on site 31: mapping | photography

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number 31 spring 2014

ma p p in g | photography

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Terra Infirma. Geography’s visual culture Irit Rogoff London and New York: Routledge, 2000 ISBN 0-415-09616-2

Akrotiri André de Alencar Lyon, technical notes by Peter C Nomikos London: Jane&Jeremy, 2014 santozeum.com jane-jeremy.co.uk

Historical Atlas of the Arctic Derek Hayes Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003 ISBN 0-295-98358-2

The View From the Train, cities and other landscapes Patrick Keiller London + Brooklyn: Verso, 2013 ISBN-13 978-1-78168-140-4

Maps of Meaning Peter Jackson London: Unwin Hyman, 1989 ISBN 0-04-445365-5

Did Someone Say Participate? An atlas of spatial practice Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar, editors Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2006 ISBN-13 978-0-262-13471-2

Map of a Nation, a biography of the Ordnance Survey Rachel Hewitt London: Granta, 2010 ISBN 978-1-84708-098-1

The Irish Ordnance Survey, history, culture and memory Gillian M Doherty Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004 ISBN 1-85182-861-3

The Petropolis of Tomorrow Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper, editors Barcelona + Houston: Actar + Architecture at Rice, 2013 ISBN 978-0-989331-7-84

how to get there

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top: Ben Schmidt has plotted all voyages from the ICOADS Matthew Maury collection of American shipping from about 1785 to 1860, assembled mostly before the Civil War. Ships tracks in black, plotted on a white background, show the outlines of the continents and the predominant tracks of the trade winds. His project is data visualisation which he says ‘are like narratives: they suggest interpretations, but don’t require them. Maury’s nineteenth century logs (with ‘merely’ millions of points) lets us think through in microcosm the general problems of reading historical data.’ sappingattention.blogspot.ca

above: an undated nineteenth century Portuguese navigational chart of the harbour, the port, the docks and the canal system at Newcastle upon Tyne. There is nothing on this chart that does not bear directly on navigation and ships. Land, is literally the paper, unmarked and unarticulated except for buildings seen from the water. After the macroscale of the voyage crossing the oceans, the microscale of the port must also be navigated.

ON SITE r e v i e w sp r ing 2014

mappi n g photography

photographing architecture Nora Wendl Robin Wilson

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Attempts at breaking into a glass house Fragmenting the architectural photograph

documentary photography Pascal Greco Keesic Douglas Maria Alexandrescu Espen Lund Nielsen Lisa Rapoport

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No Cliché: non-stereotyped Iceland Warrior’s Path, marking the trail Framing Landscape, misreading urbanism The map of the camel driver Walking as reproduction

place Michael Blois Eric Klaver Jessica Craig

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The camera and the teahouse: photography and place The photograph is not the terrain, Maasvlakte II Portraits of memory, je ne sais quoi

maps 2.0 Sean Irwin Chloé Roubert Natalia Scoczylas

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Google, maps, ideology With which all things exist and move Deliberate map(ping): the role of citizen cartography 3

drawing Hector Abarca Reza Aliabadi Victoria Stanton Asher Ghaffar

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The forgotten art of architectural drawings Thematic cartography How place is performed: a manifesto Mapping the furnace room

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Charted Displacement, Butte Montana

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fall 2014 weak systems | spring 2015 land:landscape

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Ancestor’s Path Petropolis as archipelage Ideological cartography of America Going modern and being British: critical geographies Türkmenabat: seeing something and nothing

map making details calls for articles: issues 31 + 32 subscription form masthead

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who we are

‘Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?’ ‘je ne sais quoi – déjà vu?’

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cover front: Jacob Whibley back: Jessica Craig

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Radford Watson and Sean Burkholder

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Keesic Douglas Stephanie White Rodrigo Barros Will Craig Kennis Keen

Nora Wendl, Glass House (Levitation), 2013. 24 x 36� C-print i n h a b i tat i o n control by nora wendl

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at t e mpt s at bre a k i n g i n t o a g l a s s h o u s e Nora Wendl, Glass House (Levitation) 2, 2013. 24 x 36� C-print

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hi s t o rio gra p h y mo d er n is m p o et r y a rch it ect u re p ro ject io n

It is impossible to occupy architectural history. The ephemera that stands in place of architecture, that serves to tell its history – photographs, texts, correspondence, exhibitions, drawings, paintings, sketches, models and other forms of representation – all belong to a temporal dimension that we cannot occupy.

Perhaps for this reason, architectural archives are full of selectively curated historical ephemera that conspire to create an official and narratological history of a particular structure – one that, through its cohesiveness, we can comprehend. When more than one archive on any particular structure can be found, questions arise and the narratological history of architecture begins to chip away. This essay is such a chipping. *

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I am standing alone in the dark space of a small wood outbuilding at a residency on the western coast of Oregon trying to piece together an architectural history. One by one, I project images onto the cheap scrim I have hung at the back of this shed. The warm summer light filtering under the door illuminates the detritus on the floor: dead leaves, husks of insects, dirt and sand, the ephemera that constitutes the history of this shed. The projector hums in the dark, filling the space with its own, colourless light.

Advance slide. I adjust the lens of the projector to see the image as large as possible, a photograph of the interior southwest corner of the house. Here, Farnsworth has placed a set of dark wooden chairs facing each other on a thick ornamental rug. On the terrace, seen beyond the interior of the house, her two Chinese Fu dogs face one another. Roller blinds are curled up at the top of the glass walls. The whole photograph is a confusing play of reflections, as objects that face one another (as if on either side of a mirror) are also actually mirrored in the glass walls of the house. Only the inhabitant of a glass house could have known how to compose such an image in actual space.

This is one in a series of photographs held by the Newberry Library in Chicago, a voluminous archive that has confused both the history and discourse of the Farnsworth House. Photographed by Plano, Illinois-based ‘Gorman’s Child Photography’, as the credit stamped on the back of each photograph awkwardly announces, the series of photographs documents the house as Dr. Farnsworth occupied it. These records are, in a sense, doubly wrong. They are an affront to Mies’ drawings of the house, which predicted furniture of his own design. Beyond this, the compositions of the photographs reveal the mercurial nature of a glass house – its tendency to reflect, to mirror and to distort one’s understanding of space. Indeed, these photographs remake the Farnsworth House.1 They stand against architectural history. A testament to the deviousness of these photographs is that they have never circulated in architectural histories or theorisations of the house – and copyrights surrounding these photographs make their circulation very difficult, unless one finds an unorthodox method of presenting them.

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Consider the photograph. Before the photograph comes the subject. In between the human eye and the subject, a lens is placed – the lens of a camera, perhaps, which will focus the scene’s visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the eye sees. Light will enter the lens and fall on a light-sensitive surface within the camera to produce a negative image. This negative image on film will then be placed in an enlarger and reversed – exposed to lightsensitive paper to reveal the scene. The result, the photograph, is a glimpse into a temporal dimension now lost – a time that cannot be re-entered. It is as distant to us as fiction. And yet, photographs – records of light as it fell in a particular place and time, as it fell through the lens of a camera and as it burned away silver halide crystals on the film – are one of our most direct links with history.

What is history? And where does it begin? On December 31, 1950, Dr. Edith Farnsworth spent her first evening in the Farnsworth House (Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois, 1951). In her memoirs, she describes the evening as uneasy: the house was not quite finished, spots and strokes of white paint were still visible on the uncurtained expanses of glass that were her exterior walls, and her dinner, a can of soup warmed on a hot plate, was prepared by the light of one 60-watt bulb. This is where architectural history typically ends: with occupation.

