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Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary
Oleh Mohsen Mostafavi
Tindakan Buku
Mulai MembacaPanjangnya: 381 halaman2 jam
- Penerbit:
- Princeton Architectural Press
- Dirilis:
- Jun 28, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781616895143
- Format:
- Buku
Deskripsi
Mapping has been one of the most fertile areas of exploration for architecture and landscape in the past few decades. While documenting this shift in representation from the material and physical description toward the depiction of the unseen and often immaterial, Cartographic Grounds takes a critical view toward the current use of data mapping and visualization and calls for a return to traditional cartographic techniques to reimagine the manifestation and manipulation of the ground itself.
Each of the ten chapters focuses on a single cartographic technique—sounding/spot elevation, isobath/contour, hachure/hatch, shaded relief, land classification, figure-ground, stratigraphic column, cross-section, line symbol, conventional sign—and illustrates it through beautiful maps and plans from notable designers and cartographers throughout history, from Leonardo da Vinci to James Corner Field Operations. Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, introduces the book.
Each of the ten chapters focuses on a single cartographic technique—sounding/spot elevation, isobath/contour, hachure/hatch, shaded relief, land classification, figure-ground, stratigraphic column, cross-section, line symbol, conventional sign—and illustrates it through beautiful maps and plans from notable designers and cartographers throughout history, from Leonardo da Vinci to James Corner Field Operations. Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, introduces the book.
Tindakan Buku
Mulai MembacaInformasi Buku
Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary
Oleh Mohsen Mostafavi
Panjangnya: 381 halaman2 jam
Deskripsi
Mapping has been one of the most fertile areas of exploration for architecture and landscape in the past few decades. While documenting this shift in representation from the material and physical description toward the depiction of the unseen and often immaterial, Cartographic Grounds takes a critical view toward the current use of data mapping and visualization and calls for a return to traditional cartographic techniques to reimagine the manifestation and manipulation of the ground itself.
Each of the ten chapters focuses on a single cartographic technique—sounding/spot elevation, isobath/contour, hachure/hatch, shaded relief, land classification, figure-ground, stratigraphic column, cross-section, line symbol, conventional sign—and illustrates it through beautiful maps and plans from notable designers and cartographers throughout history, from Leonardo da Vinci to James Corner Field Operations. Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, introduces the book.
Each of the ten chapters focuses on a single cartographic technique—sounding/spot elevation, isobath/contour, hachure/hatch, shaded relief, land classification, figure-ground, stratigraphic column, cross-section, line symbol, conventional sign—and illustrates it through beautiful maps and plans from notable designers and cartographers throughout history, from Leonardo da Vinci to James Corner Field Operations. Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, introduces the book.
- Penerbit:
- Princeton Architectural Press
- Dirilis:
- Jun 28, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781616895143
- Format:
- Buku
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Cartographic Grounds - Mohsen Mostafavi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword, Mohsen Mostafavi
Introduction: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary
Notes on Scale
01 Sounding / Spot Elevation
02 Isobath / Contour
03 Hachure / Hatch
04 Shaded Relief
05 Land Classification
06 Figure-Ground
07 Stratigraphic Column
08 Cross Section
09 Line Symbol
10 Conventional Sign
Afterword, Antoine Picon
References
Credits
Index
Acknowledgments
Foreword
THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION
MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI
The work of an architect or a landscape architect is always situational. We imagine things in the same way a novelist constructs a piece of fiction. But the novel is an end product in its own right, as is a painting or a piece of sculpture—all ready for engagement at the moment of completion, to be read, seen, and encountered. In a novel, the concept of action is incorporated into and inseparable from the story being told; in architecture and landscape architecture, however, we design things through a set of drawing conventions—plans—that only later might become buildings or landscapes—places.
The plan, as a form of drawing, is the description of a site that is to be constructed for a particular form of imagined purpose—a house, a hospital, a cafe, a park, a plaza. The drawing of each of these places refers at once to a condition of typicality as well as uniqueness. The house perhaps reminds us of other houses and yet is a particular locus—home—with its own specific set of qualities and characteristics. The qualities and characteristics of a house are temporal and subjective, attuned to the nuances of inhabitation and use. Yet the architecture of the house may also present a form of autonomy independent of its functional conditions.
Equally, the plan is not produced solely in the service of actualization as building. By using a certain set of conventions, such as scale and method of representation, the plan also makes itself understandable as a project—a drawn idea. We can see thick or thin walls, the size and arrangement of the dining room, as well as the relationship and configuration of spaces.
The house might also exist in relation to a particular topography. The map of this topography will perhaps be an important catalyst for reconciling the architecture of the house with the particularities of a specific location. And maps, like novels, use a certain set of conventions to construct the stories of places and topographies. Changing the scale of a map can reveal or occlude a host of information about a particular area or district.
