, lA, dated 1 Decenber 1944. 8 n. goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, hackett Pub. Co., Indianapolis, In, 1978. 9 goodman, Ways of Worldmaking: 34. 10 goodman, Ways of Worldmaking: 94 and 104. 11 goodman, Ways of Worldmaking: 6. 12 goodman, Ways of Worldmaking: 7–17. 13 What Cassirer calls representative symbolic meaning, a product of the representative function (Darstellungsfunktion) of thought, has the task of precipitating out of the original mythical flux of ‘physiognomic’ characters a world of stable and enduring substances, distinguishable and identifiable as such. Working together with the fundamentally pragmatic orientation towards the world exhibited in the technical and instrumental use of tools and artifacts, it is in natural language, according to Cassirer, the representative function of thought is most clearly visible. For it is primarily through the medium of natural language we construct the ‘intuitive world’ of ordinary sense perception on the basis of what Cassirer calls intuitive space and intuitive time. e. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Yale University Press, new haven, CT, 1996. 14 International vocabulary of metrology—Basic and general concepts and associated terms (VIM 3rd edition). JCgM 200:2008 with minor corrections. Available at Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, www.bipm.org/en/publications/guides/vim.html (accessed 30 January 2017). 15 ‘To map is in one way or another to take the measure of a world, and more than merely take it, to figure the measure so taken in such a way it may be communicated between people, places or times. The measure of mapping is not restricted to the mathematical; it may equally be spiritual, political or moral.’ D. Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, reaktion Books, london, 1999: 1–2. 16 Johanna Drucker, ‘Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory,’ Culture Machine,12, ed. by Federica Frabetti, Special Issue ‘The Digital humanities, Beyond Computing.’ http://www. culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current (access 30 January 2017).

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17 W. e. newman, ‘Mapping as applied research,’ in n. S. C. Jarrett and k.-h. kim (eds), The Visibility of Research, Architectural research Centers Consortium, University of north Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, nC, 2013: 228–236. 18 S. S. hall, Mapping the Next Millennium: The Discovery of New Geographies, random house, new York, 1992: 10. 19 See: J. B. harley, ‘Deconstructing the map,’ Cartographica 26(2): 1–20, 1989; r. kitchin and M. Dodge, ‘rethinking maps,’ Progress in Human Geography 31(3): 331–344, 2007; A. M. Maceachren, How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization and Design, guilford Press, new York, 1995; D. Wood and J. Fels, The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 2008; h. Schlichtmann, ‘Characteristic traits of the semiotic system “map symbolism”,’ The Cartographic Journal 22(1): 23–30, 1985; J. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1983. 20 newman, ‘Mapping as applied research.’ 21 J. Abrams and P. hall, Else/Where Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. University of Minnesota Design Institute, Minneapolis, Mn, 2006. 22 W. e. newman, ‘Space and/or place in early atlases,’ Environment, Space and Place 1: 125– 151, Fall 2014. 23 newman, ‘Mapping as applied research.’ 24 It is generally thought leonardo da Vinci was the first to study anamorphosis as an extreme form of perspective. See: M. kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man, harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981; T. Frangenberg, ‘The angle of vision: Problems of perspectival representation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,’ Renaissance Studies 6(1): 1–45, 1992; l. J. Feinberg, ‘Visual puns and variable perception: leonardo’s “Madonna of the Yarnwinder”,’ Apollo,159(510): 38–41, 2004. 25 M. S. Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1991: 15–16. 26 D. Wood, ‘The fine line between mapping and mapmaking,’ Cartographica 30(4): 50–60, 1993: 50. 27 The original map was an engraving by François Chauveau as part of a novel by Madeleine de Scudéry’s novel Clélie (1654–61). 28 For additional insight into Minard as a mapmaker, see: e. r. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, 1983: 40; A. h. robinson, ‘The thematic maps of Charles Joseph Minard,’ Imago Mundi 21: 95–108, 1967. 29 J. Corbett, ‘Charles Joseph Minard: Mapping napoleon’s march, 1861,’ Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science. retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qj8h064 (accessed 21 September 2014). 30 A. h. robinson and B. B. Petchenik, The Nature of Maps, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ik, 1976: 11. 31 ‘one of the important features of the map is that it records so many small places. The road map known as the Peutinger map was originally a long, narrow parchment roll 6.75 meters

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long, but only 34 centimetres wide. The Peutinger map was primarily drawn to show main roads, totaling some 70,000 roman miles (104,000 km), and to depict features such as staging posts, spas, distances between stages, large rivers, and forests (represented as groups of trees). It is not a military map, though it could have been used for military purposes.’ o. A. W. Dilke, ‘Itineraries and geographical maps in the early and late roman empires,’ in J. B. harley, D. Woodward and M. S. Monmonier (eds), The History of Cartography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 2015. 32 r. Arnheim, ‘A plea for visual thinking,’ Critical Inquiry 6(3): 489–497, 1980. 33 W. l. Bevan, h. W. Phillott and F. T. havergal, Medieval Geography: An Essay in Illustration of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, e. Stanford, london, 1873.

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Chapter 3: Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia

As he told us of many things that were amiss in those new-discovered countries, so he reckoned up not a few things, from which patterns might be taken for correcting the errors of these nations among whom we live; of which an account may be given, as I have already promised, at some other time; for, at present, I intend only to relate those particulars that he told us, of the manners and laws of the Utopians: but I will begin with the occasion that led us to speak of that commonwealth. From Utopia by Sir Thomas More, 1516

The Map as a Field of Forces: Maps and Representation This chapter addresses the way maps organize and communicate ideologies through semantic practices linked to the social and political context and the cognitive apparatus of the cartographer. Implicit in this reading is also the way maps are received by map-readers. The geographical imaginary of the map works in the service of ideology in a visual language difficult to unpack. I am not invoking traditional epistemologies of representation, what richard rorty termed the ‘mirror of nature’—maps as representational artifacts are mirrors only as they present a familiar geography of visual signs. But that misses the point of the map: it is a simulation of reality engaging multiple viewpoints, epistemologies and visual systems. The symmetry of this representational strategy is complete: the complexity of reality means one map can’t explain everything possible about any single place, idea or thing. In discussing maps and power, one of the first questions is: Who made the map? Certainly the cartographer, but also patrons and institutions commissioning maps and the structures supporting, financing, and nurturing them. Maps are socially constructed artifacts that frame and reconceptualize what a cartographer holds apart from the world. The mapmaker’s agency is in determining content and context represented in the map. In design the agent may be the architect, landscape architect, urban designer or other professional and the agency may be personal or shared, but similar mapping procedures apply: selecting what to observe in the map and how to communicate it. Consideration of the agency of the mapmaker is always in play: the socially constructed practices informing how and what the mapper sees in the world conditioned by their historicity, technologies mediate sensual phenomenon and the cognitive and intellectual context in which they

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organize their perceptions. French theorist henri lefebvre introduced the idea of a spatial triad of social, physical and mental space, including the space of the mapper helping us unpack the idea of representation and power in cartography.1 Maps work in the same way robin evans suggests architectural representations work, where geometry, far from being a stolid and dormant partner in architecture is an active agent in the links between thinking and imagination, imagination and representation, and representation and building. In Translations from Drawing to Architecture, evans shows ‘recognition of the drawing’s power as a medium turns out unexpectedly to be recognition of the drawings’ distinctness from and unlikeness to the thing represented, rather than its likeness...’2 For ‘drawings’ substitute the specifics of the map (where we consider all architectural drawings as maps) and evans’ dictum holds true. But rather than looking for evans’ gap between the drawing and the object as explanation for opportunities in the material expression of the contours of the object produced from abstract representational schema, we move in this chapter to consider the consequences of the spatial identities and practices inscribed through the grapheme of the map. Using lefebvre’s theory, maps, plans, models and designs are representations of space. Maps created by architects, cartographers and geographers conceptualizing topographical or terrestrial space as territory or space are controlled through the agency of dominant ideologues. representations of spaces shape inhabitants and in turn, shape their production of space. Representational space for lefebvre is the space of ideas, imagination and theory. Signs, slogans, and political manifestos are the symbolic manifestations of the space of representation. The spatial practice of a society is the third space revealed through the daily reality or routines of urban places—it is cohesive, but not necessarily logical. This is the space of natural phenomenon transformed by social practices over time. We can best understand this space through ‘the study of natural rhythms, and the modification of those rhythms and their inscription in space by means of human actions.’3 For the designer engaged in understanding how these representations work in the map it is crucial to manage the perceptual and cognitive reception of the space produced through the map. given the map ‘precedes the territory’ as Baudrillard argues, constructing maps projects the way territory operates on all three levels of lefebvrian representation. This chapter addresses how to think about the way ideologies are communicated by and built into the map. The primary evidence are maps made by architects and urban designers, but the principles apply as readily to maps produced by cartographers at the behest of governments or patrons. An example of the principle of selecting and structuring contents in the map will serve to illustrate. Betty ng’s map entitled Disneytopia (Figure 3.1) remaps the typical Disneyland tourist map. At first the new map appears visually compelling, but perhaps innocuous. In her view, and it is a personal view developed upon reflection, Disneyworld is a kind of modern day utopia along the lines of Thomas More’s original island kingdom. however, her map of the world (Figure 3.2) as an endless horizon of self-contained fantasy worlds and commodified experiences distorts Thomas More’s original proposal for the ideal of utopia into a dystopian post-Marxist fantasy of the limitless power of capitalism to territorialize all aspects of reality. To understand how her map works it is useful to look quickly at the origin of the notion of

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3.1 Betty Ng, Disneytopia, Harvard University, 2006. Digital print on matte paper, 24× 42 in.

utopia. In More’s eponymous book Utopia is an isolated island with natural and artificial boundaries:4 to become a citizen of the island one must adapt specific dress, customs, language, and culture. More requires you to become a ‘utopianist,’ (this wasn’t a negative for More) much as our own culture of consumption requires we perpetuate what the earlytwentieth-century german sociologist georg Simmel called the ‘spatial projection of social forms.’5 For More, a society of similarity served as a constructive critique of Tudor society and a worthy goal. In the twentieth-century Simmel will argue social interaction produces spatial effects and forms, thus a society based on a mono-culture of consumption can only produce analogous forms like Disneyland (Figure 3.3). More saw the possibility for escape for a future condition superseding the boundaries of the present (hence, Utopia is an island)

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia 3.2 Woodcut illustration of Utopia. Image taken from De optimo reip. statu deque noua insula Vtopia libellous Thomae Mori Epigrammata Thomae Mori, plera? E Graecis uersa. Epigrammata. Des. Erasmi Roterodami. [More’s epigrams edited by Beatus Bildus.] Originally published/produced in Basilaee, mense Martio, 1518. © British Library Board / Robana /Art Resources, NY.

only requiring our desire and will to achieve. For Simmel as for Betty ng, Disneytopia is the representation of a world comprised solely of spaces and social relations of consumption. It is the ultimate spectacle in which the only possible meaning of the sign is another sign. ng’s map represents the condition following from Simmel and what late-Marxist guy Debord claimed was the ‘historical moment in which the commodity completes its colonization of social life.’6 ng’s map is deeply ideological with multiple levels of signification, even as her initial observation was developed from a map with an entirely different motive. Another take on the Disneyworld map is Angelica Trevino’s disneyland (Figure 3.4). Trevino’s remapping focuses on the experiences of the original map and offers a ‘rubik’s cube’ of possibilities depending on the itinerary of the park goer not the sequence presented in the original map, implying a set of movements suggested by the entry point into the theme park. The remap by Cooke (Figure 3.6) offers a similar take: the original single sheet map is divided and folded similar to a street map, dividing separate themed areas in the park into quadrants refolded and misfolded to provide alternate routes. The continuous

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia Diagram 3.1 Characteristics of Utopias.

utopia

a. bounded b. distinct physical environment c. dimensions are carefully reported d. geographically isolated 3.3 Aerial map of Disneyland, California.

topographic surface of the theme park is subtly critiqued by the unfolding of a new topography disoriented from the familiar north-up orientation of most maps. enhancing this sense of disorientation Cooke’s map re-orients text from side-to-side, top to bottom. Playing on the idea of Walter Benjamin’s archetypal modern urban experience, the map user is invited to wander aimless and slightly disoriented through the pleasures of the park. Much the same way Benjamin’s flâneur wandered idly detached and alienated from the urban life of the city, the themepark-goer is a spectator of the packaged experiences offered by the park. The suggestion theme parks extend and enhance disassociation from reality is captured in a short introductory statement in the map key: ‘I was very excited to stay at the Disneyland hotel. It was very convenient. You walk just a short distance into Downtown Disney and get on the monorail taking you right into Disneyland Park.’ however, unlike the flâneur character who is a creature of the boulevard semi-conscious of his role as an

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3.4 Angela Trevino, disneyland, Harvard University, 2006. Digital print on heavy matte paper, 24 × 36 in.

3.5 Yunhee Min, Disneylife (2006) remapping of Disneyland. Min illustrated the fantasyland inhabitants as a cast of exemplar characters similar to those found in the medieval illuminated manuscripts. Yunhee Min, Disneylife, Harvard University, 2006. Digital print on heavy bond, 24 × 24 in.

Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia 3.6 Margaret Cooke, Disneyland, Washington University in St. Louis, 2012. Digital print on matte paper, 21 × 40 in.

‘artist-poet’ in the city as the Charles Baudelaire suggested,7 the Disney visitor is swallowed into the proscribed and commodified experiences of the park in the same way Benjamin suggests the loss of the flâneur is predicted by the triumph of late capitalism. Power and Identity one of the first cartographers to address maps and power, Brian harley cast maps as social constructions reflecting the ideology and power structures dominant in the context and beliefs of the cartographer. Using Foucault, harley argued maps are not neutral: making a map requires selection and reduction on the part of the cartographer—in other words subjective decisions reflecting not an absolute mirror of the world, but one distorted and filtered by social contracts and power structures.8 rather than a scientific and essentialist representation of reality, for harley maps provide selective views. Denis Wood borrowing from French theorist roland Barthes’ semiotic strategy with language and myth extends the notion of the map as a social construction. he argues maps work on a shared culture reading of the codes or language employed in the map.9 As an instrument for opening up the visual imagery in the map, Barthean visual semiotics and iconography allow us to cast the representation (denotative) and symbolic (connotative) meaning of the people, places and things (including abstract things) in different codes in the map. Denotation refers to a literal meaning of a sign; for instance in the map ‘house’ is literally represented through the pictogram of a house. Connotations are the associations—emotional, intellectual, and cultural—of the sign: the house signifies home, warmth and security. The semiotic structure shown in Diagram 3.2 explains how the map can be both a sign and a signifier—the map is more of a strategy for signification than a collection of signs. Diagram 3.2 builds on Barthes’ illustration of the semiotic of text. If we loosely apply semiotic theory to images we countenance more complex interpretations of visual images and words referring to a relationship between two referents. Maps take signs—words, images, film or moving images—communicating meaning and use them to stand in for something else so the original sign becomes part of a new sign.10 In this organization,

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia Diagram 3.2 ‘Diagram of Signifier/Signified Relationships,’ after Barthes, by author.

3.7 Kosuke Bando, Walled Boston is another dystopian project similar to ‘Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture’ (ca.1972) a thesis project by Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis done at the Architecture Association. Koolhaas and his collaborators satirized modernist utopias. They describe the Berlin Wall as a ‘masterpiece of design’ and proposed a walled city within London as a way to create a new urban culture, one that ‘leads inhabitants to leave the rest of the city to fall to ruins.’ Kosuke’s map critiques the idea cities are fixed cultural enclaves. The walled enclosure around the city of Boston he proposes is, much like Constant Nieuwenhuys layered map (figure 8), a piece of another locale simply added on top of the existing: in this case, the wall around Emperor Qin’s Terracotta Army (c. 210–209 BCE) buried in his funeral mound. The map is a proposition about the conditionality of placeness—in the Constant map, the world is a series of no-places where pieces of different city maps are linked to create an endless network of ‘urbanization.’ Kosuke’s map is a satirical commentary about the stability of architecture’s capacity to carry meaning: the wall is a generic fragment with transient or underdetermined cultural resonance. Kosuke Bando, Harvard University, 2006. Digital print, 36 x 42 in. on heavy bond. signifier and signified equate to image, e.g. shapes of the continent in the northern hemisphere, while ‘concept’ encompasses all possible meanings associated with that image: for example, United States, Finland, Sweden. Form is described exhaustively, simply, and coherently without resorting to any extra-imaginal or visual premises, the concept is the set of imaginal phenomena described resorting to extra-visual premises. Second level signification is the way the image is construed once it is located in a context. Using two different representations of the world map, the Mercator and gall-Peters projections, illustrates the way this works (Figures 3.12 and 3.13).

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3.8 Kosuke Bando. Alternate view of walled city, Walled Boston, Harvard University, 2006.

3.9 The City of Boston (1879). By O.H. Bailey & Co. Bird’s-eye view of Boston in perspective, not drawn to scale, 68 x 111 cm., color, Armstrong & Co. (Boston, Mass.), Riverside Press (Cambridge, Mass.).

3.10 New Babylon is a postmodern critique of the Modernist utopias by Constant Nieuwenhuys, one of the founding members along with Guy Debord and Asger Jorn of the Situationist movement. His proposal outlines a new urbanization engulfing the world and creating a social model for human interaction in the built environment. The map proposes the ‘new settlement’ would be layered out of old settlements in a continuous global network. Note the small strips are cut-up portions of other maps. [1920-2005], Symbolic representation of New Babylon, 1969, Collage of city maps. Constant Nieuwenhuys, 120 x 133.2 cm, Collection Gemeetenmuseum Den Haag. Photo credit Tom Haartsen for Fondation Constant.

3.11 This map is part of Bando’s project illustrating the displacement of Emperor Qin’s terracotta army. In effect the map treats place and the histories associated with it as equivalent to the interchangeable condition of ‘space.’Kosuke Bando, Walled Boston, Harvard University, 2006.

