Charting Null Island

This speculative design-led research investigation is 'sited' on Null Island, a 'mythological' island located in the Atlantic Ocean at 0° latitude and 0° longitude, at the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator. While no physical island is actually located on this site, it is marked by a permanently moored weather buoy called "soul". Looking at the geographical location of Null Island from an East-West perspective, the equator is a 'real' line inscribed on the centre of the globe. From the North-South perspective, the meridian through Greenwich England that we consider to be zero degrees of longitude is an ‘unreal’ line. It was designated the Prime Meridian by the British Empire during its greatest period of colonial upheaval, whilst other nations historically had their own guidelines for where the ‘prime’ meridian was located. Viewed in this sense, the Prime Meridian is culturally charged and 'imaginary'. Today, the 'island' marking the intersection of the equator and the Prime Meridian serves as an absolute cartographic reference for navigation databases in computing and placenames. In this sense, Null Island represents a liminal territory between fiction and reality, a place where a natural order, a constructed order, and a digital order coalesce.

In architectural cartography, the spatial potential of the architectural mapping of the unreal, related to the imagination, has been largely absent. The principal aim of this thesis is to explore the dual realms of Null Island - a 'mythical' island at the 'real' intersection of 0° longitude and 0° latitude — by using three-dimensional, speculative cartographic representation as a critical method.

The thesis investigation asks:

How can three-dimensional, imaginative cartographies establish place identity for a placeless place located between fiction and reality?