The cartographic imagination is therefore a specific mode of description of topography. Early maps, like the medieval mappas mundi, based more on fiction than fact, were a way of visualizing a world yet to be charted. Yet they provided the most accurate maps of the time and helped shape European intellectual life for more than three hundred years.
The advancement of technology has brought about the possibility of greater proximity between the real and its representation. There still remains, however, the challenge of translating three-dimensional information into a two-dimensional surface, including the necessity of misrepresentation as a means of getting closer to the perception of the real. What are the tools, conventions, and scales that we should employ in order to tell the story, describe the characteristics of a particular territory, including even the narrative of dynamic change and transformation?
The cartographic imagination is a study of the importance of multiple representations—of seeing and depicting various realities depending on the relevance of the occasion. A particular topography can, for example, be represented by its roads or by its undulating terrain or perhaps by a combination of the two. It all depends on the purpose of the map and the story it is trying to tell.
The complexity of representing the world and its surface—oceans, vegetation, forests, cities, ravines, mountains, paths, hills, villages, and deserts—requires an equally complex set of conventions. A knowledge of these conventions enables us to participate in the world. We carry maps when we walk the countryside, visit a foreign city, and travel the subway. The map is the catalyst for the actualization of the territory.
But the minutiae of cartographic conventions also have the capacity to help us imagine fragments of new landscapes, cities, and houses. Like words—the tools of the novelist—cartographic conventions can enhance the repertoire of a designer in articulating the space between the plan and its actualization. The understanding and experience of contour lines as a cartographic convention, for example, becomes a necessary tool for designing new landscapes. The interrelationship between depiction and actualization, a key component of the cartographic imagination, is then inseparable from the interrelationship between what is given—topography—and what is yet to come—design.
The drawing of a parallel between cartography and architecture is instructive. Each lies in the field of the practical arts; each is older than history; and each, since its beginnings, has been more or less under the control of its consumers.
—Arthur H. Robinson, The Look of Maps, 1952
Introduction
PROJECTING THE LANDSCAPE IMAGINARY
Cartographic Grounds revisits the depiction of geographic morphology as grounds of and for design through a series of foundational representational techniques associated with the two-dimensional depiction of three-dimensional conditions. This necessarily involves a historical and conceptual reunion of the plan and the map. In light of the ascendance of mapping
and data visualization in design culture in recent decades, and the privileging of abstract forces and flows, Cartographic Grounds reimagines the projective potential of cartographic practices that afford greater proximity to the manifestation and manipulation of the ground itself. The cartographic strategies depicted here offer an instrumental array for describing various conditions: subsurface, temporal, aqueous, and terrestrial. These strategies are organized in a series of ten chapters: sounding/spot elevation, isobath/contour, hachure/hatch, shaded relief, land classification, figure-ground, stratigraphic column, cross section, line symbol, and conventional sign. These ten historical cases are at once analytical and projective, precise yet speculative. Taken together, they form a rich symbolic language capable of describing existing and imagined grounds for the landscape imaginary.
The mapping and visualization of data in design culture has changed the way architects, landscape architects, and urban designers communicate ideas about buildings and landscapes. Projects are supported by the widespread availability of physical and cultural data, and the translation of this data into visual documentation is now a ubiquitous component of the design process. The trajectory of representation—of concept and context—has moved from the material and physical description of the ground toward the depiction of unseen and often immaterial fields, forces, and flows. This has resulted in an important critique of geographical determinism within design culture, privileging, however, the intangible over the material conditions of the site. Between these two schools of thought—the purely geographic and the freely abstract—is a representational project that merges spatial precision and cultural imagination. Herein lies the projective potential of cartographic practices that afford greater connection with the ground itself, making present and vivid the landscape, as it exists and as it could be, both to the eye and to the mind. The approach aspires to reconcile the precision and instrumentality of the plan with the geographic and territorial scope of the map.
Our understanding of the world is increasingly informed by the availability of data. As the complexity of available information increases, greater pressure is placed on the clarity of visualizations for effective communication. Robert Klanten et al. argue that diagrams, data graphics, and visual confections
are the new tools to understand, create, and completely experience reality.
¹ However, despite Klanten’s assessment, the potential for overreliance on data-driven design can be equally problematic. Design projects ought to be well researched and informed by relevant information while maintaining a critical stance toward the origins, collection, analysis, and visualization of the investigation. Information graphics often are not, in fact, enough to inform the conceptual and spatial development of a project. Instead, data collection and presentation are often disembodied and separated from lived experience and thus divorced from the geographical terrain; they are depicted apart from the ground condition through floating icons, decontextualized structures, and stylized environments. These visualizations too often lack imaginative or projective potential and are used to determine the outcomes of existing conditions or forecast predictions based on patterns and algorithms rather than imagining—and visualizing through drawing—alternative futures. Yet this data can be alluring, both in content and form. It is all too often a crutch for design, eliminating speculation and agency, while supporting a methodology that looks for projects to emerge out of an illusory objectivity.