3.12 In 1855 James Gall produced an orthographic map projection over the world.11 This projection is an equal area cylindrical projection similar to the projection created by Arno Peters (1973) with the standard parallels 45° N/S.12 All areas on the map are equal in size and all meridians and parallels are mapped as straight lines.13 It is unclear if Peters was aware of the Gall map, but the similarities are very close. Differences are subtle: Gall assumed the earth was a sphere. Peters assumed an ellipsoid. Both use the standard parallels 45° N/S. Social historians and political activists consider the Gall–Peters projection a more socially just representation of the world. It does not privilege the Western powers as it more closely describes the land areas of the continents although it distorts the shapes. The United Nations Development Programme uses the Peters projection when producing maps.14 3.13 The Mercator projection (1569) is by the Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator. Most contemporary maps used Ptolemy’s latitude and longitude grid and were harder for navigation at sea, requiring bearing be recalculated as the ship moved. The Dutch drive to explore fueled Mercator’s development of the new projection. It enabled sailors to calculate paths along rhumb or straight-line sections. The mathematics is difficult and shows a high degree of sophistication, but the world shown is uneven when it comes to size. Greenland is the same size as the continent of Africa, when Africa in reality is fourteen times bigger than Greenland. Despite, or maybe because of, its distortion the Mercator projection is still a popular map and is often found in classrooms throughout the Western world.

Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia

The world map (1569) by cartographer gerhard Mercator privileges ocean area. The Mercator map made it possible for a ship’s navigator to use rhumb lines, the constant sailing courses crossing all meridians of longitude at the same angle, to navigate the world’s oceans and seas. The gall–Peters map (1855–1973) is an equal-area projection favoring a more accurate portrayal of landmass. Continents in the gall–Peters projection are shown closer to their actual land area than the Mercator map. Both maps correspond to different features of the globe represented through denotation by the shapes and locations of the continents, but their utility as world maps is the same. The second level of signification is found in the utility of the maps as instruments of political power. To read this requires both form (that shape is germany and that shape is France) and content (the concept of a country as a territory represented on the map by lines and color) and visual cues like centeredness indicating importance just as top and bottom indicate relative important. The Mercator map (see Figure 3.12) illustrates how we might read the map: in the Mercator projection the map effectively positions the Western-world countries at the center of the globe, thus the center of power. even though the gall–Peters map is more accurate for landmass and position, the ideology represented through the Mercator projection continues to this day as the normative image of the globe regardless of its original use (for sea travel) while the gall– Peters projection remains relatively obscure. This is not surprising given Western hegemony is undermined somewhat by the gall–Peters’ map more accurate depiction of the southern continents and their position relative to the layout of the map. Territory equates with power, and showing the tremendous difference in size between sub-Saharan Africa and the United States sends an altogether difference message than the current political narrative. Mapping Identity: ‘Japaneseness’ The following discussion of the architect kenzo Tange’s proposal for the Tokyo Bay Competition (1960) illustrates how the representation of space and the space of representation work together to construct notions of power and identity in the map. The ‘space of representation’ is a lefebvrian concept linking power and identity in practice to their presentation of territory.15 The space of representation is the same as representational space. like the Mercator image putting the Western powers at the center of the map, the representation of space engages our spatial imagination with theoretical constructs of place and space. Signs, slogans, and in this case images of territory or context are the symbolic manifestations of the space of representation. This comes forward in the Tange plan as the megastructure bar proposed as a circulation system and the context or neutral domain Tange uses to represent the city. Background In post-war Japan the Tokyo Capital regional Development Commission (1956) began a study of the region around Tokyo concentrating on circulation/distribution. Interest in the size and organization of the metropolitan district built momentum culminating in real and imagined plans proposed around the 1964 olympics in Tokyo.16 The architect kenzo Tange and his atelier, UrTeC, including kisho kurokawa, Arata Isozaki, Sadao Watanabe—all to various degrees associated with the emerging Metabolist movement17 in Japan—published a pamphlet A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization.18 Tange was an

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active member of the international architectural scene. his closing remarks at the otterlo ’59 Congress decry the postwar climate of urban planning: ‘The Utopian view of Team X, and the escapist fatalism of the Italian group strike me as being only a partial grasp of reality, and both seem likely to result in widening the rift between humanity and technology, which is reality itself.’19 The Tokyo Plan is his proposition for this new reality and claim for a Japanese identity in relation to technology in the postwar era. The plan proposal is represented through various images. The most iconic is an aerial view (Figure 3.14) of Tokyo Bay showing a bar extending from the central city to the far shore at Chiba. Before delving into Tange’s plan-map we need 3.14 Photograph of photomontage model with aerial photo underlay and built-up sections of the proposed new city. Tange declared the following to be the goals of his redevelopment proposal: 1) shift from a radial system to a system of linear development; 2) find a means of bringing the city structure, the transportation system, and urban architecture into organic unity; and 3) find a new urban spatial order reflecting the open organization and the spontaneous mobility of contemporary society. Original image in K. Tange et al., A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization, Shikenchikusha, Tokyo, 1961. Photo courtesy of Akio Kawasumi.

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to look briefly at the history of maps in Japan. This tradition is outside of Western cartography and Tange’s map relies on multiple semantic readings from within and without the culture depending on the map-reader’s visual associations and culture. Japanese Map Traditions Unlike Western map traditions, in Japan the map can serve as ‘a surrogate for reality—maps could be a surrogate for place’20 as illustrated by this passage from the diary of Joku, a thirteenth-century court regent: I received a picture of kasuga Shrine from a monk in nara. early in the morning after washing, I got dressed in formal wear, worshipped as if I were on front of the actual shrine, and read one thousand volumes of Buddhist scripture. It is quite a penance. I will continue to do this with my family for the next seven days.21 The map is valued as a visual image more than a vehicle for disseminating knowledge. Because of Japan’s economic self-sufficiency and geographic separation their maps are more inner-focused than other traditions and somewhat ‘rhetorical and ornamental in character.’ As k. Unno suggests, ‘There was little impetus to map the world beyond its own shores.22 It was Japan that mattered most to the Japanese.’23 The instrumentality of the Japanese map is its rhetoric. Maps communicate about ‘place,’ rather than topographical precision. Map scholars agree that Asian mapping more than occidental cartography shared ‘the aesthetic principles of painting and poetry’ and was used ‘for education, for aesthetic appreciation, to express emotional states, to represent power, to settle disputes, to symbolize submission or subordination, and to promote immortality.’24 Tange’s proposal obliquely references one of the earliest surviving maps: the Gotenjiku zu (zu is map or ‘diagram’), the ‘Map of the Five India’s’ (1364). The map reconstructs the pilgrimage journey of the Buddhist monk Xuanzhiang to India (ad649–45) drawn by the priest Jukai. Its power derives from the metaphorical content of the representation. The map signifies journey—the road and the abstract terrain. It is an object of worship even today with preserved copies in temples throughout the islands. Various written descriptions ostensibly tell the story of Xuanzhiang’s travels as they simultaneously construct a history of the spread of Buddhism and its symbolic cosmography. The metaphorical syntax of the Tange plan is similar and the representational strategies correspond with the notion of a ‘journey’ undertaken as the morphology of the city. one additional map common in Japanese cartography and important as a reference in the Tange proposal are paddy-field maps. These maps relate to land ownership projected using the jori system,25 a grid of east–west, north–south rope-lines stretched over paddy fields. Unlike the graticule imposed on an occidental map, the jori is usually not drawn on the map, and if it is, the grid is not used as a coordinate system but as an aid to estimating distances. Similar to the tatami mat, this is an implicit system that constructs spatial relationships from inside to outside; in the map it organizes the spatial relationships. The jori system is found in the Tange map as the ordering system for the scale and proportion of the megastructure proposed across Tokyo Bay (Figure 3.15, see also Figure 3.20). Although

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia 3.15 A series of diagrams showing the growth of the civic axis through a system of transportation connections built over time. The linear growth is managed through a series of four five-year plans. The proposal for a linear organization of a city was not new: Soria y Mata proposed the first published linear plan, Ciudad Lineal (1882). Since then, various town planners in Europe and the U.S. developed linear city plans. Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle (1904) and Le Corbusier’s 1931 scheme for Algiers among the most well known. K. Tange et al., A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization, Shikenchikusha, Tokyo, 1961. Photo courtesy of Akio Kawasumi.

the context of mapmaking discussed informs the way Tange’s map is organized and situates the reception of the map in Japanese cartographical thinking, it doesn’t yet shed light on the meaning or ideology of Tange’s map as a representation of identity in post-war Japanese urban planning. As a utopian project it is more than a functional city plan: it is a projection of cultural values, technological aspirations and social relations instantiated in the representation of space in the map. It is to this we turn next. The 1960 Tokyo Bay Plan There are three parts to the map: the photogrammetric base, the megastructure bar, and artificial ground or platforms arrayed around the bay. The first constructive ordering system is similar to the jori and accounts for the proportional relationships present in the bar and the location of its attachments. The second order is the program of the proposed megastructure ‘bar’ zoned as follows: industry located on the platforms; housing, leisure and government functions on the bar with transportation functions distributed throughout the proposed new city. The only significant addition to the existing city is the road system attached to the bar (Figure 3.16). Formal additions aren’t integrated into the natural topography of the city and appear almost to ‘float’ above it. Just as in the Gotenjuku zu, abstraction is a constitutive element not displaced by the photographic content implied by the map representation. The representation homogenizes the megastructure and the cityscape and this seamless context diminishes both the size and artificiality of Tange’s modern Babel: the city and proposed megastructure become one and the same. The precepts of the modernist city expounded by the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) are obvious in the legend or index of the map (Figure 3.17)—the zoned program of the bar aligns well with

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3.16 Proposed roadway infrastructure for the redevelopment plan. Types of conveyance in the network of transportation systems are color-coded. For Tange the first step in creating the ‘civic axis’ is the construction of a cycle transportation system built 40 metres about the existing city. The new superhighway only touches ground at the interchanges and the system connects all major roadways, subways and railroads. K. Tange et al., A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization, Shikenchikusha, Tokyo, 1961. Photo courtesy of Akio Kawasumi.

3.17 Plan Voisin, ca. 1922–25 by Le Corbusier illustrates the Modernist urban planning principles of a regular orthogonal planning grid, high density living units (1,200 inhabitants per acre), a coordinated transportation system separating vehicles and pedestrians, open spaces at the base of buildings with a park-like setting. Plan Voisin illustrates Le Corbusier’s technocratic approach to city planning where the logic of organization depends heavily on a clear hierarchy of components and strong, centralized government control. Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin, 1922–25. Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY.

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modernism’s urban planning zoned for work, entertainment, living and green space: all separate areas connected by transportation or circulation.26 Tange’s proposal still operates within the CIAM paradigm of three functional zones connected through circulation or traffic, but in this case ‘traffic’ has crystallized into an infrastructure which Tange hopes will ‘give image to people’s desires’27 through his ‘open organization’ and ‘spontaneous’ mobility. Tange’s map also suggests a new term: a symbiosis of time, what the Metabolists termed ‘dichronicity’28 exemplified in the map by the organic growth of the bar located in a transient or mobile landscape. The map legend articulates the concept of movement or mobility. Transportation, the only modality implying movement at an indeterminate scale in this system is exploited as a rhetorical device for the topography of the city. The map represents geographies of movement: the city as network, what Tange refers to as ‘organic’ structure. The topographical base in the map is not an entirely new map or a modified version of an existing map. rather, similar to the cartographic traditions of its predecessors, the base map is a composite of several maps, images and visual referents much like the Gotenjiku zu. Tange starts with photogrammetry or aerial photography and new objects or buildings are drawn into the base to create his urban proposal (Figures 3.18 and 3.19). Photogrammetric images are part art and part science. Photogrammetry is the technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through processes of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images.29 The ‘art and science’ of this map type is an interesting paradigm for the collusion present in all mechanical representation. The photogrammetric image is typically prepared for use with a stereoscope. This is a binocular optical instrument that helps observers viewing the photographs obtain the mental impression of a three-dimensional mode.30 The stereoscope 3.18 Detail, showing collage of aerial photos at lower right hand corner. K. Tange et al., A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization, Shikenchikusha, Tokyo, 1961. Photo courtesy of Akio Kawasumi.

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia 3.19 Detail, K. Tange et al., A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization, Shikenchikusha, Tokyo, 1961. Photo courtesy of Akio Kawasumi.

together with the photogrammetric image offers a technologically advanced simulacrum of the birds-eye view implicit in historic city maps. This representational schema blurs distinctions between the topographic map based on measured survey as a surface with the absence of a positioned viewer and the perspectival construction of the picture plane. This is not to make a specific claim about subjective perception in relation to Tange because Japanese representational traditions are not contingent on a singular view or convergent perspective; the paradox of Tange’s map is its allusion to the perception of a threedimensional model that exemplifies or symbolizes by serving as a sample of properties it literally and metaphorically possesses. Closer scrutiny of the photogrammetry in the map reveals that what looks like aerial photogrammetry isn’t: only the area surrounding the historic center is actual photogrammetry. Starting at edo Palace, context is represented by aerial imagery—as the bar grows across the Bay to the proposed future, the representation of context becomes increasingly abstract. The majority of the base is a collage created from aerial photos that can’t be viewed with a stereoscope. research revealed the aerial images Tange used were part of a project funded by the government to photograph the islands after the war, symbolically reclaiming its postwar territory. The appropriated topographies follow a strict pattern in relation to the placement of the megastructure bar. The bar (Figure 3.20) links or offers passage from one condition to another, but unlike a connective bridge, the bar is directive. It is a megastructure starting at the heart of the city that ‘grows’ over time moving from a legible representation of the city through actual photogrammetric images to the abstract landscape indicated by the photographic collage (see Figures 3.18 and 3.19). like the Gotenjuku zu map, the passage of time is exemplified by the implied growth of the bar along which the map-reader is directed to move by the

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3.20 Detail of the ‘civic axis.’ K. Tange et al., A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization, Shikenchikusha, Tokyo, 1961. Photo courtesy of Akio Kawasumi.

diagrams accompanying the map (see Figure 3.15). This contradicts the apparent neutrality of the linear system that similar to the grid, is a familiar trope of the modernist planning movement. Instead the bar and its context in the map direct the viewer to dialectics of time (past/future) and motion (static/fluid) at the heart of the assertion of Japanese-ness in the planning proposal for Tokyo. The technology employed by Tange’s pseudo-aerial images highlight the tension between the map as a scientific tool and the place of the map in Asian/ Japanese cartography as rhetorical and symbolic. The apparent contradiction is part of the power of this representation of the proposed new city of Tokyo. Typically, aerial imagery separates the viewer from the city and in Western cartographic tradition implies a ‘voyeuristic’ displacement. In Japanese mapping this does not necessarily follow because loss of identity in eastern thought is itself a kind of identity—let me explain. Daisetz Suzuki, a Japanese philosopher often quoted by Tange and the Metabolists, asserts ‘so kuhi no ronri’ or ‘A is non-A, therefore it is called A’ where ‘what seem to be contradictions turn out in the end to be identities.’31 historically, Western philosophy insists on absolute categories while eastern philosophy allows for paradox as a constituent part of the nature of being. Western philosophies demand categorization of objects based on differences in characteristics such that identities are singular: A can only be A, not B. For Japanese philosophy ideas and objects can be both/and without undermining their ontological integrity. Identity is not affirmed through difference—it is nuanced. Ise Shrine (Figure 3.21) helps explain this idea more concretely. The temple is rebuilt every twenty years on a site adjacent to the ‘original’ using wood from trees grown for this express purpose surrounding the temple(s). Upon completion of the ‘new’ temple the ‘old’ temple is removed. The cycle repeats ad inifinitum in turn creating new/old temples at any point in time as a single ‘ideal temple’ always completed or torn down: no contradiction inheres in Japanese philosophy for an artifact to be new/old and same/ different. The concern with social identity or the social-self reflected in the speculum mundi of a society’s architectural order presupposes as van eyck suggests there is an order and that order is legible.32 order occurring at various scales is one of the themes of the Tange map: the internal order of society and the relationship of society to a new order: a global order. For Tange and UrTeC the homogeneity of Japanese society in many ways precluded the need for an internally legible resolution, but internationalism after the war

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia 3.21 Aerial photograph of Ise Shrine, Ise, Mie Prefecture, Japan. The shrine is rebuilt on an adjacent site on a 20-year cycle. The new and old shrine will co-exist for a short time until the old shrine is dismantled. The shrine is perceived as ever new, unique, and ancient.

demanded Japanese society begin to locate itself within a global plurality. The isolation of the Japanese ‘organization man’ (orgmen—the post-war white-collar office worker) was not the threat as much as the trend for this society of orgmen to pursue a policy of isolation or, put another way, it is not disassociation within society, but the potential for Japanese society’s disassociation from the global plurality. Tange redresses this in his proposed utopia. he cites two thinkers in later writings crucial to his social agenda: the economist William rostow, one of the authors of the Marshall Plan and karl Popper, a philosopher and cultural historian. From rostow Tange borrows the idea all economies develop linearly from small to large characterized as moving from production-based societies to servicesocieties. Tange appropriates this idea in the map by the superimposition of the circulation strategy onto the megainfrastructure of the bar. The growth proposed for the bar is the linear progression model suggested by rostow. In Open Society and Its Enemies Popper, and through him, Tange, take issue with the idea of historicism.33 Popper argues ‘historicism’ is a mode of discovering laws of history enabling us to prophesy the course of historical events. This is essentially a critique of Marxism on the basis of its claim to a kind of ‘social Darwinism’34 For Popper the falsifiability of this proposition is easily demonstrated: give one example of a social past which successfully predicted a social future, including in this case, Marxism—not easily done. Society is constantly transforming and regenerating in response to its present. Because utopian predictions argue for a delayed social condition leading to an arrested society. Popper claims they are antithetical to the nature of discovery and change. Instead the abstract future emerges from a concrete past and is the basis for a present in motion, transformation, and regeneration, in short, organic. This idea shapes Tange’s utopian project. Identity or social constructions should not be static. This would