Indeed, the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Lily Auchincloss Study Center for Architecture and Design in the Museum of Modern Art – the official archive of the American phase of Mies’ career – is a collection of ephemera that strangely denies Farnsworth’s occupation of the glass house. It is a history dedicated to the artefactual presence of the Farnsworth House and the artefactual presence, or occupation, of the architect: we see the architect on the terrace, smoking a cigar, alone or lingering with colleagues, students, visiting architects touring the house under construction. The photographs that fill this archive are, after all, primarily those commissioned by Mies, who hired Chicago-based photographer Hedrich Blessing and his staff to document the house during its construction and just after Farnsworth’s occupation of it.

In the photographs taken during the house’s construction, we see Farnsworth clearly only in strange and peripheral roles – tending to her garden, with the steel of the Farnsworth House rising up in the background as if an afterthought. In later photographs, those taken once she had occupied the house, we hover round the building’s exterior – the house is presented in striking and

formal contrast to its lush surroundings, a Midwestern floodplain.

The curtains are drawn in strategic ways that allow us only partial views of the interior. Whether these choices were made to provide Dr. Farnsworth privacy, or to remove her corporeal presence from the history of the house is unclear. What is obvious is that she is nowhere within these images, despite her investment in the design and construction of the house. And the very few photographs that we do see from the interior of the house are staged and strange.

In a photograph from within the south-facing living space, we see Farnsworth’s bed on the travertine floor covered by a white chenille blanket and, in the foreground and far background of the photograph, a composition of chairs – six in total, and two small tables. They are artful compositions that lack any logic of domestic inhabitation.

Stranger still, no body is here. No body could be here.

Nora Wendl, Glass House (Bedroom), 2013. 24 x 36” C-print

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In a library, I might observe them studiously. But I am standing in wood shed, and here, I am not observing but physically reckoning with a series of photographs that comprise a largely unacknowledged architectural history. How might I inhabit such a history? How might I inhabit the space between an historian’s casual detachment and the interior perspective offered here, through the body of Dr. Farnsworth? The projected photograph flickers in black and white. The pixelated outlines of travertine, primavera, steel and glass travel through the scrim, which undulates lightly in the breeze drifting under and above the shed’s doors, and ultimately come to rest on the white wall two feet behind the scrim. This distance between scrim and wall, two projected surfaces, gives the photograph a false depth that begins to suggest space, a dimension that can be occupied. Is it possible?

Within the shed are a few strange tools – a bucket, a stepladder, panes of glass, bricks. Using these, I work to align myself with the photograph. I stand on an upturned bucket to bring my feet to the height of the floor as shown in the photograph, as strewn in pixels on the scrim. I align myself against the glass of the Farnsworth House’s south elevation, and look out toward the Fox River – a world beyond the edge of this photograph and beyond the shed’s wooden door. I envision the Fox River in the summer of 1951 and assume the posture of a woman pausing on the edge of her glass house, contemplating walking the river’s edge.

In the glow of the projector’s light, I work to know and to re-animate an architectural history that has never surfaced. I reach to rest my hand on the image of the cold glass wall of the kitchen, watching the horizon of an Illinois floodplain recede into

a pixelated line; I climb a short stepladder to stand at the same height as the terrace and tend to the sculptures and plants projected in that space; I walk toward the space that Farnsworth used as a bedroom, aligning my own body with the perspective presented in the photograph. I cannot occupy history, none of us can. But we can choose to engage historical artefacts on artefactual terms, to know them with our senses.

Questions linger: for whom were these photographs produced?

Did Farnsworth create them for personal documentation, or for a future, public presentation that was never realised? In her memoirs, she writes about the house as already and always mythic, dematerialised: ‘The simpler of those that came to look expected to find the glass box afloat, moored to mystic columns enclosing mystic space…all the walls turned to air.’2 Such has been the history of the house. Walter Benjamin warned that without a materialist engagement with history, the past could be absorbed by ‘the course of history’, a narratological fiction. Against this homogenous continuum, the forgotten or forsaken artefact – the photograph hidden in an unacknowledged archive – stands as a testament to other, equally true histories. Through the radical inhabitation of the archive, a chipping away of ‘the course of history’, we cannot inhabit history per se, but we can project new knowledge about it.

To do this, we must in some way inhabit the voices, the eyes, of those that have authored these histories such that, as Farnsworth writes, ‘…once in awhile, by a fulminating ricochet…by another bound of paradoxes, ‘you’ may become ‘I’…’3 c

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I am deeply indebted to the organisers of the Coast Time residency on the Oregon coast for the generous gift of time and space to create new work.

Deepest thanks to the Newberry Library, Chicago and to Paul Galloway at the Museum of Modern Art for their generous assistance, and to the organisers of Writingplace at Delft University where this work was first presented.

My colleagues and students at Portland State University have enriched these ideas through conversations and seminars.

My dear friend, colleague and teacher Mitchell Squire was the first to critique the photographs and through many conversations, helped me unbury their meaning.

Thanks are overdue to Charlie Masterson, who led me to the house.

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1 Dr Edith Farnsworth took Mies on site visits as early as 1945, visited his design office in Chicago frequently, drove the architect and his apprentices and students to the house frequently during construction (1949-50) – in other words, her engagement in the process was quite active, more than the Blessing photographs of the construction might otherwise indicate. For more, see: Alice T. Friedman, ‘People Who Live in Glass Houses: Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson’, in Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007 2 Farnsworth, Edith. Newberry Library Midwest MS Farnsworth Box 2 Folder 34.

3 ibid.

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Nora Wendl, Glass House (Kitchen), 2013. 36 x 24” C-print

co u r te s y T h e A rc hi t e c t s J ou r na l

architectural journals imaging by robin wilson

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docu mentati on compl i ci ty cri ti qu e process col l aborati on

frag ment i n g t h e arc h i t e c t u r a l p h ot og r a p h a critical contribution to the architectural media

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above: wrap cover for The Architects’ Journal, 12|04|07, Number 14, Volume 225. Unusually, the editors suspended the use of advertising on the back cover to accommodate Green’s fragment photographs.

A generic form of architectural photography dominates the platforms of architectural criticism within the architectural media. The generic image prioritises a supposed legibility of architectural form using the precision of medium or largeformat cameras, corrected perspectives and carefully deployed, directional light. Whilst often technically rigorous, the mandate of the generic image is limited to witnessing the building at its optimum moment of completeness when the built reality most closely resembles the authored conception of its design as a technical drawing or rendering. Architectural photography is thus often criticised for failing to represent architecture as process – spatial, material or social.

However, perhaps the most intractable problem with the architectural photograph is not its form as such – which, after all, originally evolved in the nineteenth century from the conventions of architectural drawing – but rather its condition of dominance within the media; its hegemonic status as the official way to see architecture. The

architectural photograph is deployed through a media system defined by an essentially complicit relationship between architects and the industry’s media professionals (journalists, editors, photographers). Architectural photography facilitates this structure of complicity as a form of photographic representation that postures as objectivity, and which is all too easily, and passively, received as a faithful version of architectural reality.

How might we contribute to a media system characterised by such a systemic closure of critique? Should we abandon the architectural journals altogether, or find ways to recuperate some form of critical space within them? For my part, I advocate continued engagement with the media in the belief that the building report – the documentation and analysis of a new architectural system in image and text – presents a complex interdisciplinary and collaborative challenge – a worthy site for resistance to formulae, cliché and commodification.

Ni gel Green

c ou r t e s y The A r c hi t e c t s J ou r na l

above left: fragments of the front facade of OSH House, unused withing the AJ report above: a page from the AJ building report showing the early drawings of the site, the context and the architecture of the Toh Shimazaki/ OSH house.