Through the recovery of cartographic practices capable of envisioning complexity as it intersects with the surface of the earth directly, data can be realigned with geographic fidelity. Topographical maps display a rich array of information—elevation, routes, built structures, land classification—but without the loss of spatial qualities, human associations, relative location, and material form. Maps are defined broadly here by three distinguishing characteristics they share with the plan: projection, scale, and symbolization.² Two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional models translate physical space into a flattened, measured, reduced form where lines and signs stand for objects and uses. Together, projection, scale, and symbolization allow for the synthesis of data and the compression of information without decontextualization from the built environment.
Maps are too easily mistaken for objective depictions of a geographical condition, and their complexity often obscures the fact that they are, in fact, distortions. Their uses, limitations, and subjectivity must be understood and respected. Distortion can stem from the underlying data, editorial choices, and representational method. Maps utilize a set of malleable yet rigorously defined representational techniques capable of persuasion, description and, above all, projection.
Often as a foundation to intervention, the map—whether it is of networked relationships or a geographically precise location—precedes the plan. The plan, both as an idea-driven spatial strategy and a projective drawing, is forced to respond to the map. This dichotomous and sequential practice has limitations. Instead, the realignment of map and plan as equally projective, precise, detailed investigations allows for a smooth, informed, and nonlinear process. The base material and the project documentation are not separate entities. This is not to say that the project is geospatially or site determined but rather that the making of the map is analogous to the making of the plan.
Mapping in design culture has been enhanced and even supplanted by data-driven research, yet the map remains one of the main tools of documentation, though its proximity to the physical properties of the surface of the earth has been de-emphasized. The production of data-dependent drawings by designers has resulted in a distancing from the ground, scale, and materials of the métier and a loss of spatial precision at the human scale. The plan—as a spatially precise drawing of a grounded, material, and topographically rich landscape—has been unseated, rather than enriched by, the complexity of available information. Seen as antiquated, static, and allied with the master plan,
the plan has been deemed incapable of addressing the dynamic relationships and spatial complexity of design in a globalized context. It could be argued, however, that a reconsideration of the plan as a typological drawing that can express the surficial and spatial qualities of the earth is necessary to complement the complex systemic diagrams that point to the underlying social, economic, and political drivers. Grounding is necessary—and the conceptual framework and representation surrounding the spatial manifestations must match the intricacy and deliberation of the systemic thinking. This implies a greater dedication to the means of drawing as well as a return to visual perception, legibility, and the veracity of the work.
The distinction between spatial visualization of nongeospatial data, cartographic representation driven by advanced systems of projection and symbolization, and speculative design drawing in planar projection at the scale of the map is fundamental. Before elaborating on the advantages and limitations of the overlaps between these approaches, several terms require clarification: the topographic map, the plan, the diagram, the aerial image, and the legend.
Topographic Map
The topographic map is a class of general maps that tacitly describe a variety of physical phenomena at large scales (SEE NOTES ON SCALE). The scope of a topographic map once reflected the known observations of the cartographer, or the scale of human perception. It is now a hybrid practice, reliant on highly accessible data, augmented and verified through the personal collection of information and ground truthing. These maps can be distinguished from geographic maps, which used distant means to describe the entire world;³ from topological maps, which ignore scale and geographic location, like a subway map; and from thematic maps, which focus on a single characteristic, often geolocating statistical information. Weather and census maps are common examples. The topographic map, like its counterparts, does not resemble the land itself, but is a flattened representation coded with information illustrated by lines, colors, textures, and conventional signs. It is a constructed depiction of a piece of the surface of the earth (or the sky or another planet), showing the distribution of physical features, with every representational element corresponding to an actual geographical position, following a fixed scale and projection. Information is compressed, edited, and filtered, as well as codified to promote legibility. A topographic map requires a legend, and the act of reading a map requires a back and forth between this key and the drawing. In its final form, the topographic map offers a precise reading of landform, material, and occupation at a humanly accessible scale. It allows for immersion, through which the landscape can be seen, imagined, and ultimately designed.
Plan
The plan is a representation of a design or a proposal. It is drawn at a relatively large scale—rarely exceeding 1:10,000—except when denoting broad context or location. By definition, the plan is a projection of a three-dimensional space onto a horizontal plane or surface, though this distinction is of less importance than
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