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limit what Suzuki called ‘A’ to only ‘non-A,’ where the paradox is more productive. Tange’s map structures this relationship as a social possibility based on a spatial present and draws from the history of rhetorical mapping within the oriental tradition. The network suggested by Tange is as much cognitive construct based in part on the conditions of the present city as an exemplification of the ‘mobility’ possible across the geography of the map. The ‘old city’ (edo Palace) is the most identifiable concrete representation on the map, but like the Gotenjuku zu, Tange’s map reads as a journey from a known ‘place’ to an abstract future— across the bar to the abstracted landscape collage and across time to a possible future city and new Japanese identity in a post-war world. New Geographies, New Territories The difference between territory and geography is one of degree not kind. Territory emphasizes the agency of the dominant power or ideology through the representation of place. geographies inscribe and privilege cultural, scientific, and technological dimensions in the map. This can be confusing because geographic maps actually describe topography, not really geography in the sense of the study of places and the relationship between people and their environments. geographic maps describe land features, cities, and so on in a planimetric configuration based on euclidean geometric ordering.35 Chorographs illustrate the idea of geographies opposed to the literal geographic map. They are pictorial maps used to describe places often incorporating perspectival views that help the viewer connect to the place. In contrast, territories are geographic areas belonging to or controlled by external agents: monarchies, democracies, and multinational corporations. In the instance of a territory as geography, the map draws boundaries, identifies place names, locates center to edge and imposes the ideological order of the dominant agent onto topographies creating geographies of culture, science and power. Designers as agents similarly use maps to propose new conditions, create new contexts, present new hegemonies—in short, offer a way to see the world requiring the viewer to reorder their mental map and reposition themselves in the new spatial practice—the following discussion of camouflage offers a new perceptual geography as case in point. Paul Virilio makes an argument for the impossibility of doing this in the contemporary terrestrial map.36 It requires us to develop new map stratagems. he makes the point that virtual transmission of information within globalism today is extraterrestrial based on the contraction of time and space produced by systems of virtual communications. Power and authority are literally transmitted in the blink of an eye over vast spatial territories—older terrestrial maps depended on a relation between distance and time to convey power in the form of territory. The image of the world can be infinitely reproduced and reduced: encapsulated in visually arresting images. Jerry Brotton following on Virilio notes they lose their significance ‘precisely because it cannot meaningfully render the instantaneous passage of time and the recording of invisible computerized numerical data.’37 how to square the idea of representation, power, and identity with premodern and modern maps of territory or geography is part of the problem addressed in this next section. The blurring of identity present in twentieth-century camouflage is contrasted to the focused view of the panorama in Victorian england. But I first introduce two maps that

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purposely distort distinctions between map, mapping, and spatial perception to illustrate how designers manipulate the gap between representation and idea and representation and place; two fundamental concepts in making new geographies. The Map of Paris (Figure 3.22) by herman Mao imagines a new topographic relationship between center and periphery of Paris. The reader has to know the map of Paris well to ascertain the subtle compressions in herman’s map: he reduced the distance by re-weaving (I can’t think of a different term for it) the street map. Paris remapped is nonsensical and impossible yet the representation of space is convincing. This is closer to the idea of the spatial practice of the users for whom whole parts of the city will appear and disappear depending on how routinized they are. This happens to everyone: you sometimes can’t remember driving or walking your neighborhood yet you go through it every day. guy Debord’s Psychogeographic Map of Paris (Figure 3.23) is similar. Playing with parts of louis Bretez and Michel-Étienne Turgot’s famous tourist map of Paris (1739), references to the Carte du Tendre and the Paris subway map, Debord constructs a representation of a possible cognitive map of Paris—this is the Paris experienced while wandering aimlessly between sets of strange attractors, monuments, cafes, and unusual places in the city. What looks at first like a random displacement of the fragments of the city (Figure 3.24) when graphically overlaid on the city map is in fact quite ordered. oddly, the fragments correspond to major subway stops. like an inverse of herman Mao’s map, the Debord map indicates what is removed, but doesn’t actually compress the space in the map. The red arrows linking different fragments of experience in the city compress and reconnect the cognitive space of the city for the map viewer. Mao’s map compresses the geography, but normalizes the representation rendering the map disquieting on close inspection while suggesting the city even when its territory is subverted. Mao’s Map of Paris is a product of the contemporary condition even more so than Debord’s mid-century artifact given it consciously suppresses its own deception: the synthesis of the geographical space and the cognitive one are completed in the map. Moving farther afield we examine two map types at once more difficult to understand but easier to experience as instantiations of territory: camouflage and panorama.

3.22 Herman Mao, Paris Map, Washington University in St. Louis, 1999.

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3.23 Guy Debord with Asger Jorn, Psychogeographic Map of Paris. The map uses fragments of Louis Bretez and Michel-Étienne Turgot’s Plan de Paris(1734–39), a tourist map of Paris. The map loosely follows the configuration of the 1939 Paris Metro map. The map reorganizes the city according to the ‘passions’ of the user. The city should be experienced by wandering or drifting (dériver) from one space or place to another. The red arrows indicate possible trajectories not absolute paths. Theoretically, each person develops his or her own ‘psychogeographic’ index of Paris. G. E. Debord, Guide Psychogeographique de Paris, 1957. Netherlands Institute for Art History, Archive Constant (0095), inv.nr. 488.

3.24 Analysis of the Psychogeographic Map of Paris. This shows the correspondence between the subway map of Paris, selections of the Turgot map and the Psychogeographic Map of Paris. Although presentation of the idea of the dérive is assumed based on walking through the city, analysis of the map suggests the underlying perception of the city from the mapmaker’s (Debord) point of view was not. Rather the underlying framework is the rationalized space of the geographic map. The map strongly references the Carte du Tendre not only in conception but organization. The Carte du Tendre (Figure 0.16) seems an unfamiliar landscape, but when overlaid onto the prominent land features of the Île de Paris, the map reveals the ‘geography of love’ bears a striking similarity to Paris itself. This is to say our cognitive selves tend to organize visual metaphors in physically familiar landscapes. Map by author.

Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia New Territories, Literally Camouflage Mapping by necessity invokes a translation between what can be termed topography and territory, space and place, non-objective and objective reality. In the ‘space of representation’ mapping frames how power relations are negotiated through spatial practices. In cartographic practice mapping is fundamentally lending order to spatial phenomena in the world. Camouflage is a specialized kind of mapping masking its intent while announcing its presence. Camouflage considered as a map suggests the relationship between place and the perception of space can be managed though a mapping procedure. Under this rubric, camouflage is full-scale mapping: it maps the un-real onto the real. This special form of mapping vacillates between the two poles of space and place signification. Describing camouflage as mapping opens an intersection between geometrical space and sensible place and the axes of representation around which they operate and, therefore, looking at camouflage presents a unique vantage from which to unpack how territories are represented through the map. one example of this kind of full-scale mapping of perception is found in gestalt theory. In gestalt the relationship between figure/ground describes how our spatial imagination receives images. The face/ vase image is a good example—the balance between the figure/ground relation creates a visual paradox—the image is both face and vase at the same time. For gestalt, blurring the difference between object and environment is termed Ganzfeld and precipitates a disordering of spatial perception of the subject. The family of resemblances is unavoidable, camouflage as map, and mapping as ordering of perception share the same set of conditions—namely how we make distinctions between sensible phenomena and how we rearrange ourselves in response to the new grounds they afford. For the modernist avant-garde the answer was observed in the literal relation between the techniques of camouflage, cubism, and the new space-time in science. This is not our focus, but it is a reminder of the multiplicities of meaning attached to transparency and its inverse, camouflage. Understanding camouflage as a map requires a brief look at the history of its use. Formal camouflage emerges in the early twentieth century as a kit of techniques catalogued and instrumentalized for the science of deception in war. C. h. r. Chesney, the British officer largely responsible for instigating the Anglo-American camouflage troops, gave the first working description: camouflage is the ‘art of concealing the fact you are concealing.’38 We may ask why the difference between ‘making invisible’ and ‘concealing the fact of concealing’ warrants our attention: it is by construing the meaning of camouflage as degrees of transparency we also understand it as a matter of other degrees: between the real and imaginary, perception and cognition, perception and representation.39 given the intent of camouflage is to conceal the act of concealing it reveals a slippage between physical geographies and their representation more normative map-making procedures mask. robin evans refers to this as the ‘projective cast’ resulting from the translation between representations, space, and the imagination. In the case of camouflage the representation is a map occurring at the scale of the geographical space onto which the imaginary space collapses.40 Chesney’s characterization directs us to a more nuanced understanding of camouflage as the phenomenal difference between what we think reality is and how it is presented to us. I use two ideas to reconsider the procedures of camouflage as a map: 1) mapping as cognition and 2) mapping perception. literal camouflage is the techniques developed for warfare, and phenomenal camouflage is

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the potentially productive disordering of spatial perception through mapping. The former is addressed briefly; the latter requires additional discussion of the idea of mimicry from nature, and some examples of the camouflage of perception as a reconfiguration of intra-subjective experience and the ordering imposed on spatial realities. For the reader looking for a direct application, the last map in Chapter 4 uses ‘camouflage as map’ in a design project. Techniques of the Camoufleur Derived from the analysis of animal mimicry, camouflage is not mere replication, but a reordering of spatial perception through the manipulation of patterns and pattern recognition, optics, and light. Techniques of camouflage were observed first in insect and animal coloration believed used for defense and offence in predation. British zoologists Solomon J. Solomon and John kerr, and Abbott Thayer the American artist, catalogued the characteristics of camouflage used by animals in the wild: i) modeling and shadow, ii) outline, which relates to pattern, iii) tone or variations in light, shade and texture, particularly important when manipulated for artificial camouflage, and iv) color. French camoufleurs influenced by Cubist work made a connection between the effectiveness of counter-shading breaking up form that tends to flatten out the shape of an object and its utility in the battlefield.41 Military camouflage used to conceal objects from ground troops operates within the picture-plane, and like pictorial representation is dependent on the position of the viewer to a particular frame of reference. When camouflage operates in real time at the same scale relative to the observer, time orders the experience through movement and memory. effective camouflage stimulates memory by mimicking the familiar. An example of whole building camouflage, the lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant becomes a suburban neighborhood (Figures 3.25 to 3.27) complete with houses, streets, cul-de-sacs and fences. The image of the lockheed facility under net camouflage challenges the viewer to distinguish between the real and artificial much as the map of the proposed Faux Paris outlined alternate boundaries for city of Paris fabricated during World War II to deceive aircraft bombardiers (Figure 3.28). Successful aerial camouflage depends on working in oblique and vertical representation at the same time. Concealment from the air takes into account both views and is fundamentally a three-dimensional problem (Figure 3.29). note the similarity between the demands of camouflage and a condition always present in views of cities, namely the tension between the plan view and the prospect or oblique view. reality constituted by both views is never in doubt, but representational views in normative maps only hint at the cancellation in effect: the choice of one view displaces the other. Camouflage as a kind of literal mapping takes into account the position of the observer in both axes. This rather strange mapping demands an embodied viewer—you are in the space of the map—without relinquishing awareness of the geometric or cognitive space of the map, the view from above also being manipulated. This is more than art-in-the-world: this is the world as art, a position not unlike Schopenhauer’s assertion that the relation between transcendental knowledge of the world as representation is qualified by the subject’s willingness to lose oneself in the process of absorbing aesthetic experience.42 Physicist and philosopher of science ernst Mach, searching for physiological associations in ideas and interested in developing a science of perception, defined sensible

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3.25 The Lockheed Aircraft Plant in Burbank, CA, prior to camouflage. Camouflage of Lockheed Aircraft Company, Burbank, CA, c. 1945, Image courtesy of Lockheed Martin Corp.

3.26 The plant disappears under its ‘suburban neighborhood’ camouflage complete with houses, streets, street signs and plants. The effect is achieved using nets and plywood, but was completed with residents who walked the streets or ‘watered’ their fake lawns atop a faux neighborhood. Aerial image of Lockheed Aircraft Company in camouflage, Burbank, CA, ca. 1945.

3.27 The Civilian Mess Hall and the Munitions Factory at Rocklea, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 1943, camouflaged by a false road and leaves over the roof of the buildings. This detail of the Rocklea facility shows the same attention to realism present in the Lockheed facility in California. Even in close-up detail, the illusion is strangely convincing. If you look carefully you can see a human figure on the ‘road’. US Archives (NARA) RG 111 SC 252699.

3.28 Project map to build a fake Paris in a loop of the Seine to the north of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in order to deceive the German Air Force, October–November 1918. Faux-Paris, Adoc-photos / Art Resource, NY.

3.29 Word War II bombing diagram showing how the drop-zone is calculated using a vertical and horizontal sighting of the bomb trajectory.

Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia

space or ‘visual space’ as lived space that is limited, bounded, and mutable.43 In contrast, Cartesian or constructed space is characterized by artificially constructed geometrical concepts presenting space as ‘everywhere and in all directions alike’ unbounded and infinite in its extent. Camouflage as spatial mimicry relies on the two extremes of space proposed by Mach. Camouflage reveals the role of the observer not as a unified subject, but as a disordered ‘subject of knowing’ where spatial creation never detaches itself from perception. rather it always implies a relationship between the observer and the observed. This marks the tension between sensible and pictorial space. In the former the sense of self is locatable in space; in the latter, euclidean geometrical space blurs the distinction between the self and the environment. It is worth remembering: for mimicry in nature as for human use, resemblance exists solely in the eye of the beholder. To a leaf-like insect the ‘leaf-like thing’ is just another self, not a self in disguise. like artificial camouflage this undermines the distinction between organism and environment and the connection between the mind and a particular point in space. As we saw in aerial camouflage, the observer vacillates between these two spaces: the horizontal-oblique view of approach and the vertical or aerial view from above a target. This multiplied space of representation blurs the distinction between figure and ground, manipulating perception and cognition in a kind of reciprocal mapping that displaces the subjects’ ‘ontological sense of gravity.’ It categorically undermines the axis of difference between perception and representation. The art historian rosalind krauss makes a similar claim for the ‘optical unconscious’ where human vision is less a master of all it surveys and more a product of a paradoxical relationship between perception and vision.44 For kraus, perception and vision—or background and visual structure—press on our view of abstract art so the background reappears in the abstract grid-structure of the work while the figure is suppressed to the unconscious. Visual structure as non-figure is synonymous with the unconscious. The frame of an image doesn’t embed an actual figure into the image, but constitutes a map of logical relationships. Much like camouflage, imaginary modern perception is characterized by transparency, simultaneity, and immediacy, as well as its rendering frame.45 remember for a moment the gestalt optical illusion of putting two vases next to each other and producing a third immaterial vase formed between the two. Camouflage, like the vase illusion, fluctuates between three poles: the representation of space, representational space, and the space of practice. New Geographies from Before: the Victorians and Panorama The following case examines how the cartographic imagination enables us to project new geographies through the panorama. Panoramas are pictorial constructions of space ordered by perspective projection placing the subject in a measured relationship to the viewer. Spatial relationships within the representation are relative to a vanishing point specific to the point of view of the observer. The territory framed by the view is limited by the horizon in depth and the limits of distortion in width. This is controlled by how far the viewer is from the object being viewed. Panoramas are a specific type of chorograph and an excellent way to understand how the geographic imagination is engaged through the map. The next section outlines the general characteristics of the panorama within the

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context of chorographic maps and then looks at a specific case: one of the first panoramic cityscapes, the View of London from the Albion Mills by robert Barker (1739–1806), and its instrumentality as a map including its cultural signification as a new form of ‘looking’ in the industrial city (Figure 3.30). Initially the city was the primary subject of panoramas, but very quickly two other view-types developed: narrative taken from recent or ancient wars or battles of military conquest and power, and travelogues showing a scene from a distant land. Although all three types could arguably be a kind of map, I concentrate on cityscapes because of the similarity to the chorograph or pictorial map. The panorama looks too much like a picture to be taken otherwise by the modern sensibility. The deception is the panorama’s apparent transparency and the ease with which we confuse its ‘pictorialism’ with reality in the case of the photograph, or conversely with the painted panorama, its naturalness as a painting. In the manner of Mikhail Bakhtin who uses the form of the novel to interrogate canonical genres within literature, what he terms ‘novelizing,’ I use the panorama to ‘pictorialize’ the map—open a discussion of mapping through the device of the panorama. Placing emphasis on authenticity and the completeness of the view is reminiscent of map stratagems. The panorama’s scientific authority is based on this hyperreality projected through perspective. The relative relationships of the scene are reconfigured on a two-dimensional vertical surface or picture plane so when viewed from a pre-determined distance (usually about 15–20 feet) the distortions are minimized and the simulacrum of a totalizing view is created. In the case of the panorama, these views are elided so the singular vanishing point blurs and there are multiple vanishing points with infinite possible positions for the subject to look at the scene. The success of this technique can be measured, in part, by criticism levied against the panorama that it was too real and would lead to the individual’s inability to distinguish reality from illusion.46 Unlike the chorograph, the size of the panorama intensified the experience of viewing the map—literally everything was a picture. The panorama and later aerial views come closer than any other map forms to Borges ‘map of the empire, whose size was that of the empire and which coincided point for point with it.’47 robert Barker exhibited some of the earliest panoramas in the late eighteenth century. Very quickly Barker realized the need for a specially constructed building (Figure 3.32) to accommodate the specific needs of displaying a panorama: namely, a curved wall and the controlled lighting. The first panorama rotunda christened the Panorama opened 25 May 1793 with the ‘View of the grand Fleet at Spithead in the Year 1791.’ The two-level building housed two viewing circles. The larger lower circle accommodated a 10,000 square foot image and the smaller, upper circle one of 2,700 square feet. The View of London map measured approximately 266 feet in length with a height of 35 feet. Besides the rotunda, important features of the building were the lighting of the canvases done from overhead so light would fall onto the view naturally and the sequence of movements whereby the viewer was removed from the exterior ‘real’ environment to the ‘recreated real’ environment of the canvas.48 The building allowed for maximum control of the visual scene. In later panoramas the area in front of the viewing platform would extend to accommodate objects—literally a faux terrain in front of the lower part of the canvas heightening the simulation.

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3.30 Detail, View of London from the Albion Mills by Robert Barker, ca. 1798.