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Such an approach to architectural documentation within the journals requires internal editorial support, a protracted process of dialogue with a receptive editor. The examples here are taken from a building report I produced in collaboration with the artist and photographer Nigel Green for The Architects’ Journal in 2007.

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A more critical and reflexive use of the image within the architectural media would not eradicate the existing model with the replacement of one form of architectural photography with another.

Instead a critical image of architecture would evolve: relational, its meaning and significance formed within a diverse field of imaging, and more broadly representative of architecture’s processes. A reform of the architectural photograph needs a reactivation of the site of its publication as a discursive platform in which a portrait of architecture is understood as both a project and a projection: a work of construction in image and text.

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this page: while Green’s fragment images were used on the cover, the images used for the building study itself were Green’s more conventional medium-format colour photography. opposite page: Green’s fragment images showing the botanical and landscape context of the OSH house, unused in the AJ article.

Nig el G reen

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A house in the Surrey countryside by Londonbased practice Toh-Shimazaki Architects was published with then AJ editors, Andrew Mead and Sarah Douglas, during a short-lived period of experimentation with the conventions of representation. This was the result of a re-launch of the journal by the London-based, design agency APFEL (A Practice for Everyday Life). APFEL, who have also worked on signage and identity designs for clients such as the British Council, Tate and the V&A, reformed the journal’s graphic identity and layout, and also engaged with AJ staff in a significant reconceptualisation of the relationship between image and text.

Our Toh-Shimazaki article focused extensively on the landscape context of the house and drew on the architects’ own imagery of site investigation and design process (maps, sketches, montage, models and snapshot photography). The prehistory of the building – the building as an idea, as a process and as a contextual entity on both intentional and unconscious levels – was strongly represented. Two distinct modes of photographic representation were used for the building itself: orthodox medium-format colour photography, and fragment photographs. The latter derive from a method that Green developed in his art practice, involving a deliberately excessive use of the processing chemicals of analogue photography to create contingent effects of staining and solarisation, plus a physical tearing of images into fragments. Fragments of the exterior of the building were used on the cover of the journal, whilst more orthodox photography of the interior was used within the article itself.

The fragment uses an inherent disruption of legibility to expose what is at stake in the construction of a generic image. The implication is that all object (or referent) presence within an image is fluid or fugitive, subject to the actions of the chemical medium. The fragment’s ‘archival’ quality also fundamentally confuses the location of the referent in time (is it past, present or future?). The article sets up a dialectical relationship between the fragment – which unequivocally expresses the actions of the medium, foregrounding the process of making and thus the role of the author – with a generic norm that works precisely to eradicate all signs of process within the creation of an image that supports the fiction of unmediated photographic realism.

On receiving the published article the architects felt that the fragment photographs contained an implicit criticism of their work along the lines that the building was somehow overly nostalgic and reliant on the work of mid-twentieth century precedents. The architect’s misreading of our intentions registers two things: the sensitivity of the profession to the role of photography in presenting its work, and an instinctive distrust of any image that develops aesthetic autonomy from the architectural design. It also reveals how architects understand photography to be the dominant medium of discourse within architectural journals, that the photographic image alone is capable of formulating an article’s critical position independent of the text.

The Toh-Shimazaki article revealed the potential discomfort of a renegotiation of the implicit professional covenant between architect, writer, photographer and editor, through its shift in the style of photographic documentation. The imperative to challenge the dominant mode of architectural photography lies not simply in the potential to reveal something different about architecture and the life of buildings, but also to enable reflection on the way architectural and media professionals perceive their roles, establish the terms of collaboration and understand the value of their work. c

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Nigel Green

no cl iché Iceland photography books pa s c a l g r e c o by stephanie white

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P as cal Gre co

This book of polaroids is published by Jane & Jeremy, a small independent publisher located in South London who produce hand-made limited-edition books. The polaroids are by Pascal Greco, a film-maker and photographer living in Geneva. His work (found at pascalgreco.com) includes the 2003 documentary Swiss Fashion Design, Tokyo Streets – a 2006 film about Tokyo’s urban trends, the 2008 Super 8, a ‘poetic and psychedelic’ movie with an original soundtrack composed by Kid Chocolat, and a new film, Nowhere, coming at the end of 2014. His books, Kyoshu, Nostalgie du Pays (Infolio, 2007), Seoul Shanghai Tokyo (Idpure, 2010) and Ratrak (Verlhac, 2012) cover the complexity of modernity and dereliction, daily life and the concomitant mysteries of night life.

Not at all complex, No Cliché is a collection of polaroids of utter banality that forces us to see so many other images that purport to document ‘place’ as hyperbolic as fashion, as bad poetry, as nastily in the service of branding as a tourist ad. This is not the Iceland of the hot springs, the volcanoes, the lichens and ponies; nor is this is Roni Horn’s Iceland. But it is Iceland.

The perversely hand-made artisanal book, foil-stamped, clothwrapped, hard-covered with tipped-in prints, sewn in signatures on crusty paper — the sheer contrast to bleachy polaroids of indifferent buildings and water towers could not be greater.

Everything about the media landscape of today, overburdened by glamorous manipulated imagery disseminated the cheapest way possible, is countered by this project. c

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J a ne & J e r e m y

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J a ne & J e r e m y

memorials | streets by keesic douglas

Wa rrior’s P at h marking the trail 1812-2012

path s al l e g ia nc e s w ar s tr ees v ul n e r a b il it ie s

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1812 – 2012: A Contemporary Perspective Keesic Douglas, Thea Haines, Robert Hengeveld, Mark Kasumovic, Meryl McMaster Curated by Patrick Macaulay Harbourfront, Toronto April 21 - July 15, 2012

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My community, Rama-Mnjikaning First Nation, is north of Toronto, the home of Fort York. Spadina Avenue or Ishpadina, an Ojibway word for hill or mountain, was traditionally one of the routes for the indigenous peoples to travel from their homes to Fort York when they were called upon for battle.

Two hundred years later, the trail has been marked. Some of the trees have been cut while tall stumps remain. By creating a memorial, the City of Toronto has honoured those warriors and their families who stayed behind.

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Indigenous peoples, including the Ojibway (my ancestors) were asked to fight for the Crown during the War of 1812. They thought they were fighting for their own sovereignty.

They thought they were fighting for their own lands. They thought they were fighting for their families.

There was much to do at home in their communities year-round. Each moon called for a different activity. When the Crown called the people to fight they came. They left their homes. They dropped everything and they came. They waited. They waited some more. They were sent home to wait to be called again.

While waiting to fight, the berries were still gathered. The communities were still maintained. The fish were still caught.

The warriors waited.

f ra m e weeds i n ve nt o r y f ra g m e n t park

urban landscape | d e s ta b l i s at i o n by maria alexandrescu

framing landscape misreading urbanism

Sample inventory of Rotterdam’s various and varied landscape conditions

‘It would be interesting to think about objects where you cannot really distinguish the object from the support, in any sense. We want the object to be independent and freestanding, but it never is. There are either logical or real conditions, or constructed ones.’

— Mark Cousins in an interview with Celine Condorelli1

This project is a rethink of what a park in the city can be. One strand of this investigation is the nature of the object and how it is framed, and whether one can deliberately misread the immanent greenery of Rotterdam as series of framed ‘objects’. Another strand notes how these elements of greenery are already framed within the city. In this double investigation, I seek not so much to comprehensively link these factors, but to borrow and ‘misread’ theories of landscape and urbanism to arrive at a certain rethinking of conventions, allowing gaps in which fieldwork can take place as a way of thinking through doing.