3.31 The enlarged detail is from the vantage point from the rooftop of the Albion Mills. The ‘View of London from the Albion Mills’ was recreated in oil and installed in the Upper Circle of the new building 28 March 1795. Soon after there was an explosion of panoramic views created in cities from Europe to the American continent. As a form of entertainment the panorama reached high levels of popularity and is an early capitalist example of the commodification of the view. Encompassing a view similar to Wenceslas Hollar’s (1640) prospect of London, the Albion Mill view is from the south bank looking across to the north. But unlike the earlier and more limited view it continues southwards toward Southwark, eastwards toward Bermondsey, and westwards to Westminster and Lambeth. The Albion Mill built on the south side of the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge (seen in full panorama view) by Samuel Wyatt to grind corn into flour was the first mill in the world to utilize rotary power from steam. The machinery was supplied by none other than the Birmingham company of James Watt and Matthew Boulton. Aquatint by Henry Aston Barker, after Robert Barker (http://www.gac.culture. gov.uk/work.aspx?obj=29586).

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3.32 Cross-section of Barker’s panorama rotunda in Leicester Square, ca. 1798. Soon after opening the exhibit, Barker realized the need for a specially constructed building to accommodate the needs of displaying a panorama; namely, a curved wall and the controlled lighting. He commissioned the design of a building from Robert Mitchell, an Edinburgh architect; and the first panorama rotunda, christened the Panorama, opened 25 May 1793 with the ‘View of the Grand Fleet at Spithead in the Year 1791.’ The twolevel building (see Fig. 4.4) housed two viewing circles. The larger Lower Circle could accommodate a 10,000 square foot image and the smaller, Upper Circle one of 2,700 square feet. Besides the rotunda form, important features of the building were: 1) the lighting of the canvases which was done from overhead so that light would fall onto the view as in reality, and 2) the sequence of movements whereby the viewer was removed from the exterior ‘real’ environment to the ‘recreated real’ environment of the canvas. The building allowed for maximum control of the visual scene. In later panoramas the area in front of the viewing platform would extend to accommodate objects, literally a faux terrain in front of the lower part of the canvas to heighten the simulation of the view. Robert Mitchell, Plans and views in Perspective, with Descriptions, in England and Scotland, London: Wilson and Co., 1801. Reprinted from: S. Oettermann, S., The Panorama History of Mass Media, Zone Books, New York, 1997: 104.

The panorama as a map functions on multiple levels. First, it is a product of an advance in scientific invention in the technique of reproducing three-dimensional spatial relationships onto a two-dimensional surface. The geometry of projection engaged by the panorama is specific and measured no more or less than the scalar reduction of geographic space in an ichnographic map. As a socio-political document the panorama reframes the subjectivity of the individual in rapidly changing social conditions and repositions the industrial subject within the growing urban complex. It rationalized the position of the industrialist within new power structures of emerging capitalist society at the same time it commodified the city by replicating its reality in the ‘view at a glance.’ The Victorian era is visually delineated by the importance given the technological innovations of science and the new engineer-technocrats. Similar to Saint-Simonian utopian ideas popularized in France at this time (remember the great Saint-Simonian monument,

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia 3.33 Orientation plan for the London Panorama, 1792 (Guildhall Library Corporation of London). Key issued to visitors as an aid to viewing and identifying objects in the panorama. Reprinted from S. Oettermann, The Origins of Panorama, Urzone, New York, 1997: 105.

the eiffel Tower), the panorama fetishizes the monuments of the emerging technocratic society. But with a particularly english twist: the only building to fall in the center of the london panorama panel most accurately aligned with the vanishing point in perspective, and therefore least distorted is St. Paul’s Cathedral. It looms like a beacon in the skyline in a kind of reversal of the ‘central eye’ or ‘position of the watcher’ in Bentham’s Panopticon (Figure 3.34).49 here the eye of god tempers the english drive to technocracy with a reminder of the balancing power of the church in society. In effect there are two centers in the ‘map’: one, the literal center of the rotunda from which the view is optimized; and two, the visual center focused on the Cathedral. It is the tension between these two that signifies meaning in the map. As Foucault notes, ‘Such asymmetry of seeing-without-being-seen is, in fact, the very essence of power because ultimately, the power to dominate rests on the differential possession of knowledge.’50 Accordingly the Panopticon was designed to ensure a ‘surveillance that would be both global and individualizing.’51 In the case of the english panoramic map, the pictorial describes the contours of surveillance both personal and global. Christine Boyer positioned the city as a system of representation using three ways of mapping to catalogue the complexity, diversity, and contradictions of the cityscape. The traditional city is represented as a work of art; think of the city representations in Blaeu’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (see Figure 2.8), the contemporary city is about spectacle and the modern city, panorama.52 For the nineteenth-century londoner positioned in the map above the emerging modern cityscape, the view is limitless and the frame, ultimately global. The

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3.34 Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century prison reforms provided Foucault with a representative model for what happens to society in the nineteenth century. Bentham argued the perfect prison would be structured so that cells would open to a central tower. Individuals in the cells do not interact with each other and are constantly confronted by the panoptic tower (pan=all; optic=seeing). They cannot see when there is a person in the tower; they must believe they could be watched at any moment: ‘the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure he may always be so.’53 Bentham saw prison reform as a model for how society should function. To maintain order in a democratic and capitalist society the populace needs to believe any person could be surveyed at any time to ensure the people internalize the panoptic tower and police themselves: ‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.’54

panorama makes it possible for the individual to become grand—to take in the expanse of a world from a comfortable vantage point while reinforcing the role ofthe individual in perpetuating the value codes of english society. In a contemporary take on the panorama, erin Dorr used a search engine to find images of iconographic buildings uploaded to the Internet (Figures 3.35, 3.36 and 3.37). The composite map of these city skylines includes between 200 to 500 images overlaid so the origin point is at the icon. In the case of the new York skyline she used random photographs taken of the empire State building. These panoramic skyline maps created by tourists, city-dwellers, and personal photographs of unknown origin, constitute a collective memory of the city. We don’t have to look far for a similar idea in Aldo rossi’s analogic city: the city is a locus for the collective memory of its inhabitants associated with objects

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3.35 Erin Dorr, Mapping Collective Memory, The St. Louis Arch, Washington University in St. Louis, 2012.

3.36 Erin Dorr, Mapping Collective Memory, U.S. Capitol Building, Washington University in St. Louis, 2012.

3.37 Erin Dorr, Mapping Collective Memory, Empire State Building, Washington University in St. Louis, 2012.

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and places in the city.55 Cities are concatenations of structures and spaces built over time imbued with the values, codes and desires. Dorr’s maps testify to the power of these forms not because they are subjects of many of the photographs, but because they seem to hold their formal definition from any viewpoint within the city. These archetypal figures are urban artifacts acting as ‘primary elements’ contributing to the morphological and cultural evolution of the city when built and beyond. Their influence continues to shape the collective images of the city and remains fixed even as other objects around them change. A similar primary element is seen in the map (Figure 3.38) made by Carolina rivera and Jessica Dickinson in genova. The map shows multiple photographs of the city skyline to establish the lighthouse or the lanterna as a primary element. Interestingly the map also shows an overlay of topographic maps of the city from the 1400s to the present day. The escarpment on which it stands was at one time a peninsula prior to the infill and reshaping of the harbor. Since then the hill around it is significantly reshaped and only the original small rise for the lighthouse remains. The particular promontory of the lighthouse remains fixed even as the boundaries of the harbor shifted dramatically. Perhaps this underscores the necessity of the function of the lighthouse, but it may also point to the collective associations of the city with its role as a port city and the original sacred value given to the land on which the lighthouse is constructed and its locus in the city and harbor.

3.38 Carolina Rivera and Jessica Dickinson, Permanency and Ephemerality of Porto Antico, Florida International University, 2014.

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia Future Place(s) Finally returning to a theme introduced at the beginning of this chapter: mapping utopia. Utopian maps are distinguished from the previous ideological maps of territory and geography simply because the author intends the map as a representation of an imaginary place. This is a bit like saying ‘now you see a duck’ even though everything I show you is also a duck, but maps of utopia have to do this for us to know they are removed from the present. historically this removal in time was a distant future—utopia is from the greek, ou-topia, literally meaning ‘nowhere,’ emphasizing it as a fiction.56 generally utopias depend on some future technology or a radical political construct enabling a new way of life—More’s utopia supported no private property, a welfare state with free hospitals, euthanasia and priests being allowed to marry. Following on, sociologist karl Mannheim stated the difference between ideology and utopia is in how they affect the world: ‘Ideas which later turned out to have been only distorted representations of a past or potential social order were ideological, while those which were adequately realized in the succeeding social order were relative utopias.’57 Mannheim emphasizes the impossibility of utopias is the difficulty of changing an existing order from within our own historical context: ‘The representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can in principle never be realized.’58 revisions of Mannheim take into consideration late-twentieth-century theories embracing the complexity of determining the social self in relation to the collective, but his general distinction between utopias and ideologies is useful for the discussion here. The former is explicit while the latter is implicit. Maps of utopia like Mannheim’s dictum are represented as fictions that are difficult to reach, but fictions we should strive to attain as relative utopias. however if or when we do attain them, they become our condition and we are hard pressed to see them from our point of view as utopian. I unpack Colin rowe’s entry for the 1979 ‘roma Interrotta’ exhibition as case in point. There are many maps of utopia, but using a well-known example proposed by a designer, in this case an architectural historian and a team of designers, enables us to compare a map in the same genre of maps from the mid-twentieth century as the previous Tange example. These maps are part of a shared context of late modernism in architecture and urban design. The visual evidence from designers in this period includes photographs, drawings, and text published in trade magazines, journals and books. The Tange and rowe maps were widely published as part of exhibition or competition catalogues. ‘Roma Interrotta’ revisited ‘roma Interrotta’ was an invited exhibition held in 1978 in rome by the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte dedicated to urban studies. A catalogue was issued in conjunction with a 1979 exhibit in new York at the Cooper-hewitt Museum. The entry submitted by Colin rowe included Peter Carl, Judith Di Maio and Steve Peterson. The list of invited participants reads like a dance card at a 1970s architectural ball: robert Venturi, James Stirling, Paolo Portoghesi, romaldo giurgola, leon krier and Aldo rossi among others. Participants were allotted a section of gianbattista nolli’s Grande Piante di Roma printed in 1748 and tasked to ‘remember a city that never was: a counterfactual rome generated after 1870 and the unification of Italy, but before the advent of modern urbanism’ (Figure 3.39).59 The rowe entry re-mapped Plate viii (Figure 3.40), one of the twelve plates from the original nolli folio (Figure 3.41).

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3.39 Map, La nuova topografia di Roma by Giambattista Nolli, ca. 1692–1756. Composed of 12 sheets, each 42 × 67.5 cm., the complete engraving measures 174 × 210 cm. New Plan of Rome interpreted by Piero Sartogo, Constantino Dardi, Antoine Grumbach, James Stirling, Paolo Portoghesi, Romaldo Giurgola, Robert Venturi, Colin Rowe, Michael Graves, Robert Krier, Aldo Rossi, Léon Krier. Courtesy of MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome. MAXXI Architettura Collection. Roma Interrotta Archive.

Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia 3.40 Full section of the submission by Colin Rowe, Peter Carl, Judith Di Maio and Steven Peterson for Sheet Eight (Ottavo Settore) of the Nolli plan. Along with the density created by the new in-filled blocks shown by the shaded areas there are a series of quotations of familiar buildings from the canon of Modernism including the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe (lower left hand side). This visually references the concept of bricolage introduced by Rowe into architecture and urban theory. Architecture bricolage is an assembly of components from different periods, styles or types in one building meant to stimulate the viewer by creating a juxtaposition of conflicting signs, assuming the viewer is informed enough to recognize the historical and typological references. Courtesy of MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome. MAXXI Architettura Collection. Roma Interrotta Archive.

3.41 Sheet Eight (Ottavo Settore) from the Nolli plan.

This ‘temporal opposition of memory and prophecy,’ as richard Somol suggests, reveals in the form of production the ‘preexisting system through which choices (or options) are available.’60 rowe’s formalism obeys this logic of substitution: the choices allowed verify their own ideology. rowe’s map (Figure 3.42) reduces the original section of the nolli plan to a figure/ground with high contrast between buildings rendered as black shapes and the field or urban space between buildings in white. Colin rowe introduced the figureground diagram (really a map) borrowed from gestalt psychology as a way to reinforce

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia 3.42 The plan shows a detail of L’Aventino l’Orto Botanico from the submission by Colin Rowe, Peter Carl, Judith Di Maio and Steven Peterson for Sheet Eight (Ottavo Settore) of the Nolli plan. The infill is proposed by the Rowe team and intended to ground the figure of the open piazza’s and public spaces. The fragment of the Aurelian wall shown at the bottom is a singular addition to this section of the city. It provides physical and conceptual ‘closure’ to reinforce the Gestalt reading of the figure/ground in the plan. Colin Rowe, L’Aventino l’Orto Botanico, Courtesy of MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome. MAXXI Architettura Collection. Roma Interrotta Archive.

the dependence of part-to-whole or in the case of the city: object to field, solid to void. For rowe the map represented the field of the city as polis and the political sphere it implies expressed as a dynamic relation between built/unbuilt, public/private.61 gestalt is a theory of visual perception describing how people organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes. The theory emphasizes the relationship between the whole image and its parts. The figure ground refers to how the eye differentiates an object from its surrounding area. objects, forms, and shapes are perceived as figures and the surrounding area is the background or ground. In gestalt, balancing figure and ground makes the image clearer in mind for the observer. A literal interpretation of this Gestalt-form would be dangerously diagrammatic for the architectural drawing, but through the syntax of mapping it is built into the cartographic representation; that is to say, rowe’s position is most clearly understood through the map. Starting with the characteristics of the original map rowe used for inspiration, the nolli map epitomizes the culmination of renaissance visualization, namely the ichnographic or orthogonal plan.62 Ichnographic plans represent a view of the topography of a place from above and allow us to measure a scaled distance from one point to another. We still use this today, most commonly for street maps, general area maps, and so forth. The development of this map-type impacted the way cities were represented and how urban spaces might be described. The tradition of drawing the city from a single viewpoint with lines of projection at an oblique angle to the earth’s surface in chorographic maps permitted the illusion of the ‘totalizing’ view, but distorted spatial relationships: objects were drawn with respect to

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a single elevated viewpoint and the distances between them were impossible to measure on the map. The development of the exact sciences to a large degree depended upon this evolution of an abstract language of representation.63 leonardo’s plan of Imola (1502) is the first example of a city view based on a surveyed or measured plan. Samuel edgerton suggests a causal relationship between this and leonardo’s Man in a Circle and Square.64 The connection to cartography especially the employment of the Ptolemaic grid demonstrates the power regularization and visual ordering had on the renaissance mind. In the ichnographic plan the city is portrayed from an infinite number of viewpoints all perpendicular to the topographical features and drawn on a horizontal surface. rowe claimed the ichnographic plan was a new conceptual attitude toward the city ‘in which quantitative topographical relationships were given visual priority over both symbolic values and the actual appearance of the city.’65 The nolli map describes not a rome of antiquity. The Grande Pianta is a catalogue of the contemporary rome in 1748. nolli makes graphic distinctions between the ancient and modern, archeology and architecture (see Figure 3.40). From historical texts we know he surveyed the city carefully, noting where ancient and contemporary city weave together. Themes of the map include 1) a distinction between the public/private city and 2) history and government. The rioni or districts are demarcated—the map even goes so far as to indicate the city sewage system by denoting the locations of drains.66 Curiously the rowe plan is bleached of these jurisdictional boundaries. In comparison rowe isolates architecture from history by employing a more simplified graphical representation with stark contrast between buildings rendered in black and the ground in white. This gestalt-like simplification of the graphic language of the map whitewashes the original nolli map’s distinctions between ancient and contemporary, civic neighborhood identities, and municipal infrastructure. The rowe proposition is not a revolutionary plan as it doesn’t posit a new city type; instead its radicality suggests the city, like cubist space, is ‘brought forward and identified with the immediate, physical surface of the canvas.’67 rowe’s gestalt plan depends upon the ‘figural whole-qualities of the visual field,’ but does not necessarily distinguish homogenous from heterogeneous space because the Gestalt reading insists there are contexts ‘in which what is happening to the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clearcut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole.’68 Whereas the city is fragmented (we cannot ‘see’ it all at once), the act of measuring demands we construct a mentally abstracted ‘whole’ fluctuating between the part and totality. rowe insists the gestalt view represents the structure of an ideological superstructure while the real city presented in the original nolli map is available only as an illusion that vanishes when reached. In rowe’s terminology the habitat of the city can’t be understood through the separateness of the parts, but must be a whole structure. Analysis of the map demonstrates this and one other feature: rowe’s plan (Figure 3.43) is a collage of identifiable architectural ‘bits’ regularized through localized geometries—even nature is abstracted and ordered. Most telling perhaps is the inclusion of a section of fictive Aurelian wall at the lower left of the re-drawn map. remember the original plate represents an interior part of the city quite removed from the fortification wall. The boundary isolates

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Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia 3.43 The analysis of the Rowe entry overlays the original plan and the reconstituted section. The areas shown in yellow are described in the competition text as public and institutional program. There are few or no private or domestic buildings (shown in blue) or similar programs typical of the Modernist functional zones of activity in the city: live, work, play, circulation and verdure or green space. The proposal emphasizes public architecture and informal street relationships. It obscures the topography in favor of creating a strong contrast between the figure of dense buildings and their ground. The overall impression of the proposal is a dense area with carved Piazza’s and public spaces— this reinforces the Gestalt notion we see the world in terms of patterns and forms that are stable and coherent. The addition of the section of the Aurelian Wall that actually occurs at the edge of Nolli’s Rome is revealing: it reinforces the edge of the city shown in Sheet Eight creating a false clarity about the limits of the city. Map analysis by author.

the fragment from the map and reinforces the gestalt of the ‘totalizing’ part. Through the use of collage, the world of reality the map usually designates is suspended. rowe assembles a set of identifiable architectural monuments and disavows any actual urban planning. The tension is the representation of ‘plan’ in the abstract countered by the geometric relationship of the parts. Although his critical urbanism is not a modernist prescriptive, rowe won’t abandon modernist tenets entirely. he implies the functional ‘zone’ in his rome map through the district, a spatial and political construct existing between the house (private) and the city