In their work on support structures, Condorelli and Cousins use Derrida’s concept of the frame to reposition what is typically read as a stand-alone object but which usually requires an often concealed support in order to exist. Derrida’s concept of the frame, which he expands from Kant’s frame as supplement to the work (in the case of a painting, for example), concerns the paradox of it neither belonging to the work of art nor to its context: ‘The frame is never a ground in the way the context or the work may be, but neither does its marginal thickness form a figure. At least, it is a figure which arises of its own accord.’2 What happens if we apply Derrida’s elaboration to Kant’s idea of the object? Kant considers the concept of the object as a constitution of things that have a finality as such.3 If we consider the object with its frame as its own figure, this combined entity no longer has that finality - yet the object, because of its frame, can still be recognised as something distinguished from its context. What this suggests is that each thing framed is in turn a frame, and, at another scale, in turn frames.

Rather than plotting this photographic accumulation of frames and the plant world in plan as a conventional map, it is plotted spatially, as a series of conditions introducing into the system of ‘park’ signifiers (the signs and the fences) a more general condition of frames, whereby any little plant can be articulated. The city becomes a system of frames.

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The possibilities of ‘maps’ unconstrained by geographic relationships and proximities in favour of recognisable spatial conditions refocusses on the small event, the thin edges, the often overlooked, and destabilises differentiations between city and landscape. If every instance of greenery is understood to be not on its own but as part of a system of framed frames, then each such instance can only be identified as a temporary ‘final’ object. Although the city can be read a park, the very identity of park is destabilised, allowing for the ongoing possibility that new configurations of greenery can be set aside in the urban fabric. c

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1 Cousins, Mark. ‘Support Structures: An Interview with Mark Cousins’ Interview by Celine Condorelli. Afterall, Summer 2009: 118-123.

2 Derrida, Jacques, and Craig Owens. ‘The Parergon’ October Vol 9.Summer (1979): 3-41. The MIT Press. p26 3 Kant, Immanuel, and Arnulf Zweig. ‘The Critique of Judgement’ in The essential Kant. New York: New American Library, 1970. p 397

This photographic project began with walking through Rotterdam in a dérive from instance of greenery to instance of greenery, making an inventory of greenery at all scales: a planted traffic island is framed by the road but the grass that covers most of it also frames the flowerbeds. The curb that frames the traffic island frames the mosses that grow in its cracks. Every instance of something framed in turn frames something else – the process repeats at every scale. A frame is not necessarily the edge between the context and the thing, but rather the limits of perception, between the smallest plant that the camera can focus on, to the largest playing field that that fits in the camera’s frame.

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Rotterdam, like many other cities, is patchwork of sharply defined elements of the green and the built. It is not so much that the built fabric frames green voids in the form of parks within it, but rather that it is a web of green that frames the city blocks. This green web is made by parks, grassy tramways, singels, tree-lined streets, however only some of these green fragments are defined and recognised as parks. In a city with so much public open green space distributed so extensively, how is it possible to determine what is a park?

Designated parks have designated paths, but so do certain streets.

Official parks are framed, and thus understood, through a system of indicators: signs and entrances, delineated areas on maps. If this system is suspended and only the idea of the park as a framed fragment of nature is used, then each small leaf and each patch of lawn, each singel and each open lot, can be read as a ‘park’. How does our understanding of the city as an entity change?

eph e m e r a i m p e r m a n e nc e ti m e c ol l e c t io ns en co u n t e r s

‘[…] the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.’

m i c r o c a rt o g r a p h y | secret cameras by espen lunde nielsen

– Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science

t h e m a p of t h e c a m e l d r i v e r

In ‘Cities and Desire I’ of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, two ways of understanding the city of Dorothea are described: that of the cartographer, describing the city in numbers, quarters and birds-eye perspectives, and that of the cameldriver, who knows the city through its near components, interactions and faces of its inhabitants. As does Calvino’s cartographer, architects tend to understand the city on an overall macro-level through cartographic and diagrammatic representations, in which the manifold spatial and ordinary qualities either disappear or are purposely left out.

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As the early twentieth century mapmaker, Leconte, was doing his ongoing updates of Nouveau Plan de Paris Monumental – a map of the extraordinary monuments of post-Haussmann Paris, Eugene Atget accumulated a completely different kind of knowledge and reality of the city as a flâneur, drifting around the streets with his large-format wooden camera on his shoulders.

He captured the (infra-)ordinary and ephemera of le vieux Paris: its street corners, shop windows, inhabitants, street-peddlers, prostitutes, stairways and living rooms until, finally, more than 10,000 photographs later, he stated that ‘I can truthfully say that I possess all of old Paris’.

The knowledge or ‘map’ produced by the two speaks of two completely different realities; in Atget’s version of Paris, the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Boulevards do not exist, or at least are not the focal points of the city. In Leconte’s maps, the city is constituted of these alone, leaving the inbetween as a flat tone of nothingness. top: A Leconte. ‘Plan Monumental Paris & Environs Itineraire Metropolitan’, published in the 1928 tourist pocket map of Paris, Nouveau Paris Monumental Itineraire Pratique de L’Etranger Dans Paris 27 x 21 inches : 68.58 x 53.34cm above: Eugène Atget: ‘Cour, Rue de Valence, Paris’, ca. 1920 Automobile and two motorcycles in front of garage in a courtyard, 5e Arrondissement, Paris, France. From the portfolio 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927

by Berenice Abbott, 1956 From the PH Filing Series at the Library of Congress

Like Atget and the camel driver, my research is concerned with understanding the city and the topography of everyday life through lived experience and encounters at the scale of 1:1, as opposed to overall diagrammatic reductions. The city and the people inhabiting it are understood as integral parts of one organism. My work is an investigation of the spaces of the infra-ordinary, a term coined by Georges Perec to describe the ordinary and habitual aspects of everyday life, as places of coexistence and correlation in the city. 1 Through my thesis project, Eroding Permanences of the Infra-ordinary; City as Archive (2012) I produced a set of alternative maps in order to decipher and understand a part of Queens, bit by bit. These included three different versions, applying to each their own technique: 1 Accumulative: the first is a collection of found and acquired objects, assembled into ‘Ragpickers Archive of Ephemera’, which expresses the area through a narrative of objects, from old photographs and letters of residents to everyday things as tokens of (non-)events: cigarette boxes, receipts, a spare part from the auto-mechanic, chipotle peppers from the deli.

2 Aural: another kind of map was produced in the entrance of Cousins Deli: in ‘Memory Tape / Strata Recorder’, a tape recorder was altered to being cyclical (a two-minute loop), instead of the linear nature of both the tape cassette and the way we understand time. This loop captured bits and fragments of sounds, conversations and ambient noise, constantly re-writing itself, thereby becoming a map in constant transformation, as the area itself.

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1 Perec, Georges, trans. John Sturrock. ‘L’Infra-ordinaire’, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1997

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right: Rackpickers Archive of Ephemera

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above: Memory Tape / Strata Recorder

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3 Photographic: ‘Stairway Camera’ mapped the comings and goings, and thereby the residents, of an apartment block (98 11th Street, Queens, New York). Different from a diagrammatic section of the building, the camera, activated by a false stair tread on the first flight, captured the ephemeral moments of passing-by of the postman, inhabitants, visitors and deliverymen – and the inherent temporality, velocity and movement of this due to the shutter being held open for as long as the shoe pushes the stair tread. A person running is hardly visible (as a consequence of an underexposed image) – the longer the moment lasts the more exposed the image becomes, eventually blending into one whole; one will become part of the staircase. The device, the stairway and inhabitants engage a performative relationship.