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(public). For rowe the district is where citizen-subjects objectify the ‘law’ as a spatial reality. Curiously the official district demarcation shown on the nolli plan is suppressed in the rowe map. Interpreting this suggests society must not be defined through the law, but the law must be defined by society: the individual through the collective and the public space of the street and square structure social identity and construct the polis. For rowe this ‘plausible abstraction’ must have an order. For corroboration of this we need not look far. rowe and hejduk wrote an article in 1972 articulating the position of the ‘reasonable man’ in relation to the law in the politically charged space of the public domain: here is the law that assumes public significance [the centralized courthouse and square of lockhart, Texas]; and it is around the secular image of the law, like architectural illustrations of a political principle, that these towns revolve. In each case the courthouse is both visual focus and social guarantee; and in each square the reality of government made formally explicit [sic] provides the continuing assurance of order. (emphasis added)69 From other writings we know that, for rowe, socially constructed order is a utopian liberalism balancing the needs of the individual with the greater good of the collective. rowe cites karl Popper for his ‘ideal of emancipation through self-knowledge,’70 but criticizes this as restrictive because to act on an ultimate good is also ultimately a limitation. The ideology of ‘roma Interrotta’ redraws a plausible utopian liberty through a visual discourse fluctuating around this paradox. It is in the tension between memory and prophecy, utopia and tradition, represented by the friction of the gestalt image of the map, rowe argues for timelessness or what richard Somol calls rowe’s ‘eternal present.’71 The terrain of the ideal city can’t be mapped either as a synchronic present or a conditional alternation between past and future. In the map rowe must resort to a repetition of the vernacular and the historic fabric because this attests to the impossibility of an architecturally constructed ‘illustration of a political principle’ operating in the present.72 While rowe argues that as an imperfect image of the good society ‘utopia will persist,’ he counters it ‘should persist as a possible social metaphor rather than probable social prescription.’73 The collage operates as metaphor or simile of the social identity possible to construct only from the conditions of the city as a whole. For us to understand our place in the order of the city (given it is spatially divided) it must only be conceptualized in its totality something only possible through the map. Lakes of Wada Betty ng, who also authored the map beginning this chapter, drew the Time Warp map shown in Figure 3.46. ng’s map describes the loss of time in-flight (Figures 3.44 and 3.45) when traveling from the U.S. to hong kong during the 21-hour time change. her map challenges the notion time is absolute, even in our localized condition. The map (Figure 3.46) shows a terrestrial geography stretched to underscore how one’s sense of self through place is distorted as you fly through multiple time zones across great distances in a short time. Wolfgang Schivelbusch made a similar observation about all transport technology as the ‘material base of potentiality and equally the material base of the traveler’s space-

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3.44 The time schedule mapped in segments for Betty Ng, A Travelogue on Christmas Day 2007 Losing 14 Hours and 25 mins in the Coordinated Universal Time, Harvard University, 2008.

3.45 The experiential or perceptual segments of the trip mapped over time, Betty Ng, A Travelogue on Christmas Day 2007 Losing 14 Hours and 25 mins in the Coordinated Universal Time, Harvard University, 2008.

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3.46 The perceptual landscape as a continuum of experienced time, Betty Ng, A Travelogue on Christmas Day 2007 Losing 14 Hours and 25 mins in the Coordinated Universal Time, Harvard University, 2008.

time perception.’ he underscores the effect this has on our entire mode of being: ‘If an essential element of a given sociocultural space-time continuum undergoes change, this will affect the entire structure; our perception of space-time will also lose its accustomed orientation.’74 To understand how this might work outside of the obvious change in temporal perception we turn to a particular problem in mathematics looking at the fates of various possible trajectories of movement, the ‘lakes of Wada.’ ‘The lakes of Wada’ (Figure 3.47) is a mathematical puzzle in topologies attributed to Takeo Wada published by his student kunizo Yoneyama in 1917. The problem is as follows. Start on an island with two lakes, one with warm water and one with cold. on day one dig a canal from the sea bringing each point of the island within a distance 1 from the seawater. on day two dig a canal from the first lake, bringing each point of the island within a distance ½ from the water of this lake. on day three dig a canal from the second lake bringing each point of the island within a distance 1/3 from the water of this lake. repeat the preceding moves ad infinitum decreasing the distance from the three waters at each pass. The canals extend but never touch—meaning after an infinite number of moves no ‘ground’ is left and all points on the boundary of any of the three canals is infinitely close to all other regions. If you imagine that each line is a possible fate or trajectory for the canal, what you see is each fate occurs on the boundary of every other fate. In chaos theory the Wada theorem describes the trajectories of seemingly random systems like drips of water from a faucet or the arc swing of a pendulum. The implications are interesting for our networks of travel that, after all, are no more than trajectories of fate moving through space-time. networks as the lakes problem demonstrates, define connections and boundaries. networks are bounded systems constrained by a series of choices possible at any given place—it is as if we could lose ourselves in many possible fates. It might be like a multiple personality disorder where our subconscious mind bifurcates at any point between hong kong and back again.75 ng’s map reveals a fundamental action of modern travel arguably starting with the railroad: our ability to see networks is directly related to this abstraction of time through its disassociation with the phenomenal and re-association with a spatial collapse of the movement of the body. The question is: how does this affect our histories and their inverse, our utopian projections of the future? especially as we project them through the map. To answer the first we must consider what networks have done to our physical world and how we experience time. gianni Vattimo in the End of Modernity argues the age of mass

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3.47 ‘Lakes of Wada,’ a problem in the mathematics of topology. Topology is concerned with properties that remain invariant, i.e. do not change, under continuous transformations in the physical (intuitive) world. These include distortion and stretching. The Wada property is seen frequently in topology problems in mathematics, ‘namely that each point that is on the boundary of one region is on the boundary of all.’ Imagine an island in the sea and on it a cold and a warm lake. In the course of the first day, canals are to be dug, one from the sea, one from the warm lake, and one from the cold lake, in such a way neither salt and fresh nor warm and cold water come into contact with one another, and so at the end of the day every point of land is at a distance of less than one mile from the seawater. On the next day each of the canals is to be continued so the different kinds of water remain separated and at the end of the work the distance of every point from each kind of water is less than one half-mile. At the end of the third day (recall the sum of 1 + ½ + ¼ + ⅛ … + 1/n approaches 2 as n goes to infinity) the dry land forms are within a distance of 1/3 from each of the lakes. The lakes and channels are a closed set. The set is the common boundary of the three regions: the sea, the cold lake, and the warm lake (extended by their corresponding canals). J. Kennedy and J. A. Yorke, ‘Basins of Wada,’ Physica D, 51 (1991): 213–225) and A. Bogomolny, Topological Curiosities from Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles http://www.cut-the-knot.org/do_you_ know/brouwer.shtml.

Maps as Power, Identity and Utopia communication, instant telecommunication, and mass migrations of people signals the end of history. Vattimo considers it impossible to find objective reality among images received from the media because there is no way to step outside or be an impartial spectator of these images. he refers to unilinear history in the sense of a progressive history viewing the past in terms of cause and effect where what is seen to have a past determines the present and the future. not unlike the Wada example, Vattimo suggests there are many histories not just one: there can no longer be a clear goal throughout historical development. The Internet freedom of information and constant media make it impossible to conceive of a single reality. This has epistemological consequences since the plurality of histories and voices in the age of mass communication highlights multiple rationalities and anthropologies. This undermines the possibility of constructing knowledge on certain foundations where the tendency to universalize and impose a single view of how the world is ordered is weakened although not entirely eliminated at the extreme.76 As Matthew harris points out, ‘Vattimo sees in late modernity the realization of nietzsche’s prophecy of the world becoming a fable. The dissolution of the unilinear conception of history and its implications for modern views on knowledge and reality liberates differences by allowing local rationalities to come to the fore.’77 Without the possibility of a future, all is an eternal present and utopias become relative the moment they are proposed. A utopian ideal is not possible in a constant present. We can only find negotiated interpretations as both/and conditions we acknowledge as part of our own ‘being’ (born in a particular time, place and condition). Betty ng’s Time Warp map is a personal and eternal ‘utopian present’ found in the stretched-out space-time between a known place and a place to-be-known. Imagining the role of design in this condition is only part of the challenge—expressly being able to execute a spatial configuration without resorting to the avant-garde paradoxical condition of what is present is past. Design in these circumstances is dicey. If even part of the utopian relativity is true, our current context exists somewhere between the real and the virtual, the probable and possible. The socially constructed materiality of building and urban design and its artifacts are unhinged from history and re-attached to techniques and technology. The cautionary tale is that without some kind of ‘there’—an application, a material purpose—physical and material design is no more than a simulacra consumed as part of the spectacle of everyday life. We become victims of our own time warp and purveyors of the next cool thing, trafficking in stimulation and style removed from the pleasures of the skin or the pleasures of the text. Notes 1 h. lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, oxford, 1991: 117. 2 r. evans, Translations from Drawing to Building, vol. 2, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997: 154. 3 lefebvre, The Production of Space: 117. 4 T. More, Utopia, The Chiswick library of noble Authors, Scott-Thaw Co., new York, 1903. 5 g. Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds), Sage Publications in association with Theory, Culture and Society, london, 1997. 6 g. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & red, Detroit, MI, 1973: Preface.

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7 Baudelaire captures the essence of the flâneur: ‘The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. his passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world … The lover of life makes the whole world his family … or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas … or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.’ C. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, garland, new York, 1964. originally published in Le Figaro in 1863. 8 J. B. harley, ‘Deconstructing the map,’ Cartographica 26(2): 1–20, 1989. 9 harley, ‘Deconstructing the map.’ 10 r. Barthes, Empire of Signs, hill and Wang, new York, 1982. 11 Peters Projection (Gall’s Orthographic Projection), from USgS http://cegis.usgs.gov/ projection/pdf/peters.text.pdf (accessed 8 September 2012). 12 J. heyn, ‘The gall-Peters misapprehension,’ 2003. Accessed 4 September 2016 from http:// www.heliheyn.de/Maps/gallPeters/gallPeters_e.html. 13 lantmäteriet, ‘Peters projection,’ 2005. Accessed 5 September 2016 from lantmäteriet: http:// www.lantmateriet.se/upload/filer/kartor/geodesi_gps_och_detaljmatning/kartprojektioner/ oversikt/Peters_projektion.pdf; M. T. rosenberg, ’Peters projection vs. Mercator projection,’ 2012. Accessed 8 September 2012 from http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/ aa030201a.htm. 14 rosenberg, ‘Peters projection vs. Mercator projection.’ 15 lefebvre, The Production of Space. 16 The propositions are published in Architectural Design, #10, october 1964, as ‘Tokyo 1964: Tokyo/“olympic planning” versus “Dream Planning”,’ gunther nitschke (ed.), 485–524. This is one of the most complete documentations of the various Tokyo Bay proposals coming out of the Metabolist movement. It also includes a commentary by P. Smithson on the UrTeC Tokyo Bay Plan, 479–480. 17 The Metabolists were a post-war Japanese architecture movement challenging the modernist tenets by looking to nature and Japanese history. 18 Also published in Shinkenchiku, March 1961, and The Japan Architect, April 1961. 19 CIAM ’59 in otterlo, concluding evaluation of the otterlo Congress. 20 katsuka Unno, ‘Cartography in Japan,’ in J. B. harley and D. Woodward (eds), History of Cartography, vol. 3, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1987: 347. 21 Unno, ‘Cartography in Japan’: 365. 22 early map tradition in Japan includes two general types: the paddy-field maps at the local scale, and the gyoki style based on a series of maps first recorded in period (ad710–74). 23 Unno, ‘Cartography in Japan’: 368.

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24 n. Sivin, and g. ledyard Scope, ‘Introduction to east Asian cartography,’ in harley and Woodward (eds) History of Cartography, vol. 2. 25 The main unit of length is the cho (109.09m). The word is descriptive, literally jo (the rows) and ri (the columns). 26 The guiding principles for city planning for CIAM were given in the 1933 Athens Charter. The idea of planning organized to produce a ‘functional city’ is outlined according to the following principles: the city should be organized into function-based zones, primary functions are living, working, recreation and circulation (transportation routes and movement paths), parks and ‘green spaces’ should be used as buffer between zones, and historic monuments should be removed unless they are of high value and did not compromise the healthy living conditions of inhabitants. See, e. Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928– 1960. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000. 27 kenzo Tange Team, A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Structural Reorganization, Shikenchikusha, Tokyo, 1961. 28 ‘The Metabolist movement … sought not to exclude any particular time period but to express the past, present and future in them in a single architectural space regarding every point in time as equidistant from the observer. Time is neither linear nor heaped in a pyramidal hierarchy, but is complexly interwoven, like a net of rhizomes. This is the symbiosis of time, or diachronicity, from the Metabolist perspective.’ k. kurokawa, From Metabolism to Symbiosis, Academy editions, london, 1992: 10. 29 American Society for Photogrammetry and remote Sensing, ‘What is ASPrS?’ https://web. archive.org/web/20150503211923/http://www.asprs.org/About-Us/What-is-ASPrS.html (accessed June 2015). 30 From Glossary of Mapping, Charting, and Geodetic Terms, 3rd edn, Department of Defense, Washington, DC, 1973. 31 k. kurokawa, Kisho Kurokawa: From Metabolism to Symbiosis, Academy editions, london, 1992: 229. 32 The architect Aldo Van eyck was a proponent of structuralism in architecture emphasizing that design and culture share similarity through larger structures or systems. Aldo van eyck, ‘Statement against rationalism,’ written for CIAM VI in 1947. A. Van eyck and V. ligtelijn, Aldo van Eyck, Works, Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, 1999. 33 k. r. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, g. routledge & Sons, london, 1945. 34 The crux of Popper’s argument was contra Marx who thought human society could be governed by scientific laws of which he is the discoverer. These scientific laws are ‘natural,’ based as newtonian science, on structural truths verified through observation and posited as general laws, or theorems. I. Berlin, Karl Marx, 3rd edn, vol 189, oxford University Press, new York, 1963: 232. 35 B. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1996: 5. 36 he makes the point that virtual transmission of information within globalism today is extraterrestrial based on the contraction of time and space produced by systems of virtual communications. P. Virilio, The Information Bomb, Verso, new York, 2000.

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37 J. Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World, reaktion Books, london, 1997: 81. 38 C. h. r. Chesney and J. huddlestone, The Art of Camouflage, Studio Publications, Transatlantic Arts, new York and london, 1943: 64. 39 The idea is introduced by roger Callois, to which this reading of mimicry and camouflage is indebted. See: r. Caillois, C. Frank and C. naish, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, Duke University Press, Durham, nC, 2003: 92. 40 r. evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995. 41 ‘In nature, by what is known as counter or “compensating shading,” a subject which is treated more fully in a later chapter, animals and birds are often toned so as to lose their modeling and solidity and appear flat.’ Callois et al., The Edge of Surrealism: 17. 42 A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, e. F. J. Payne (trans.), new York, Dover, 1969 [Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. I, 1819; vols. I & II, 1844]. ‘[We] sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present. … We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression.’ The World as Will and Representation I: 178. See also The World as Will and Representation I: 185, ‘only through the pure contemplation described above, which becomes absorbed entirely in the object, are the Ideas comprehended.’ See also The World as Will and Representation I: 185–186, ‘genius is … the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time.’ 43 e. Mach and T. J. McCormack, Space and Geometry in the Light of Physiological, Psychological and Physical Inquiry, The open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, Il, 1906. 44 r. e. krauss, The Optical Unconscious, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993. 45 A. Wiesinger, ‘The optical unconscious in Benjamin and krauss,’ from the Time-Memory experience

project

(part

3).

http://www.alan-shapiro.com/the-optical-unconscious-in-

benjamin-and-krauss-by-anja-wiesinger/ (accessed June 2015). 46 ‘I am swaying between reality and unreality, … between truth and pretense. My thoughts, my whole being is given a movement that has the same effect as spinning or the rocking of a boat. Thus I explain the dizziness and sickness which overcomes the concentrated onlooker in the Panorama.’ r. hyde, ‘Introduction,’ London from the Roof of the Albion Mills: A Facsimile of Robert and Henry Aston Barkers Panorama of 1792–3, guildhall library Publications in association with the london Topographical Society, london, 1988: ii. 47 J. l. Borges, ‘on exactitude in science,’ from J. l. Borges, A Universal History of Infamy (1935) in Collected Fictions, Andrew hurley (trans.), Viking Penguin, new York, 1988: 325. 48 To access the Upper Circle for instance, the patron had to go up three flights of stairs, down one flight and up another to get to the viewing platform. See Figure 3.32: cross-section through panorama building. 49 The Panopticon proposed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) as a model prison. Bentham was a Utilitarian philosopher and theorist of British legal reform. The Panopticon (‘allseeing’) functioned as a round-the-clock surveillance machine. The design worked so that

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no prisoner could ever see the ‘inspector’ who conducted surveillance from the privileged central location within the radial configuration. That is, the prisoner could never know if or when he was being watched. 50 M. Foucault, ‘Afterword: The subject and power,’ in h. Dreyfus and P. rainbow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1983: 208–26. 51 M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin gordon (ed.), Pantheon, new York, 1980. 52 M. C. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994. 53 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books, new York, 1977: 201. 54 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: 202–3. 55 A. rossi and P. eisenman, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982. 56 Can also be interpreted as eu-topia from the greek eu ‘good’ + topos ‘place.’ This means ‘good place,’ implying a place where society is perfected. More addresses this in an addendum to his book, ‘Wherefore not Utopie, but rather rightely my name is eutopie, a place of felicitie.’ More’s Utopia: The English Translations thereof by Raphe Robynson, 2nd edn, 1556. 57 M. h. Tamdgidi, ‘Ideology and Utopia in Mannheim: Towards the sociology of selfknowledge,’ Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 1(1), Article 15: 346, 2002. http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol1/iss1/15 (accessed 27 December 2016). 58 Tamdgidi, ‘Ideology and Utopia in Manheim’: 343. 59 From the introduction to the competition catalogue by giulio Carlo Argan and part of the information provided to participants: ‘rome is an interrupted city because there came a time when it was no longer imagined, and it began to be planned (badly)…This is the raison d’être of the roma Interrotta exhibition. It is comprised not of proposals for urban planning, naturally, but of a series of gymnastic exercises for the Imagination whose course runs parallel to that of Memory, and no longer of history.’ Invitees requested the part of the original nolli map they wanted to re-draw. M. Cerruti, Roma interrotta: mostra organizzata dagli Incontri internazionali d’arte, Mercati di Traiano, Roma, maggio-giugno 1978, Incontri internazionali d’arte, rome, 1978. 60 r. e. Somol, ‘oublier rowe,’ Any, #7/8: 8–15, 1997. 61 C. rowe and F. koetter, Collage City, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978. 62 The etymology of the word is greek: ichnos, meaning trace or outline and graphos, or writing, to trace or write and outline, in this application of a city. The term first appears in Vitruvius (De Architectura, I, 2, 2) to signify a ground plan. For a detailed etymology see J. Pinto, ‘origins and development of the ichnographic city plan,’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35, 1976; revised and expanded as ‘The renaissance city image,’