Each of these maps resonates with and supplements each other – and one can argue that the true map arises in between their superimposition, creating a map not only of the physical structures, but the ‘dynamic, temporal qualities of the city as a superorganism with its countless narratives, events and fluctuating systems’.2

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above and below: Stairway Camera

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2 Brook, Richard, and Nick Dunn.

‘Films’ in Urban Maps: Instruments of Narrative and Interpretation in the City.

Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2011

A second attempt (PhD, 2014) at capturing the liminal space of the stairway – which ‘belongs to all and no one’ – is performed through another analogue optical device: the peephole camera. Mounted on the inside of the door of my apartment (third floor, left), it uses the only physical aperture between the private and the semi-public worlds. Triggered by the locomotion of people climbing the flight of stairs, the optical device produces a potentially infinite map seen from my subjective perspective – a map that itself exists within the very space that it represents and cumulates. The device becomes a probe of insight, an analytic apparatus from which to understand and reflect upon the world through forensic investigations of its photographic output.

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This ‘autobiographic’ or subjective map is one reality of many; a city is constituted by countless stairways, thereby suggesting a countless number of maps. As in Dorothea, thousands of camel-drivers carry internal maps, and behind the faces of the inhabitants encountered, an infinite number of maps exists, each with their own subjective reality. If all of those were to be exhaustively described in details through cartographic representations, a map at the scale of the world is needed, ‘which coincides point for point with it…’ c

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this page: The Peephole Camera

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Obviously, such a map cannot be considered an average expression of all stairways of the city; the majority may share common denominators, while other aspects will be highly specific to each given situation. Precisely this circumstance – that immediately might seem problematic – is exactly its strength. It (subjectively) describes the city and its manifold variations as multidimensional and does not reduce the stairway to a diagrammatic, generic image (in the same way that Leconte reduces Paris to a tourist’s version).

w al king as re pro duc t i o n …every walk is unreproducable, as is every poem.

Even if you walk exactly the same route every day – as with a sonnet – the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day…. If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfilment or disaster.

– A R Ammons, ‘A Poem is a Walk’ 1

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exhibitions | sequences by l i s a r a p o p o rt plant architect inc l andscapes wal k i ng stoppi ng seei ng recordi ng

At one time all mapping was a product of walking at a very slow measured pace. With the twenty-first century facilitating instantaneous pictorial high definition views at the click of a button, mapping has nearly excluded time from the experience of reading maps and reading place. Time is a key factor in our work at PLANT Architect, which frequently focuses on experiencing landscapes by walking, rather than through encounters with singular buildings. The experiences are both narrative and filmic.

In 2012 we explored the problem of recapturing time within the depiction of our own work in two nearly concurrent installations – one in Venice2, one in Cambridge, Ontario3:: the Podium Roof Garden at Nathan Phillips Square4, and the Dublin Grounds of Remembrance in Ohio –both projects with long walks at the core of their design.

Catering to typical needs of architectural publications, these projects have been visually described with photographs of only the most dramatic moments. This is nothing new. Depictions of an architect’s work typically focus on highlights – the most striking and complex and consumable views – just like the traveller who shares highlights of their voyage but who omits the long train rides in between.

Our unease with the singular drama shots began more than twenty years ago with our Sweet Farm project – architectural interventions for looking at the landscape. The focus of most of our depictions of the project was of the objects for looking at the landscape, rather than the landscape itself. The landscape seemed so nuanced that we did not entirely understand how to photograph the experience of it. The nuanced in-between, however, is what interested us most.

For the last twenty years our practice has been developing landscapes that explore how the choreography of a space links physical engagement with the sites’ meaning. The activation of linkages reveals site, space, history and ecologies, enhances community ritual while creating loci for gathering. We believe that walking common ground creates public heritage through action.

Walking helps us measure ourselves against the earth. Walking connects our bodies with our imaginations. Walking becomes a way of understanding, revealing and forming site. Walking acknowledges time as a significant factor of experience. ‘…walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it.’ 5

1 Originally published in Epoch 18 (Fall 1968): 114-19; delivered to the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh in April 1967.

2 In August of 2012, PLANT was invited to present at the 13th Biennale of Architecture in Venice, as part of an exhibition entitled Traces of Centuries & Future Steps at the Palazzo Bembo.

3 PLANT was one of three participants in 3ByLAND, part of the Common Ground exhibit in the summer of 2012, at Cambridge Galleries. The commission included site-specific installations in downtown Cambridge, as well as the gallery exhibit.

4 The Podium Roof Garden is part of the larger project for the revitalisation of Nathan Phillips Square. The project was won by international competition in 2007 by PLANT Architect Inc in Joint Venture with Perkins+Will Canada, and with Peter Lindsay Schaudt Landscape Architecture Inc and Adrian Blackwell Urban Projects.

5 From Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit, 2001. p29

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The Podium Roof Garden, Nathan Phillips Square With two twenty-foot long walls at Cambridge Galleries we could take advantage of the scale of the walls to create a walk. Each wall (one representing each project) depicted two continuous and concurrent sequences running at eye level. Walking one way, and then back again mimicked the clockwise and counter-clockwise experiences of each site.

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Out of range of the eye level sequences, were shorter sequences – cross paths, night walks, as well as the iconic static images. Hung above and below – positioned as special moments that you could take in along the walk – these compelled you to stop to look, pausing the constant pace of the eye-level intervals.

At first the long sequences seem repetitive, but with the close and slow reading, the subtle nuances were revealed. Visitors walked back and forth – each time newly constructing a different narrative. m a ppi n g a n d

Ch ri s P o mme r

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C hr i s P om m e r

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In our work, walking is both a process and a product. It is an act we perform to understand, experience and reveal meaning – both for ourselves at the outset, and for those who visit the sites we have been engaged to design. The projects showcased in the installations treat walks not only as organisational devices within a larger landscape, but also as active, physical carriers of meaning. In many ways, these walks are a retracing of our own original exploratory steps on the site – an enhanced echo of our first contact with the site – both physical and analytical. Like the sites themselves, we want our exhibitions to be walked to be understood. Although these are necessarily reductive experiences of the sites themselves, we hope they are expansive experiences taking the visitor well beyond the punctuated iconic ‘money’ shots.

Like the Borges map6 that became so detailed that it was the true size of the world, we try to find a way to give a sense of the slow pace, the subtle changes in detail that you absorb as you walk between the moments of drama. We re-engaged Steven Evans to reshoot the Podium – he had taken all of the original iconic shots – but this time to shoot it in a measured pattern, using stop-frame animation as the model. Simultaneously, Chris Pommer 7 reshot the Grounds of Remembrance using the same model.

The photographic exercise became a form of mapping – clockwise, counter-clockwise, morning, night, filled with a crowd, empty. Testing the pattern of the photographs became part of the project – using different measured equal paces.

6 ‘Del rigor en la cienza’, Los Anales de Buenos Aires, vol. 1 March 1946 7 Chris Pommer is a partner at PLANT Architect Inc

Which pace most clearly depicted the experience, the nuances without, like Borges, making the visual depiction so detailed that it was the true size of the experience? And, how did the pace differ between one project and another – one highly urban, the other more natural? The camera looks straight ahead, but we don’t. We move our eyes constantly to take in the environment. Although a flipbook could passively reproduce the filmic sequentiality of the experiences, we want the experience to be more physically active and necessarily slow. We want to explore what the relationship of the central walk is to the punctuation points; with the two installations we were able to explore and compare approaches. * These exhibits celebrate the long, slow pace and space stretched between obvious precious moments, contemplating in equal terms the value of both, and challenging how we depict these experiences outside of the spaces themselves. Every walk may be unreproduceable, but we relish the struggle to reproduce them, embedded with the element of time. c

PLANT Team: Lisa Rapoport, Chris Pommer, Mary Tremain, Vanessa Eickhoff, Peter Osborne, Angelica Demetriou and Zac Mollica Photography: Dublin: Stephen Evans and Chris Pommer Nathan Phillips Square: Steven Evans Special thanks: Arrow Graphics Midtown Reproductions

6 ‘Del rigor en la cienza’, Los Anales de Buenos Aires, vol.