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in A. C. Crombies and n. Siraisi (eds), The Rational Arts of Living, Smith College Studies in history 50, Smith College library, northampton, MA, 1987: 205–254. 63 Pinto, ‘The renaisance city image’: 206. 64 S. edgerton, ‘Mental matrix to Mappamundi to Christian empire: The heritage of Ptolemaic cartography in the renaissance,’ in D. Woodward (ed.), Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1987: 10–50. 65 edgerton ‘Mental matrix’: 28. 66 g. nolli, Rome 1748: The Pianta grande di Roma of Giambattista Nolli in facsimile with an introductory essay by Allan Ceen, J. h. Aronson, highmount, nY, 1984. 67 C. greenberg, ‘review of the exhibition Collage,’ in The Collected Essays and Criticism 1945–1949, vol. 2, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il, 1986: 259–263. The entire quote is as follows: ‘Cubism brought about the destruction of the illusionist means and effects that had characterized Western painting since the fifteenth century … The fictive depths of the picture were drained, and its action was brought forward and identified with the immediate, physical surface of the canvas, board, or paper. Painting was no longer a matter of fictive projection or description, and the picture became indissolubly one with the pigment, the texture, and the flat surface that constituted it as an object.’ 68 It is the inner structure that is revealed in the rephrasing of the problematic, but we must keep in mind Wertheimer’s insistence it is not answers that are privileged, ‘gestalt theory does not seek a solution in a separation of the subject matter of knowledge.’ M. Werthiemer, ‘gestalt theory,’ Social Research 11(1): 78–99, 1994. 69 C. rowe and J. hejduk, ‘lockhart, Texas,’ Architectural Record 121(3): 201–206, 1957. 70 C. rowe, ‘The architecture of Utopia,’ in The Mathematics of the Ideal villa, and Other Essays, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1976: 205–224. 71 rowe, ‘The architecture of Utopia,’ 206. 72 Cerruti, Roma Interrotta. 73 rowe, ‘The architecture of Utopia.’ 74 W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1986: 36. 75 This is the plot device of the movie Fight Club based on the book of the same title by Chuck Palahniuk. In this story the narrator splits into two personalities while flying around the world on business trips. his dissociated personalities are unaware of each other for most of the story. 76 g. Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988. 77 M. e. harris, ‘gianni Vattimo (1936– ),’ The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Accessed 25 June 2016 at http://www.iep.utm.edu/vattimo/

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Crimson flames tied through my ears, rollin’ high and mighty traps Pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my maps ‘We’ll meet on edges, soon,‘ said I, proud ‘neath heated brow Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now ‘My Back Pages,’ Bob Dylan The Instrumentality of the Map in Design This chapter presents specific ways to use maps and mapping in design. As discussed in previous chapters the instrumentality of the map is its efficiency as a representational artifact. As a practice, maps instantiate and exemplify cartographical thinking and introduce geography, cartography and spatial reasoning and are part of the ‘spatial turn’. From the 4.1 Lysa Janssen, GIS Datascape, Harvard, 2006.

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humanities, the ‘spatial turn’ in intellectual discourse transits across disciplines prying open previously hidden meaning or understanding in texts, scientific experiments, and human studies. The ‘turn’ in spatial relationships is an intellectual attitude about thinking with place— the extent to which our sense of self is constructed in relationship to a world replete with objects and their geographies including their histories, social meaning, shared ethics, and values. The turn itself is a look backwards at intellectual communities formed at the dawn of modernism around shared issues in panopticism, territoriality, and landscape. recently, geographic information systems (gIS), digital mapping, and various technologies of mapping expanded the scope of these spatial practices, but their content is rooted in our notions of territory and agency. The mapping impulse is akin to heidegger’s dictum that ‘the essence of technology is by no means anything technological’ where the essence of mapping is anything but the map.1 heidegger proposes the drive to technology isn’t located in the creation of machines themselves or even various human activities associated with modern modes of production. Automobiles are a good example: the parts making up the machine and the labor of the factory workers all belong to technology, but are not its essence. The essence of technology is a frame of mind viewing the world as potential reserve, such as the human population as raw materials, for the production of automobiles. heidegger characterizes the modern impulse in technology as the tendency to enframe nature, including our own bodies. In every aspect of society and culture we set things apart from nature by seeing them in relation to their abstract utility or standing-reserve—the unseen potential in a forest is lumber, rocks is ore, and lakes is water for irrigation, consumption or pleasure. Technology drives our need to measure, calculate and categorize that precedes the sciences. The cognitive structures we impose on the world consequently shape the way we see and respond to it. Cartographical thinking aligns itself to our perceptual modality in the same way: it precedes the territory and determines how and what we can ‘see’ in the world. recent theorizing opened up new applications, but I argue the current capacity for spatial thinking is a distinct condition originating with changes brought about by modernization. Unpacking how this works historically in cartography and at present in design helps us engage current discourse proactively in the process of enframing or mentally mapping the world around us. This aligns with heidegger’s proposal that although we cannot escape our tendencies to see the world as standing-reserve we can orient ourselves to the way nature reveals itself and establish a constructive, not destructive, relationship with the world.2 The world is constantly revealing itself around us, but to see it we must create a productive gap between lived experience and our representations, not as mirrors to hide our biases, but as possible worlds we can knowingly choose to unfold like the pages of a modern atlas or ‘theater of the world.’ This chapter examines specific ways maps influence design. We study examples from various historical periods up to and including recent maps made by design students. My survey isn’t comprehensive. It’s a selective introduction for the reader, demonstrating how cartographical thinking engages the process of design as hypothesis making. By and large, these projects are architectural, landscape-oriented, or urban design propositions, but the mode of thought applies to any design problem. Starting with a historical example we

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consider the specifics of perspective mapping used by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) the renaissance architect and surveyor. Brunelleschi is not unique in employing the mapping impulse. Designers across disciplines instrumentalize maps, but his is one of the earliest uses of a drawing technology or map projection in design. Modern examples include Colin rowe’s figure/ground gestalt in the ‘roma Interrotta’ project and kenzo Tange’s use of photogrammetry in the Tokyo Bay Plan. Additionally, kevin lynch introduced the idea that perceptions of urban inhabitants create unique ‘cognitive maps’ of the city. looking only at the last century there are numerous designers who instrumentalize the map to promote their ideology of design: Patrick geddes, Frank lloyd Wright, Archigram, Cedric Price, Peter eisenman, and zaha hadid to name a few. Almost all designers use maps to understand the given conditions of a site or environment, however, not all are able to use the map as a conceptual device to curate and synthesize their observations. This is partly why I pursued a methodology for using mapping as a strategy of secondary signification: to build correspondences between observation and real-world conditions or concepts and possible physical or perceptual analogues.3 Another reason is a certainty that if designers don’t learn to use maps effectively they are unable to manage the complexity and quantity of qualitative and quantitative data necessary to make informed decisions in data-intense environments. The chapter concludes—although the reader is welcome to approach this in any order—with a series of case studies produced by students in a map course taught over the last six years at various institutions. Maps are discussed from conception to their role in design projects when applicable. Early Maps and Mapping as Hypothesis Making Fillipo Brunelleschi is credited with the first formal application of perspective in the early fifteenth century.4 The famous and familiar experiments in front of the Baptistery of San giovanni in Florence and later in the Piazza della Signoria are the first demonstrations of the use of the picture plane and a measured distance geometrically transposed. The use of perspective in the work of Brunelleschi differs from the Barker panoramas discussed earlier. Panoramas were didactic in the mid-nineteenth english socio-political context. The following use of perspective mapping is less polemical, more prescriptive. I argue perspective mapping was a kind of ‘hypothesis making’ informing decisions relative to a particular context for Brunelleschi. This moment of origin reveals an alternative instrumentality of perspectival understanding of the interrelationship of building and site. Closer examination of Brunelleschi’s empirical experiments reveals two distinct uses for perspective technology: the Albertian model that is pictorial and compositional and a second, that is topographical and closely related to survey, or mapping procedures.5 Technologies of perspectival construction introduce not only a way to reconstruct the third dimension on a flat surface but also to order our perceptions of space. As we saw with projections in Chapter 2, perspective projection structures thinking about space. Perspective projection was the first step towards a rationalized visual image. however, an alternative reading for the role of perspective in architectural ideation relates directly to maps and mapping as a topographical tool used to verify, examine and later, in husserl’s terms, induce the ‘spatiality of the thing, and of things cohering ultimately to the ideal objects

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of geometry.’6 our concern is with representational effects applied to reality apart from a specific representational preconception as a methodology for reenacting or mapping the visual plane on a flat surface. In this case it is not the possibility of using perspective to design; it is the use of perspective as design. This is not as obvious as it sounds because what we are talking about are two distinctly different approaches to the relationship between building and context. one is the idea of space as an abstract construction occupied by objects as in the Albertian grid, while the other conceives space as an assemblage between object and field or context. An embodied architecture conceived in the latter category intensifies the relationship between spectacle, allegory, and place. As urban historian J. konvitz argues linear perspective was not thought to be an artificial device to give the optical illusion of reality on two dimensions by a two-dimensional version of reality, but a key to the spatial organization inherent in the world.7 Panofsky’s assertion that perspective is a ‘relative’ form culturally dictated effectively demolished its claim to truth8 and like Mark Monmonier’s claim for maps as distortions of reality based on the particular criteria used to construct them, perspective as a kind of topographical mapping gives a distorted image, or at best, an incomplete truth.9 Assuming we accept that artificial perspective was a substitution of one construct for a previous one, a ‘substitution of one aspect of truth, and one convention, for a different convention and another truth,’ does the instrumentality of early perspective for design in architecture transcend its role as a purely fictive representation?10 To answer this we need to clarify the historical role for a topographical perspective specific to architecture and more obviously related to maps. Brunelleschi’s discovery of linear perspective comes to us from his biographer, Antonio Manetti, and later Vasari, neither of whom give a detailed description of his methodology. The extent of the explanation of Brunelleschi’s demonstrations consists in the use of panels with holes and a mirror viewed from a fixed viewpoint, one for the Piazza della Signoria, including the Palazzo Vecchio, and one for the Baptistery in Florence. Many scholars have attempted to recreate the conditions of the original panels, but lack pictorial evidence as neither of Brunelleschi’s vedute is extant. Turning instead to vernacular and artisanal epistemologies offers alternatives to the customary explanations and uncovers a use for perspective in the design of buildings in their context. What we can deduce from Brunelleschi’s experiment suggests looking at three areas rooted in the cognitive landscape of the fifteenth century: first, a critique of skills relating to perspective in painting; second, conventional mathematical and geometrical skills; and third, methodologies of survey commonly known to geometers including Brunelleschi. It is reasonable to assume that all three played a significant role in translating empirical observation to geometrical construction. Perspective and Painting The difference between pictorial perspective used in painting and Brunellschi’s topographical perspective is evident in their origins: one emerges from painterly approaches creating the perception of spatial depth and the other is an applied perspectival treatment of spatial

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relationships in the built condition. For most art historians linear perspective emerged as an advance in the drive toward naturalism in painting. Jehane kuhn explores the possibility of an alternative view: perspective arose within the context of architecture and the arts of measurement or survey, an observation suggesting perspective did not meet a need in painting, but was imposed on it.11 Analysis of perspectival techniques in medieval art shows there was knowledge of the skills for creating pictorial depth before measured perspective in architecture. The rules for pre-perspective constructions developed by giotto, Duccio and other painters and codified by Cennino Cennini don’t indicate an unsolved problem within the pictorial tradition that Brunelleschi’s perspective experiments resolve.12 The painterly representations weren’t judged inadequate.13 Painters won’t reject or resist the new perspective technique, indeed the first published theory of Alberti’s’ Della Pictura is directed specifically toward painters, but research hasn’t uncovered a demonstrable desire within the history of painting for alternatives.14 This suggests perspective as invented by BrunelleschI met a different and equally particular set of needs appearing within architecture. If this perspective doesn’t come from within the discipline of painting: where would it surface? For this we turn to alternative skills sets typical for architects and surveyors in the renaissance. Perspective, Mathematics and Survey gauging entailed the estimating of volumes and distances through euclidian geometry. It allowed merchants to estimate quantities, especially useful as no standardization of measurements or containers for goods traded between city-states exist. leonardo Fibonacci brought the ‘rule of Three’ to Italy from Islam early in the fourteenth century and easily a third of any arithmetic treatises written at the time, including Piero della Francesca’s Trattato d’Abaco (1450) refer to it. ‘The rule of Three’ is a proportional system stating simply, ‘A is to B as C is to D’.15 It allowed laymen through daily use to become skilled at reducing complex and diverse relationships to a geometrical proportion. Art historian Michael Baxandall argues these skills form a visual awareness predisposing the general populace to ‘attend to the structure of complex forms as a combination of regular geometrical bodies and as intervals comprehensible in series.’16 Both skills are the basis of a visual language shared by the commercial populace and producer alike as a proficiency informing the reading of pictorial representations and establishing a familiarity with three-dimensional translation onto a flat surface and visual dexterity closely aligned with surveying. The direct link between architects’ use of orthographic systems to produce accurate measurements in drawings and measured appearances determined using applied geometry is associated with misura ad distanza or ad occhio: topographical survey. Typical survey methods involved rods, or upright staffs, wooden or copper squares, quadrants, mirrors, plane table and the astrolabe. All shared a dependence on proportional formulae and similar triangles (Figure 4.2). The simplest procedure involved measuring lengths on a graduated rod placed at a distance from the object being measured thus utilizing the proportional relationship between the two (Figure 4.3). The mirror method and its variations (Figure 4.4) necessitate placing a mirror, either on the ground or elevated on a staff, between the observer and the object and measuring heights and distances from the reflected image. Both methods were utilized in the quattrocento in the new and rapidly growing practice among architects of surveying buildings

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4.2 Surveying exercise, Fillipo Calandri, Trattato di Arithmetica (Florence, 1491–92) published in by Lorenzo Morgiani and Johannes Petri, 1.

from classical antiquity. This convergence stimulates the knowledge preceding the invention of perspective. We know Brunelleschi used the rod method (Figure 4.5), or a modified version called the sighting-plane (proposed by kuhn) to survey antiquities in rome.17 Closer examination of the descriptions of Brunelleschi’s perspective panels reveal they were not constructed with the Albertian procedure (to be discussed shortly). Alberti’s method constructs, before drawing a building, an orthogonal grid of pavement receding to converge on a ‘centric point.’ The views chosen by Brunelleschi however, do not emphasize the ‘centric point.’ Few orthogonal lines are visible in either construction: only the two side facades in the Baptistery, and at the Piazza della Signoria, none at all. An alternative methodology is implicated with similarities to the sighting-plane method but inferred by difference. This leads us to a closer examination of the instrumentality of one of the views Brunelleschi constructed in the Piazza della Signoria looking toward the Palazzo Vecchio. The view reveals a direct relationship between the techniques of survey and an impetus in architectural design for a verifiable and measured representation of the relationship between building and urban landscape. In the case of Palazzo Vecchio it is a spatial relationship between the palace and the piazza and the identity of the piazza within Florence. The palace is the central figure in the civic life of the city, and its presence on the skyline of immense importance. Marvin Trachtenberg shows contrary to common belief medieval architects consider larger-scale relationships and take into account the geometry of sightlines. The latter is ‘driven by topographic conditions and empirical perspectival views, or “tactile” physical volumes shaping and shaped by surrounding illusionistic spaces…fused into an inseparable unity of form and meaning.’18 Trachtenberg argues the orientation of the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio in conjunction with the framing of the Piazza is an urban design solution acting as a hinge between the older, orthogonal layout

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4.3–4.5 Figure 4.3 illustrates the indirect measurement of a building by the rod method (from Fibonacci). AMN is the rod, ED the observer, THL the building or object. Figure 4.4 shows the measurement of a building by the horizontal and vertical mirror method. For both: h is the height of the building, H the height of the observer, d the horizontal distant, c the center of the mirror, D the boundary of the plane, and EO the observer. Figure 4.5 illustrates Brunelleschi’s conjectural sighting-plane method. Point t is the same as Alberti’s ‘centric point.’ Height readings are marked on measured strips of parchment. These would later be transferred to a drawing surface by reference to the horizontal and vertical crossings (Kuhn). The method, unlike Alberti’s, suggests a constellation of points registered on a sighting-plane more dependent on the observer’s distance from the object rather than the observer’s exact location. This organization is similar to one described in a treatise on cartography found in the monastery of Klosterneuberg near Vienna dating from the early quattrocento. Brunelleschi was likely aware of this procedure through his friend P. Toscannelli studying at the monastery close to the same time. (Figure by author after a diagram by Kuhn.) of roman Florence and the later reordered city developed in relation to the Arno. The reorientation of the edges of the piazza could only be to enhance the role of the space as a connector between the older roman city and the later city. The asymmetrical disposition of the tower and its height are part of a grand architectural scheme (begun in the late 1200s) in which the asymmetrical piazza bisected by the monumental asymmetrical building is perfectly in balance when seen from the extreme corner entry off the Via del Calzaiuoli (Figure 4.6), exactly the view Brunelleschi’s chooses for his demonstration (Figure 4.7). Brunelleschi’s view in effect verifies this topographic condition precisely because it is a measured representation whose goal is commensuratio (symmetry or uniformity) that imparts a geometric regularity that unlike a pictorial representation is not arbitrary.

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4.6 Isometric rendering showing the viewing angles from the corner of Via dei Calzaioli. It illustrates the tower height is within the 60-degree cone of vision used to minimize distortion in a perspectival drawing. (Diagram by Sohee Ryan, after Trachtenberg.)

4.7 Reconstruction of the two views attributed to Brunelleschi. View on the left is the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral, on the right the Piazza della Signoria. (Sohee Ryan, University of Arkansas, after Paronchi.)

Case Studies 4.8 Piazza della Signoria with the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. The left-hand view is a photograph taken from the northwest corner approximating the position of Brunelleschi’s panel. The right-hand view is a constructed rendering from the same position. Photo courtesy of JoJan.

let’s summarize ideas presented thus far: In Perspective, Mathematics and Survey we reviewed the relationship between the basic arithmetical skills and the common tools of survey familiar to Brunelleschi and showed his demonstrations may arise from techniques of survey. In addition, the purpose was to verify a topographical or urban condition; one we can confirm from historical evidence, specifically the design and spatial organization of the Piazza della Signoria. next we compare the two concurrent perspective technologies: leon Battista Alberti’s pictorial perspective more closely aligned with painting, and Piero della Francesca’s topographic perspective to which arguably Brunelleschi’s empirical experiments relate. I will apply this to an analysis of spatial thinking in the quattrocento and ultimately to the use of perspective in design. Natural and Artificial Perspective Alberti’s costruzione legittima begins with the construction of an a priori frame filled with an endless pavement or grid into which objects are inserted and composed in the service of a story molded by the perceptions of the artist (Figure 4.8). The individuality of each object is asserted without any relation to reality and fixed by the imposed grid. The ‘centric point’ (this does not have to fall on the geometric center) coincides with the position of the observer’s eye which means the observer must remain in that particular position otherwise the image is distorted. In addition the relation between human presence and the perspective scenery diverges in the Albertian construction.19 It is only orthogonal objects (buildings, furniture) that submit themselves to projection. A world of things (people, clothes) and as hubert Damisch demonstrates, clouds, do not easily yield to Alberti’s grid and cannot be projected.20 Alberti’s perspective is a set of conventions ‘without any necessary relationship to reality.’21 This is key, as Brunelleschi as an architect uses perspective to shape reality.

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1. Perpsectiveprojection of a square using Piero's method. Where E - viewer, V - focus of orthogonals, ABCD - square, BE and CE are drawn and points b and c are noter, CB is transferred to give ddcc (after Kemp).

2. Diagram of Piero's Other Method, using a plane triangle 1, 2, 3. The plan is shown in 6,the side elevation is a and the front elevation is c with the perspective image of the triangle mapped onto it (from a diagram by R. Evans).

4.9 Two diagrams showing the construction of Piero’s ‘Other Method.’ Diagram 1, above, is the perspective projection of a square where E – viewer, V – focus of orthogonal, ABCD – square, BE and CE are drawn and point b and c are noted. CB is transferred to give ddcc (after Kemp). Diagram 2, below, uses a plane triangle so the plan is shown in b, the side elevation is a, and the front elevation is c with the perspective image of the triangle mapped onto it (from a diagram by R. Evans). This method emphasizes the projection of points defining the shape of an object, opposed to the Albertian method of locating an object on a plane with a preconstructed grid.

Case Studies 4.10 Shown is Alberti’s ‘legitimate construction’ demonstrating the ray going from the center of the eye (E) to the ‘centric point’ (C), by author (after Kemp).

Piero della Francesca who besides being a painter was also a noted mathematician developed a perspective methodology in De Prospectiva Pingendi (1474)22 with a very different set of assumptions (Figures 4.9 and 4.10). Unlike Alberti, Piero’s method doesn’t assume an a priori grid. he employs five elements: the eye, the form of the object seen, the distance between the eye and object, the lines joining the eye to the farthest edges of the object, and the surface of the picture.23 The vanishing point, so present and troubling for Alberti, Piero avoids when possible. he presents two methods of construction: the first nominally shares with Alberti the center point to which parallel lines converge, and the ‘other Method’ or altro modo24 in which they do not. Because the other Method was not in common use, no demonstrable link to Brunelleschi’s empirical experiments exists,25 but it illustrates the point that Piero’s intuitions about perspective were informed by an entirely different set of concerns, concerns shared in general by design in architecture.26 his procedure somewhere between orthographic projection and perspective projection effectively dissolves surfaces into a ‘constellation of points’27 rendering a perspective result, similar to the effect of architecture. Piero begins by demonstrating the relationship between objects is proportional to their distance and beyond certain limits they are distorted (Figure 4.11). The rule ‘indicates the limits of the validity of the representational configuration produced by perspective.’28 he explains: ‘This is because, within the limits, the eye will see, without moving, all of your work, whereas if it’s obliged to move, the areas (termini) beyond the limits of vision will appear false. Consequently, if you observe the reasons I have just elucidated, you will see the defect results from them, and not from perspective.’29 In other words, Piero’s perspective is able to map relationships between the object and the eye and even when using the vanishing point,30 ‘concentrates on the local [sic] relationships between eye, picture plane, and object.’31 Fixed through an internal structure, objects are dependent on a systemic relationship to the field, or to borrow gestalt terminology, field and object are co-dependent. A comparison between the two perspectival constructions demonstrates the difference. The grid in Piero’s view is not regularized by a priori geometrical order, but results from the projection of the salient points of the object onto the plane of intersection (Figure 4.12) whose frame is limited by the distance from the object at which it becomes distorted. he

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4.11 Comparisons of the demonstration of the propositional diminution of objects as proposed by Piero (top) and Euclid (bottom). For Euclid E is the observer, KL and MN planes. Angles x and y are not equal. For Piero E is the position of the eye and C, the position behind the picture plane (PA) such that DC: AC = ED: BA. (Digram by author after Evans.)

4.12 The diagrams show a comparison between Alberti’s method and Piero’s other method for construction of a perspective. The left-hand diagram is the projection of a circle using Alberti’s grid method where the shape of the circle at bottom becomes an ovoid-like shape positioned relative to the grid at top. The drawing on the right is a projection of an octagon by Piero using his ‘Other Method.’ Note the octagon at bottom (actually the outline of a fountain) is projected point by point to construct a perspective view, not projected into an a priori perspectival grid. See Figure 2.13 for a demonstration of projected curve surfaces using Piero’s method.

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describes orthogonal foreshortening through proportional ratios. In contrast the Albertian system relies on the grid to determine the projection of the object and the limits of the frame. The best demonstrations of this are visual and Piero’s diagrams of the human head exemplify the bravura of his mathematical constructions. Because of its compound curves and distorted planes the human head is especially difficult to project (Figure 4.13). It doesn’t yield to the flat planes necessary in the Albertian method. Piero uses a collection of points to plot the contours of the head and rotate it in an orthographic projection resulting in a perspectival view.

4.13 It is not possible to determine the contours of something as complex as a human head using Alberti’s method. Any figure consisting of complex curves is located in an Albertian perspective not calculated (see Figure 4.6). Piero’s method locates a point grid on the surface and re-projects the points in perspective. Head studies, Piero della Francesca from Prospectiva Pingendi (1472–75), 22 × 29.5 cm.

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It seems an ordinary perspective eludes us. our assumed familiarity with it can be deceptive. From the analysis two separate but similar schema emerge: 1) the Albertian pictorial perspective characterized by a grid-based methodology (the velo)32 suited to the perceptual translation of space on a flat surface, namely painting, and 2) the rationalization of apparent or localized conditions through a topographical perspective more closely related to Piero’s methods and Brunelleschi’s survey experiments. This suggests perspective for Brunelleschi was a topographic tool used to map a condition opposed to an illustrative tool used to represent conditions. The ‘perspectival hinge’ is not only as Alberto Pérez-gómez suggests between architectural ideation and drawing as a ‘vehicle to conceive architectural space,’ but also between solid and void in a geometrically measured field out of which architecture emerges.33 This means topographical perspective surveys and reconfigures context. Assuming this is useful, we need to find evidence of its instrumentality in Brunelleschi’s architecture. even if Manetti disavows a connection in his biography, it is reasonable to assume Brunelleschi would attempt to apply his innovation. This requires looking more closely at the buildings produced after the demonstrations with the panels. one such project is the dome of the Florence Cathedral, after which we look at two interior configurations. The Dome of Florence and the Plan as Map Depending on the reconstruction, Brunelleschi’s perspective demonstrations occurred as early as 1413, but not later than 1425. he completed his major architectural work after 1420 with the exception of the dome for the Florence Cathedral (1418). For our purposes the extension to the Palazzo Vecchio is significant. It is reasonable to assume the proposed addition heightened his awareness of its urban configuration and contributed to him using it as a model for one of the vedute.34 It focused his attention on the urban configuration of Florence in general and was likely in mind when he began official work on the dome. We briefly examine the dome and lantern for the Florence Cathedral as exterior examples of how Brunelleschi could use topographical perspective. Analysis of the dome generally focuses on its construction and engineering, and not how it works in its environment. Understood as a natural result of the architect’s charge to finish the gothic church, the dome’s contextualism is seen to undermine its claim to being the first modern building in the renaissance. on examination, however, the ornamental white ribs of the dome are atypical for Florentine domes and their prominence on the exterior are in fact in contrast to the trecento domes on the lower church (Figure 4.14); an impression reinforced by the armatures of the lantern. The effect emphasizes the presence of the dome in the sea of redtile roofs above which it floats and gives it directionality when viewed from the streets below, a characteristic understood perspectivally in relation to the way a person moves through the cityscape. I argue the dome works across two scales heightening local relationships between tangible conditions: first, the everyday view from within the city streets and, second, the city view confirming its presence as an important civic structure. Projecting an urban role for the dome using the white ribs is only possible to imagine given a topographic and perspectival mode of imagining context. The dome is not compositional, but instrumental in its landscape. Summarizing characteristics of the alternative or topographic perspective we find the frame is linked to the limits of vision; attention is on ‘local relationships between tangible

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Case Studies 4.14 Left, dome of Florence Cathedral and right, typical Florentine domes.

things,’35 the viewpoint of the observer does not coincide with the vanishing point (given there is one), and emphasis is on proportional relationships not converging parallels. Most analysis of the origin of Brunelleschi’s ideation (and renaissance architecture in general) concentrates on its relation to the aesthetics of roman antiquities. As we see with the dome, it is possible perspectival ideation was equally influential, in particular topographic perspective linked to how space is configured not just represented. Another question is whether it is possible the procedure of survey and its implication in the invention of topographical perspective played a part in the interior configurations of buildings. To understand how Brunelleschi uses topographical perspective in the design of interior spaces we look at two churches, San lorenzo (1421–28) and San Spirito (1436), completed within ten years of each other. Both plans are latin crosses with side aisles, a configuration lise Bek argues verifies a causal relationship between the kind of telescopic effects proposed by Albertian perspective and renaissance space.36 however, this is to impose a pre-condition

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Case Studies on an effect axiality that exists well before Alberti’s converging parallels. Besides, this would only be useful from one point of view and doesn’t help explain the geometric unity of the plans of the churches taken as a whole or the actual spaces of the interior. A coherence of the unifying geometry is evident in the sectional relationship between arcade and clerestory in both churches. This becomes evident when looking at the proportional relationships illustrated from any view other than the central one as seen in San lorenzo (Figure 4.15). In contrast San Miniato al Monte (Figure 4.16), a preperspective church, shows that without using perspective to control the relative spatial relationships, arches and their openings are not geometrically proportional. San Spirito is more complex spatially than San lorenzo. It abandons the linearity of the wall and substitutes the dynamic undulating edge of the side niches (Figure 4.17), which in the original proposition would have been the expression of the exterior façade. The tangible relationship between the geometry of the niche and the proportional geometries of the plan drive the design. The conditions of the topographical perspective we uncovered in Brunelleschi’s approach are evident: emphasis on proportional relationships and the resistance to a vanishing point organizes the space of the church in a series of nested geometries, in effect a three-dimensional result of an orthographic projection.37 one might imagine this is what Brunelleschi wanted to prove the day he stood in front of the Piazza della Signoria and contemplated how to bring the connections between the palazzo, piazza and Florence into geometric focus. Topographic perspective reveals tangible parallels between building and context. The symbolic power of this within the greater realm of Florentine and Italian political hierarchies was clear, and more importantly for the humanists revealed a geometric consistency corresponding to a worldview demanding the measure of appearances reflect an inherent order. Topographical perspective like pictorial perspective is an illusion—a perception of reality, or realities. The first is useful in design to understand an effect; the second manipulates context. remembering context (historical, physical or intellectual) isn’t fixed—it is always relative—meaning that it occurs at multiple scale levels and across temporalities even as it ‘fixes’ the topography of place in the representation. Making a distinction between Alberti and pictorial perspective and Brunelleschi and Piero’s ‘other Method’ clarifies several instrumentalities for perspective. While the one is a simulation of a perceptual reality and looks more real, the other is a transcription of the data from one milieu (the site) to another, usually a building. This begs a different set of questions in relation to how building is understood in the site or context. At the very least it brings the continuity between place/field and architecture/object into sharper focus. The next section asks how we can achieve this using a variety of data. Working with Observation: Quantitative and Qualitative Data Maps and Experiments Stephan Toulmin philosopher and educator compared scientific theories to maps. he begins by questioning the traditional account of how experiments are used to establish theories. Data and experiment are the sine qua non of establishing value and validity of theories in most of the hard sciences. Toulmin’s observation goes to the heart of the how data as observation about natural phenomena are being used and accounted for in the experiment.

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4.15 Interior of San Spirito, Florence, showing the spatial depth achieved by the overlapping proportional divisions in plan, section, and elevation, similar to the plan shown in Figure 4.17. The dark marble ‘outlining’ of the arches and columns helps clarify the geometric relationship. Contrast this to the use of color difference as surface pattern typical of pre-Brunelleschian architecture seen at San Miniato al Monte.

4.16 San Miniato al Monte, Florence (1018–1207). This church predates perspective. Although the arches have a familial resemblance they are not proportionally related. Therefore, they do not work as spatially unified whole.

4.17 Plan of San Spirito, Florence, by Brunelleschi (Geymuller, after Trachtenberg). The proportional relationships in plan produce an even more controlled spatial complexity than San Lorenzo. The plan diagram on the left shows the geometrical oscillation of major and minor structural members as proportional squares (Luporini). The diagram on the right is the geometric scheme illustrating the five degrees of proportional relation isolated in the west transept. Drawn by Sohee Ryan, University of Arkansas, 2016.

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he makes three particular points about the nature of the relationship between experiment and theory. experiments have: 1

less observations than one would expect—to establish the difference between laws and generalizations because ‘to establish the form of a regularity in physics only a few careful observations are needed.’

2

A difficulty in explaining how subsequent applications of a theory are related to the observations by which the theory was originally established.38

In his next observation he notes the same problem present in the map: To take the two difficulties together: it is worth noticing they arise for theories as much as, and no more than, for maps. not all the applications to which a theory is put need have been specifically made in the course of the experimental investigation by which it was established. But nor need all the things which can be read off of from a map have been specifically put in. A child might wonder how it was possible ever to produce a map at all, since to tread every inch even of a small area, and to measure all the distances and directions one can read off a map, would take an unlimited length of time. This, of course, is the marvel of cartography: the fact that, from a limited number of highly precise and well-chosen measurements and observations, one can produce a map from which can be read off an unlimited number of geographical facts of almost as great a precision.39 (emphasis mine) This doesn’t undermine the utility of the map or the diagram in hypothesis making. only through this kind of ‘fuzzy visual math’ are ‘unlimited number of inferences of comparable accuracy’ made from a limited number of highly accurate observations.40 guidelines for working with observation are robust in cartography and the sciences. Questions about how data is acquired, evaluated and applied in the map arise often and this section addresses some of the theoretical and practical questions related to data. Maps of course require us to interpret and interpolate meaning from visual signs standing in for characteristics or qualities. Using nehemiah grew’s maps of tree growth from The Anatomy of Plants (1680) demonstrates how (Figures 4.18 and 4.19). These maps representing the cellular structure of tree cores allow multiple interpretations of seemingly precise information. ‘Seemingly’ because the visual representation is neither precise or exact—we don’t know how large or how many cells are in a tree trunk and doubt they would look like this in reality, but from the map we infer a number of useful qualities of the cells of tree branches. In a similar vein Descartes’ map of Vortices (Figure 4.20) was a popular explanation for the movement of the planetary bodies through the ether, the dense air-like substance believed to fix bodies in space. Describing the heavens in this way worked as a theoretical philosophy, but in practice was not particularly good at explaining phenomena. In hindsight, Descartes’ vortices served an important cultural role as an underlying philosophy for a Copernican sun-centered theory, but few of the scientific ideas developed as explanations for the orbits of planetary bodies.

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4.18, 4.19 The images are from Nehemiah Grew, Anatomy of Plants (1682). Grew published a detailed study of plant anatomy credited as the beginning of modern comparative anatomy. The plant anatomy as drawn suggests comparisons with the organs and structures of human bodies. These studies contributed to a general debate in the seventeenth century that plants did not have internal structure with distinct organs. Grew believed there were similarities of function between animals and plants leading him to look for the same structures in both. These maps are a hypothesis of how plant bodies are like human bodies. This mechanist view was ‘a deliberate attempt to offer explanations of phenomena in corporeal, material or physical terms,’ however these difficult terms were interpreted. Anatomy studies are atlases or maps representing physical bodies reduced often to their salient characteristics. Nehemiah Grew, Anatomy of Plants, 1682, plate LXXIX and table XXXVI.