1 March 1946 7 Chris Pommer is a partner at PLANT Architect Inc.

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Gardens of Remembrance, Dublin, Ohio

The mapping had become significantly less detailed with the frequency of images edited to the absolute minimum, yet the pacing, walking, stopping, and wandering experience was still evident.

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In Venice we created an object that you needed to walk around – a two sided folded aluminum form suspended at eye level, clad and inset with images of the two projects. Significantly more compact (and de-mountable for travel), the challenge was to create a similar experience, using reductiveness to effect. Each side had the two main sequences – clockwise on top and counter-clockwise on the bottom. In the space between were recessed apertures with the alternate path sequences and the iconic shots – now top lit miniatures – inviting you to stop on your walk to peer inside to these special moments.

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tr av el s ex pe r i e nc e r ec or di ng me th o d s c ul tur e

d o c u m e n tat i o n senses by michael blois

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the came ra an d t h e t e a h ou s e the photograph and the place

above: the original project: the experience of traditional and urban tea house spatiality Yoshikien Garden in Nara: this path forces one to focus on each step and change of direction to avoid tripping, but at the same time you are positioned to observe the entire garden rather than one specific object.

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While it is understood that looking at a photo is not a replacement for personally experiencing a place, through our senses we are able to understand a great deal about a place by simply looking at a photograph. When I visited Kyoto and Tokyo to study the Japanese tea house and garden from a sensory perspective, my primary means of documentation was the camera.

I wanted to use it to capture and to convey important aspects about moments I experienced.

I avoided wide frames and dramatic angles in favour of framing the image exactly as I actually saw the space. Increasingly the value of photography is discounted because it is so ubiquitous – grabbed images on phones without concern for the quality of lighting or the frame.

And architectural publications use photographs taken from such dramatic angles and with enhancements they create an alternate version of the subject. Rarely do such images represent the moment the photograph was taken. With so many things vying for our visual attention, advertisers and publishers rely on bold and surreal images to draw viewers to their brands, all of which have led us to distrust the photograph and to discount its ability to record qualities of the built environment. However, if photography is approached from a sensory perspective, experiential qualities of a place can be recorded.

M i c ha e l B l oi s

theory

Yoshikien Garden in Nara: this path has challenges that require focus to navigate. Visually the separation between path and garden is not as well defined as other paths here, so while the lack of contrast causes the path to blend in with the garden, it demands more physical attention.

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Bacon, The logic of Sensation, 1981 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2003 3 Michael Blois. Corporeal Architecture: a material response to sensorial experience.

Master’s thesis, Ryerson University, 2010.

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1 J J Gibson. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966 2 Daniel W Smith. ‘Deleuze on Bacon: Three conceptual trajectories in The Logic of Sensation’ in Francis

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M i ch ae l B lo i s

In The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, J J Gibson theorised that the five senses are more accurately described as systems in which individual senses work together. A basic orienting system picks up gravitational and acceleration forces to create a frame of reference for all the other systems. The auditory system responds to vibrations in the air and is able to detect the direction of the source. The haptic system is made up of a number of subsystems that relate to the sense of touch, and is extended to include temperature, pain, pressure and kinæsthesia, or body sensation and muscle movement.1 The visual system collaborates with all of the other systems to register information – movement, depth, texture and colour – through the medium of ambient light. Together, haptic and visual systems are responsible for spatial experience: the understanding of three-dimensional space.

Although the visual system is the only source of input when looking at a photograph, Gibson has suggested that the other systems are activated in the process of reading an image.

The connection between haptic and visual systems in the understanding of space is also found in Deleuze’s discussion of figuration in painting. Perception (understanding of the body in a painting) is not only generated optically, ‘but take[s] on a sculptural or tactile quality (depth, contour, relief ), producing the illusion of a three-dimensional world behind the frame.’2 This phenomenon, termed tactile-optical space, uses visual cues in paintings and by extension, images, to construct a tactile reading of space.

In his study of Francis Bacon, Deleuze proposed colour as the critical element in this process: a haptic vision of colour links colour to image in ‘a strong eye-hand relation’ – Bacon’s ‘juxtaposition of pure tones arranged gradually on the flat surface’ show the human body deformed by the forces that act upon it.

Sensory systems work together, in combination, to construct our understanding of the world. The surface in front of you can confirm this phenomenon. Without touching it, one can see its level of reflectivity, its texture, and will infer how that surface would feel when touched.3 Haptic vision combined with experience communicates temperature, texture, malleability and a number of other characteristics. In the way that a basic orienting system provides a frame of reference, so too does memory, which we draw on to make linkages between the different types of sensory input.

camera For this project I used a Nikon D80 with a 50mm prime lens. The prime lens means that you can’t stand in the same spot and simply zoom in and out to frame your subject, you must physically move to compose the photograph. In doing so the camera is very present as an instrument between you and the scene. The lens links theory and experience. As I moved through the gardens positioning the camera, the resulting photographs were indisputably tied to my experience of the paths that I followed. With a zoom lens I could have shot one side of the garden while standing on the other, without actually ever going to the other side. It is the peculiarities of place that inform how a photograph is framed and exposed.

Togu-do at the Ginkakuji Temple in Kyoto: how a traditional building meets its surrounding garden – the roof extends to cover a verandah and the foundation enters the landscape in a series of steps.

There is a strong contrast between the dark interior and the day-lit garden; rough and varying textures of the garden are in direct contrast to the smooth, uniform wood, rice straw and paper inside.

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The tea ceremony, like the garden and structures that house it, is designed as a contrast to everyday life, ‘freeing the mind for greater thoughts’.4 It teaches important cultural values and is a means for passing on Japanese traditions to future generations. Contrast is essential to the experience of the tea house and its surrounding garden, and I had this in mind while framing the photographs.

Contrast is both ceremonially and perceptually important. Changes in the garden path, from straight to meandering, parallel parts of the ceremony when silence descends to fully absorb the preparation of the tea, then when it is ready, a small noise terminates the act. A change of clothing – freshness; the garden – purity; the tea – cleansing; the burning of incense – informality; the tea bowl – tactility.4 Each of these symbolic relationships is communicated sensually.

The photographs show the context of the ceremonially-designed qualities of place, which have turned a cultural ritual into a physical frame. It is the understanding of the haptic / visual relationship that informs the way that these photograph were taken. A sensory approach to photography leads to a thoughtful rediscovery of the beauty in the everyday and might convince us to not rely so much on manipulated images that distort experience.

With these examples of photographs taken in the gardens of tea houses, the focus isn’t so much the tea garden, but the textures, contrasts and cues that foreground all the senses and sensory systems involved in our understanding of a photograph. The garden and tea ceremony, like the importance of memories, provides context for this activation of our embodied understanding of both detail and place. c

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4 Dorinne Kondo. ‘The Way of Tea: a symbolic analysis’ in David Howes, editor. Empire of the Senses: The sensual cultural reader. New York: Berg, 2005. pp 192-211

B a r t v a n Da m m e

infrastructure | i m pa c t e d l a n d s c a p e s by e r i c k l av e r

docu mentati on envi ronment i ndu str y sea l evel recl amati on

t he p h o t o graph i s n ot t h e t e r r a i n B a r t v a n D a m m e ’s M a a s v l a k t e I I It’s hard to imagine a more potent metaphor than the sea. All seafaring cultures have their own mythologies; in both The Odyssey and The Tempest, the sea plays a key role in the plot and fortunes of its characters. However, as powerful a role as the sea may be, there is a distant otherness to such stories. The action happens ‘out there’ far away from home.