4.20 From René Descartes, ‘Vortices,’ from the Principia philosophiae (1644).

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‘The relationship between the map and the geographical statement,’ is, as Toulmin points out, ‘of a different, non-deductive kind.’41 one cannot understand the movement of planets from the map, but the map presents everything contained in the set of observational phenomena (whether right or wrong) in a logical manner so ‘the aggregate of discrete observations is transformed into a simple and connected picture, much as the collection of readings in a surveyor’s note-book is transformed into a clear and orderly map.’42 This is interesting when related to the observation and cataloguing of natural phenomena often made by designers deciding how to address a particular problem in context: it is the transformation of the observations to the map and the theoretical framework more than the description of the phenomena accounting for the kinds of conclusions possible to draw. As a representational device the map supports this precisely because of the imprecision of signs—like Descartes’ vortices produce more in their misreading than clear understanding. Quantitative and Qualitative Data Definitions of terms vary slightly but in general quantitative data can be measured using quanta or numbers and tends to approximate phenomena using analytical methods. Qualitative data is characterized as an approach to particular examples of phenomena trying to describe it in depth. research is an iterative process in which data gathering, analysis and representation do not proceed along a linear course, but are usually fluid and messy.43 knigge and Cope commenting on the idea of the iterative process note, ‘This kind of purposeful recursive data exploration is a shared characteristic of both grounded theory and spatial data exploration and visualization (emphasis mine). They advocate for a ‘grounded visualization’ encompassing four areas of commonality between grounded theory enabling rigorous qualitative analysis, and visualization: 1) both are exploratory, 2) iterative and recursive, 3) enable simultaneous consideration of particular instances and general patterns, and 4) encourage multiple views and perspective for building knowledge.44 I propose that using a grounded theory approach facilitates the multiplicity of possible data and the internal consistency of the logic of the map. It is demonstrable that a ‘grounded theory’ approach aids research in geography and some of these methods are worth recounting.45 Using grounded research requires the researcher to be clear and open in reporting research procedures so overall findings may be judged in terms of the validity and credibility of the data, the plausibility and value of the findings, the theoretical formulations, the adequacy of the research process generated, and the empirical grounding of the research findings.46 In addition, findings need to be replicable. But while general consensus reigns regarding standards for quantitative data not applied to qualitative data, there remains an expectation of rigor and recognition of the importance of dissemination and communication of methodologies. Finally, grounded theory is deeply concerned with enabling rigorous qualitative research in which theory is held accountable to empirical data.47 one of the reasons grounded research is a useful idea to develop in the context of design studies is it ‘is an attempt to acknowledge analysis to be a social practice with all its attendant subjectivities, partial knowledge, and positionalities, but it is one seeking to find rigorous,

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verifiable, and explicit ways to draw conclusions.’48 knigge and Cope conclude a grounded visualization approach: offers a way to combine qualitative and quantitative data together with a ‘commitment’ to iterative, reflexive rounds of analysis, enables research to be attuned to multiple subjectivities, truths, and meanings. By building on areas of commonality between grounded theory and visualization—being exploratory, iterative—recursive, considering both the particular and the general, and allowing multiple versions of reality to emerge—grounded visualization carries great potential for building theory that is both ‘grounded’ in everyday life and real experiences, and ‘situated’ by context and broader trends and patterns. grounded visualization is a particularly geographical set of analyses that could be used broadly thereby expanding the relevance and capabilities of spatial perspectives to other researchers. Specifically, grounded visualization is sensitive to scale issues, from local to global and back again; integrates mobility and flows over time and space; greatly depends on both qualitative and quantitative measures of context (historical and geographical); and, finally (as shown in our case studies), enables rich explorations of place.49 This approach coincides with similar problems faced in design research given the blurry line between quantitative and qualitative data. Additionally, scalar data occurs synchronically and diachronically. It can be subjective and depends on historical, social, or geographical contexts. A plethora of recent concerns about the types of data used in the map concern the way data is gathered and the formats used to represent it beginning with the introduction of geospatial information systems (gIS). gIS data divides into two formats: raster and vector. It is worth briefly comparing these differences to ‘look under the hood’ of the gIS machinery. how gIS data is classified and organized unmasks general questions regarding data in maps. raster files are a matrix of digital cells: each cell contains a value representing quantitative information—information with a quanta or numerical value on a scale like temperature, land use/cover, elevation, depth, or intensity of vegetation. Vector data consists of points, lines, and polygons—again digital—representing location, distance or area of landscape features. Although one would think of vector data as quantitative, it is usually generated from gIS processes through a qualitative approach, whereas raster data linked to the number of pixels on a screen tends to be gathered using sophisticated remote sensing techniques that are quantative.50 Most vector data is generated using highresolution aerial photos or satellite images requiring processing and screen digitizing by hand. human interpretation of how this data is catalogued and validated is part of why it is considered qualitative not quantitative. A good example of this is land-use data generated for the purposes of municipal maps. Categories or zones are assigned, e.g. commercial, housing, institutional, where the blanket assessment of an area zoned ‘housing’ may not be true. Within a given area are likely people with home offices, garage laboratories, or possibly houses used solely for production of illegal drugs. The assigned category describes ‘multiple representation’ and refers to the various methods for symbolizing data. But as Slocum points out regarding the map:

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The postmodernist should be interested in this approach because it concurs with the notion there is no single `correct’ way of visualizing data. Additionally, however, the postmodernist would be interested in the multiple meanings and potentially hidden agendas found in a particular thematic map.’51 A similar example is the Map of U.S Data Network and Cost of Energy per kWh to Mean Temperature in February map (Figure 4.21). The map indexes five conditions: 1) average cost of energy per kWh by state, 2) zone temperatures, 3) location of data cable hubs and transmission lines, 4) network ownership, and 5) location of railway lines. The comparison is a gap-analysis identifying opportunities for the strategic expansion of the data network using the relationship between current hubs, temperature and cost of electricity. The ideology of the map may not be overtly polemical—it is an argument about the relationship between a visible resource (electricity) and its invisible demand made by server farms powering the Internet. The map identifies locations for server farms in the U.S. balancing cost of power, outside temperature, and access to existing network cable to supply using a sustainability model. The qualitative selection of data points reveals that contrary to current locations for major network hubs in states with warm climates or coastal locations where temperatures are milder, states with cooler climates and less expensive energy are optimal for reducing cost. however, given their smaller populations and weaker political representation these states aren’t hubs. If anything the map demonstrates in the politics of power, literally and figuratively, numbers matter. Case Studies These case studies are from my mapping course given at Washington University in St. louis, harvard University, and Florida International University. Student maps range broadly between quantitative and qualitative analysis and include thematic, choreographic, ichnographic and topographic maps to name a few. The following selections illustrate the capacity of the map through measurement, or better, filtering the world (however relative) to act as a document of observations—in short, a kind of ‘scientized document.’ Mark Monmonier famously showed not only do all maps lie, they must.52 The lie Monmonier refers to is not one of commission, but omission. As documents of observations, maps are by definition reduced models of reality reflecting the mapmaker’s dialogue with the world. The course taught students how to hypothesize and communicate their ideas to themselves effectively through maps. exercises and readings focused on the necessary grammar and syntax of mapmaking, but the methodology required students to unpack, repack and then generate maps. If theory was the instigator of thought, application was the handmaid to facilitate a deeper understanding of the mechanics of thinking cartographically. emphasis wasn’t placed on technologies used in making maps (gIS, mathematical projection, CAD programs), but rather on maps as representational strategies. Students were encouraged to use whatever technology appropriate to the subject of their map including video, digital software, hand drawings, gIS, and physical and digital modeling. required were two mapping projects and a series of short exercises. The first project was an unmapping problem in which students choose one of five pre-selected maps, deconstruct them to understand the map’s organization, then reassemble components of the original map into a new map according

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INCLUDING DATA LINE TYPES AND ENERGY SOURCE PER STATE

MAP OF U.S. DATA NETWORKAND COST OF ENERGY PER KWHTO MEAN TEMPERATURE IN FEBRUARY

4.21 Map of U.S. Data Network and Cost of Energy per KWh to Mean Temperature in February, digital file printed on matte paper, 36 × 42 inches, author and Sarah Kellerman.

-"d-" -OF-

21.ULYBI1

PER W SIFTATE. FEU 2010

4.22 Frame-by-frame mapping of Hans Richter film, ‘Rhythmus 21.’ Richter and Victor Eggeling were among the first to explore abstract film. Eggeling transposed his scroll drawing to make ‘cinematic drawings.’ Richter moved away from drawing to make a series of early abstract films in the 1920s. ‘Rhythmus 21’ (1923) is one of these films made using black, grey, and white rectangular images fading in and out of the film frame with additional horizontal and vertical lines and grey, black and white spaces. Richter creates a rhythm with the elements conveying movement through space. His films are conscious mapping of a sequence of movements using a limited and controlled vocabulary of visual elements. Richter’s abstract films influenced architects like Mies Van de Rohe and Le Corbusier. See Figures 4.23–24.

4.23 Similar to the floating abstract planes in Richter’s film, Mies’ proposal for a concert hall echoes the suggestion of spatial enclosure. The dynamism of the space is generated perceptually for the user as they move through the space, mimicking the effect produced by watching one of Richter’s films. Concert Hall, 1942. Project. Collage over photograph, 29½ × 62 in. The Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mary Callery.

4.24 Early modernist architects like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier were strongly influenced by Richter’s work. Richter worked directly with Mies as the director of almost fourteen hours of film on Mies’ work and as editor for the avant-garde journal G – Material zur elementaren Gestaltung. The experience walking through the planes dividing the ‘rooms’ of the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies echoes the visual experience of Richter’s abstract films. The difference hinges on the virtuality of the film versus the actuality of the lived architecture. German pavilion for the International Art Exhibit, Barcelona, 1929. For a thorough discussion of the relationship between Mies and Richter see Eve Blau, ‘Transparency and the Irreconcilable Contradictions of Modernity,’ Praxis: Journal of Writing and Building, Expanding Surface, Issue 9, 2007.

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to a particular intellectual construct (see Figure 4.22 for an example using film as a map). The final map used a dataset selected by the student. restrictions weren’t placed on the choice of data or how it was organized, but the final representation needed to conform to the terms and functions outlined in the mapmaking methodology. The method wasn’t limited to phenomenal problems, but applied also to ideas or concepts. It asks that students calibrate their understanding by translating from one idea or condition to another. Depending on the subject of the map, data was quantitative based on numerical measurement or qualitative highlighting a correspondence between qualia or the subjective properties of experience.53 Case Study 1: Orthographic Projections and the Grid Map: Canopy_Florida_11.09.09, 10:00AM Sara Johnson’s Canopy_Florida (Figure 4.25) is a thematic map looking at density of foliage. The map frames a narrow slice of Floridian understory and calibrates luminosity. The goal in the map was to evaluate an existing natural condition formulating an artificial response through a shading device. Johnson’s observation of the site related to the quality of filtered light, but she wasn’t certain at first how to measure this condition. look for patterns? look for density of material? Use a light meter? When and for what duration? her dataset was a series of photographs taken during a site visit. This determined the scope of problems she could study. After consideration of what was at hand—a series of images taken during a specific time of day—Johnson opted to analyze the specific conditions of light penetration through the tree canopy. The frame of her map is limited to data taken at 10:00AM on a given site in the Florida everglades. The map outlines the sequence of translation from original canopy condition to reformulated density. Using a typical condition Johnson projected a rationalized grid to 1) fix the distribution of light and dark as patterns in the scene, 2) visualize the general pattern of light and dark abstracted from the leaf cover, and 3) create a flexible framework for measuring the differences from one quadrant to another in the field of light and dark (Figure 4.26). Imposing a grid is a common tactic in mapping to analyze relative relationships and is distinct from a map projection involving translation between scales. Scale is of little value in this map as Johnson treats the photograph as a topology or surface preserving its properties under continuous deformations similar to a subway map where it is impossible to understand a measured distance between the stops of the train. The train stops relative relationships in the map remain the same whether you distort the map (by folding say) or stretching it. By translating the original photograph into a high-contrast image and mapping the data on the grid, she allowed for the construction of a new valueset. This was reprojected onto the grid using a set of predetermined parameters to inform an alternative reading of the relative density of light in the original condition. Johnson tested an alternative reading of the density as a color mapping. Color and change in tonal value is characteristic of luminosity in human vision. Finally, the z-axis translation is projected as a three-dimensional lattice structure in the final translation of the original perceived densities. The final mapping informed the design of an artificial canopy intended to mitigate or augment the natural canopy of the Florida site. By looking carefully and analytically at the

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4.25 Sara Johnson, Canopy_Florida, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010.

4.26 Detail from Canopy_Florida showing procedure for isolating tonal densities. From top to bottom: 1) original image, 2) pixelated image created from original, 3) three-dimensional grid applied to pixels with a trace of color variation to highlight depth, 4) three-dimensional grid rotation corresponding to color variation along x-axis, 5) three-dimensional grid rotation corresponding to color variation along y-axis, 6) three-dimensional grid rotation corresponding to color variation along z-axis, 7) three-dimensional grid rotation corresponding to color variation, all, 8) three-dimensional grid rotation corresponding to color variation, with luminosity. Sara Johnson, Canopy_Florida, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010.

Case Studies

condition of luminosity in the test-bed, Johnson interpolated the parameters for the new design. The mapping is effective because she was specific about the data and translations. Similar to sonar maps translating one dataset (sound) to another (graphical index) to describe a third condition (terrain), this map translates an original image made using light (photo) to a density reading and finally a three-dimensional representation of a new perceptual terrain. Case Study 2: Perceptual Analogues and the Axis of Translation Map: GIS Data_scape and Everchanging Frame Perceptual analogues encompass two sides of the continuum of visuality: 1) the point of view from which we perceive a space and 2) the geometric projection used to present space to us. Maps manage this continuum through the axis of translation and the projection selected for the geometric space in the map. remember the axis of translation is the point of view of the observer determined by the mapmaker. What google earth calls ‘street view’ is an embodied view taking into account human binocular vision similar to perspective. Using google earth software one can transition from the overhead view (vertical axis of translation) to the street view (horizontal axis of translation) to simulate an experience of the continuum along the axes of translation. Maps can combine views, but generally mapmakers select either a birds-eye view or a perspectival view when accounting for an experience of space in the map (I say this cautiously given the many possibilities in mapping). Unlike the perspectival view, the geometry of orthographic projection assumes light rays are parallel offering an infinite set of points from which the surface of the representation will be viewed—think of a typical planimetric view or roadway map. Isometric views are impossible to experience and give us a geometrically distorted view of an object (Figure 4.27). The playful ‘mapping’ of occupied spaces in a room by Michael Schwartz (Figure 4.28) is not really a map but more an image illustrating possible perspectival points of view in a room. To qualify as a map he would need to point our attention to how the space is distorted. The following maps focus on different mechanisms for spatial perception. The first map uses ideas from ecological perceptions to describe a scene using a gIS dataset. The second map uses two axes of translation: the plan-view ordered by orthographic geometries and the perceptual view organized by the perspectival optics of the camera lens capturing what the observer sees. GIS Data_scape Mapping lysa Janssen asked how we perceive a scene using theories of perception from ecological psychology. her questions pertain to how we see: 1) what is the spatio-perceptual mechanism of seeing and 2) how to show what we are actually ‘seeing’ through analogy. To understand the context of the first question Janssen turned to classical theories of perception in cognitive psychology. This was a reasoned approach to the problem but it required learning something about perception in cognitive psychology. There are two general ways to think about perception in cognitive psychology. one is an indirect theory where reality is rationalized through perception and the second is a theory of direct perception put forward originally by James J. gibson. Indirect theories have a longer history. They posit perception is learned through unconscious inference allowing us to seek a meaningful explanation for

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4.27 Isometric drawing from below. Auguste Choisy, Palatin, Courtesy of Colloque Centenaire Auguste Choisy.

4.28 A photo-montage of the possible positions of a figure in a room. Michael Schwartz, Washington University in St. Louis, 2001.

Case Studies

the patterns in the stimulations in the world. In this modality perception is a construction not a mechanistic process assuming sensory information alone is insufficient to attain perception—we are equipped with some kind of ‘intelligence to learn how to comprehend their meaning.’54 Perception is more than sensation—it is a cognitive process requiring some kind of intellectual capacity for us to process the information we receive through the senses—sensory data alone is insufficient; it is dependent on the perceiver. gibson proposed an alternative approach to visual information acquisition: a direct or realist view where the environment is understood to provide all the information necessary to specify its properties.55 gibson’s ecological approach emphasizes the direct experience of the world mapped by the visual cortex. In this model sensory stimuli are sufficient for us to act—we acquire meaning directly from the perceptual process—it doesn’t occur after we receive the information from our senses. This is gibson’s notion of affordances: our perceptions afford our actions. For instance gibson argued the transforming optic array contains meaning like the pattern of light created by a tree stump indicates it is ‘sit-able on’.56 Direct perception emphasizes the importance of the quality of the stimuli over cognitive processing. gradients, optic flow, information as input (not stimuli) and the senses are understood as a ‘perceptual system.’ Memory is past experience inferred as attunement and the differentiation between stimuli rather than a recording of narrative experience. Using a gibsonian approach, Janssen’s GIS Data-Scape map proposes that the raw data of a visual image (photograph) be treated as a visual field of color projected using gIS software (Figure 4.29). Using a single image of a scene (Figures 4.30–4.32) she explored the quality of the visual stimuli. The first step in the process is the pixellation of the original image, then pixels are converted into bands of color abstracting the image to its most basic color data. A second iteration converted pixellated images to a set of densities depending on a preselected range of values from light to dark. The new mapping translates one set of data (light) to a three-dimensional landscape (see Figure 4.30) focusing on the attenuation and differentiation

4.29 Single image remapped as color bars and divided into quadrants. Lysa Janssen, GIS Datascape Mapping, Harvard, 2006.

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The experiment is designed to test a series of ways to measure the background or context (Question 2} . Using a Geospatial Information System approach to the visual data of thes scene we calibrated the depth of the scence as a function of lights and darks according to their tonal value and color. The view of the scence was pixelated to simplify the visual field and allow the data to be tagged with multiple properties: 1) color/tonal value, and 2) z-axis information . The values were inverted for depth. The higher the z-value the lighter the field.

According to Gibson, the properties available in a scene are not explicable in terms of general laws, meaning they are not mechanistic, but rather, are produced from a dynamic interaction between perceiver and context . The ecological approach is therefore an ecology of perceiver-environment reciprocity. In this model of perception the environment is a continuous background surface that provides visual structure. Is is the "ground" against which the perceiver gauges their own position in the scence. As a perceiver moves through the environment they are using visual information relative to the background or context to determine size, distance, and shape values.

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