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Bart van Damme has been photographing the landscape and architecture of the Netherlands for well over two decades. A trained painter, his interests gradually moved away from painting with photographs of models textured with slide projections of dots, leaves and flowers; his scope has since increased in size and distance. In 2008, he began to photograph the construction of Maasvlakte II, the outermost projection of the Europoort near Rotterdam. It added 2000 hectares to a massive 105 square kilometre harbour, twice the size of the Borough of Manhattan.

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My first experience of the North Sea was a November day at Petten, a coastal town in the Netherlands northwest of Amsterdam. My father was born and lived his early life nearby. I was driven there by his cousin’s daughter. The clouds were thick and dark and as we pulled into the car park tucked into the leeward side of the protective dike the wind was blowing sea foam like tumbleweeds over the top. We climbed the stairs and as I reached the final few risers the wind pressures began to increase exponentially. Taking the last stair I could barely stand. The immediate feeling was similar to that of a child in the presence of an angry and raging adult – vulnerable and wary. The water was fearsome. This is a stark contrast to my experience of the same sea about a week later in Scheveningen, a resort town and district of Den Haag further south. The sky was a crystal blue and the sea was as smooth as a mirror.

While there is a common thread in the nautical history of the Netherlands with other cultures such as ancient Greece, Rome and Britain, as geopolitical forces with global reach and economic fortunes forged on the seas, there also is a difference in the totality of that experience. Instead of a distant otherness, the sea is closer to home in the lowlands of the Netherlands – its constructed landscape is shaped in opposition to its geofluvial character and the sort of misfortune wrought by the extreme forces I experienced that day in Petten. Twenty-five percent of the Dutch population lives below sea level. The sea looms over the land in turns, as an omnipotent bearer of wealth and doom. It is the bi-polar character of the North Sea that left the greatest impression on me when I consider the Dutch landscape.

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all ph o to s th i s pag e B a r t v a n Da m m e

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In the Maasvlakte series, one catches more than a whiff of van Damme’s influences from the New Topographics movement and more immediately the work of Andreas Gursky and Edward Burtynsky. His approach he explains, ‘is more documentary than artistic’ though one may argue that point in viewing the results; the magnetism of the Maasvlakte images is undeniable. Van Damme is self-effacing about the source of any artistry, much like John Clare when he claimed of his pastoral poetry, ‘I found the poems in the field and only wrote them down’, Bart van Damme sees his work as collecting the artistry inherent in the area. ‘Maasvlakte has opened up new creative possibilities to see and document the landscape […] to me it is an artistic landscape that seems to transcend its mere function.’ He concludes, ‘I try not to be biased in my work.’

This is where he distinguishes himself from his influences. For Gursky and Burtynsky, the power of their work lies in the sublime tension between the visual beauty and the moral consequences of our cultural desires. Within Gursky’s photographs there is a weighted sense of alienation in junk culture size and multiplicity, and Burtynsky’s images seem to contain large scale versions of the original environmentalist symbols of the pipe spewing sludge and the oil-covered bird.

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More of Bart van Damme’s work can be seen at www.studiovandamme.com

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The photographs of the Maasvlakte project are published in the book Maasvlakte I & II available from Blurb at //bit.ly/111i9Aa

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Van Damme explains that ‘though personally I loathe coal as an energy source there are few things so beautiful as a mountain of coal catching the light. In other words, aesthetics over politics.

I’m trying create art out of these landscapes, not illustrations to dress up a political or other message. A message may be there, but always layered and never too obvious.’ This is a distinct sensibility that is perhaps defined by the Dutch context of the work and van Damme’s approach in particular. Maasvlakte has been designed as a centre to distribute goods to the western world through a massive transformation of the landscape. At the same time it is also a defence against the rising seas in a time of global climate change, a recreational destination and a conservation area that preserves nesting areas and the sustainability of the fishing industry. The tension in, and ultimately my attraction to, van Damme’s work lies in the same tension I first experienced of the North Sea. This is a landscape perched between fortune and doom. It walks the line between western consumerism with its vanities of ‘bigness’ and an environmental sensibility necessary to sustain Dutch culture that will hopefully prevent misfortune. When I look at the clear blue skies in the overwhelming majority of the images, I can’t help but recall the darkness that can also gather. c

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perception | recognition by jessica craig

p o r tr ait s of me mo r y je ne sais quoi

As I move through a city, particularly one I think I know well, I am struck by how suddenly I encounter a sense of déjà vu, that intangible feeling of recognition and strangeness. It is a sense of the uncanny, the resurfacing of a forgotten memory carefully tucked away by our unconscious until triggered by some familiar element in an unusual setting: a discarded child’s toy, a nostalgic tone of light, a moment of stillness where there is normally commotion.

The photographs shown here were taken at such moments throughout Toronto, in places that have similarly been tucked away from public memory, whether for an hour or for years. I didn’t grow up in Toronto, but in these places I found myself briefly and sometimes cryptically transported into a space from my past. I raised my camera and took a picture, hoping it would capture this feeling I couldn’t quite name.

The information conveyed through a photograph uses one of our most primal and universal forms of understanding: sight. John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.’1 With a similar observation, Jacques Lacan notes that as we learn to move from seeing (the realm of the imaginary) to speaking (the symbolic realm) something is lost in translation. Lacan terms what is left behind, the real. We sense this loss though we cannot describe it, struggling through graphic or written forms of expression, but rarely able to say all that we feel.2

1 John Berger. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 2008. p7 2 Dylan Evans. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1996

On Saturday afternoons when humidity made doing anything too much to bear, we laid on the dock: sometimes on our stomachs, mesmerised by an undulating jellyfish, sometimes propped up to look out to the horizon, gauging the weight of the ocean in silence.

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I admired my grandmother’s hands: elegantly manicured with golden diamond rings, capable of the most intricate crafts. Behind every stucco wall, for an instant, I felt she might be waiting.

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Though she lived in the heart of the city, her home was only accessible via several flights of stairs, which transformed into waterfalls when it rained.

Jessica Craig

Following this logic, every method of recording is an interpretation of reality, but while a map and writing use learned social conventions to represent their subject, a photograph can communicate through visual instinct. Possibly because of this, in addition to capturing the specific – acting as testaments of past events or freezing moments in time – photographs can also hold the elusive quality that resides in the atmosphere or in the spaces between the objects in the frame.

Certainly, a photograph is always a partial truth, even when unmanipulated in post-production. Just as language shapes what we mean when we speak or write, the camera lens will physically distort reality, magnifying, blurring and cropping the scene. Of greater interest, however, is the additional bias of the individual viewing the photograph that deepens its ambiguity. In semiotic terms, Rosalind Krauss notes that a photograph is an index: when we look at a photograph, we see the forms within the frame, but we also make a chain of associations unrelated to those forms that we draw from our personal histories and that influence our perception. In spite of technical or psychological distortion, a photograph’s ability to evoke this automatic chain of thought implies that these images have still maintained some facet of the real to resonate with our unconscious memory.3

3 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985. p 115

This aspect of photography, layering our personal memories with what we see before us, resembles how we subjectively experience lived space through our preconceptions. Space itself is not fixed, but fluid, susceptible to numerous perceptions and expectations; though a photograph captures a single place and time, its significance can also extend beyond this literal record.

Photography’s strength when documenting space stems from the viewer instinctively adopting the camera eye as if it were their own. The complexity of a place can be exhibited in all its unedited glory and immediately understood by the viewer as how this place would look in person. Seemingly insignificant details that might be eliminated during a simplification into drawings and maps remain present in a photograph. These details act as potential memory triggers that would allow the viewer to acknowledge qualities of a site beyond its measurable features. Roland Barthes referred to this detail as the punctum: something in a photograph that directly but inexplicably pierces the viewer.4 The challenges lie in the desired degree of trust and control: whether the photographer has successfully distilled the essence of a place into a single frame and whether the viewer will glean the anticipated response. True representation is, of course, impossible because reality remains outside the grasp of language. Recognising the limits of each medium, a combination of writing, mapping and photography collectively provides the most accurate representation by offering a flexible expression of space. c 4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.

New York: Hill and Wang, 1981

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Jessica Craig

ear th mo de l datase t s tr eet vie w po l i ti c s

c a rt o g r a p h y ambition by sean irwin

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go o g l e maps ideology

Google is the current leader in the race to compile a digital version of our planet. Combining GPS data, images from Keyhole spy satellites, topographic information collected by NASA, and countless images captured by Street View cameras Google has nearly realised its quixotic ambition of a complete digital simulacrum of the Earth. It is a tremendously ambitious project; Google’s geo-spatial applications take up 20 petabytes (or 20 000 terabytes) storage. Street View has more than eight million kilometres of imagery stitched together and they are now adding places inaccessible by car, attaching a version of the Street View camera rig to snowmobiles, ATVs and even backpack frames. The Google Art Project allows users to ‘visit’ 150 museums in eight countries – a feature included in the basic Maps interface as of 2014.

In 2012 Google started an inventory of our planet’s 400 billion trees. Then there is Google Sky, Google Ocean, Google Moon, Google Mars and Liquid Galaxy.

Conceptually, we are building a mirror of the real world.

So, anything that you see in the real world needs to be in our database.1 – Ed Parsons Google geo-spatial technologist

Go o g le 2013

The historic centre of Rome as seen in Google Earth with all the available data layers on.

Barton and Barton consider maps the ‘quintessential ideological genre’2 Maps appear to be a representation of an area but cartographers must actually decide what to include on the map. The United Kingdom’s Ordnance Survey, founded in 1791, has hundreds of pages of rules for inclusions and exclusions in its so-called Red Book such as ‘outhouses can be included provided they are both permanent and large enough to be shown without distortion’. No map can possibly contain all the available information about the region it depicts – the plat would be illegible. Google attempts to resolve this problem with Layers that can be turned on and off.

However, with all the layers ‘on’, the map is useless.

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Barton and Barton identify three criteria for determining whether a map qualifies as an ideological document: it must present (or privilege) a specific point of view, it must disguise the fact of this privileging, and it must present its ideology as natural or non-ideological. Barton and Barton use the phrase ‘coterminous with reality’ to describe this last qualification; the most effective ideological documents are those that seem to be nothing more than statements of truth (or in the case of maps, depictions of reality).

The ideology of maps can be relatively benign – Barthes, agreeing with Gide, described the ideology of the Blue Guide as the HelveticoProtestant morality that considers mountain climbing a civic virtue and churches the only acceptable tourist destinations.3 Google’s ideology concerns technology. This should come as no surprise. Specifically, the argument made by Google Earth, Google Maps and Street View is that technology (and digital technology in particular) is commensurate with the natural world. The combination of Google Earth and Street View are like the general and specific arguments for Google’s ideology. Google Earth presents us with, on one hand, the world as it is, and on the other, the world recreated digitally. Google’s efforts to make its Earth more realistic and complete aim at disguising this distinction.

Google Earth miniaturises for the sake of utility; Street View, in its entirety, is impossibly huge. Combined, they make the argument that digital technology can recreate our planet in sum and in detail.

Go o g le 2014

Prince Edward Viaduct, Toronto.

Clement Valla collects images like this one that reveal the limitations of Google’s technologies

1 Reuters TV, Youtube.com, June 29, 2012, http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=pAbeCYtUQW8 (accessed January 21, 2014) 2 Ben F Barton and Marthalee S Barton, ‘Ideology and the Map: Toward a Postmodern Visual Design Practice’, in Central Works in Technical Communication, Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A Selber, editors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp 232-252 3 Roland Barthes, ‘The Blue Guide’ in Mythologies, trans.

Jonathan Cape Ltd. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. pp 74-77

The introduction of accurately modelled terrain to Google Earth created some surprising results. Buildings appeared to be upsidedown, bridges looked as though they had melted, highways twisted and bent. Artist and programmer Clement Valla began collecting these oddities and presenting them as Postcards from Google Earth.

Valla argued they were not simple glitches, ‘they are the absolute logical result of the system. They are an edge condition – an anomaly within the system, a nonstandard, an outlier, even, but not an error.’4 These anomalies focus attention on the software and spoil an otherwise seamless illusion – Google’s software engineers used Valla’s images to create an algorithm that specifically identifies and adjusts highways and bridges.

Google vs Gehry. Google Maps struggles with the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Millennium Park, Chicago. A crowd of faceless people in front of Anish Kapoor’s ‘Cloud Gate’

The ideology behind Google’s geo-spatial applications fosters the illusion of control. Rafman has compared the Street View camera to ‘the modern concept of God’ – omniscient and omnipresent.6 Throughout our history, mapping new territory has had the paradoxical effect of making the world seem smaller, rather than larger. If Google can realise its goal of a complete and realistic model of the entire world, it will be an incredible achievement but it will also reduce the apparent complexity of natural systems.

Google’s ideology is not malicious but it is dangerous. We are facing numerous problems at the scale of the natural world (climate change for example) and it is essential we remember these are fundamentally political, not technological, problems. c

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6 Willy Staley, ‘The 6th Floor; Eavesdropping on the Times Magazine’, December 16, 2013, http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes. com/2013/12/16/poachingmemories-from-googleswandering-eye/ (accessed January 21, 2014)

Go o g le 2014

Jon Rafman’s Nine Eyes of Google Street View is the result of patiently combing through Google’s most recent acquisitions looking for the ‘incredibly poetic, beautiful, sublime or violent and scary’. The images selected by Rafman are collected in gallery exhibitions and are posted on 9-eyes.com. Despite Google’s claim they are building a mirror of the real world, the images we see are not simply a reflection. Rafman learned to start each session by visiting the Street View site for a list of recent updates. ‘The best place to go for images is to check where the Google cars are and to follow those.

Otherwise, Google may have removed any ‘anomalies’, which often make the most interesting images.’5 Google’s Earth and Street Views are most bizarre where Google’s aspirations directly conflict with the limitations they themselves have set. Familiar streets become more discomfiting than unfamiliar, and algorithms employing facial recognition software systematically (and literally) deface people in Street View.

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5 Jon Rafman, Artfagcity.com, August 12, 2009, http://www. artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/imgmgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-googlestreet-view/ (accessed January 14, 2014)

Both the ‘melting bridge’ problem and its solution were created by a series of assumptions or expectations of how things are, or ought to be. While both Google Maps and Google Earth present the semblance of the world in all its detail and peculiarity, the model is actually generated by a series of algorithms based on general rules.

As a result, atypical objects produce strange results.

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4 Clement Valla, Rhizome.org, July 31, 2012, http://rhizome. org/editorial/2012/jul/31/ universal-texture/ (accessed January 06, 2014)

Go o g le 2014

Gabor Szilasi, Lake Balaton, Hongrie 1956 gelatin silver print signed, 8.6 x 13.1” (sight) on 11 x 14”

Jon Rafman, 58 Lungomare 9 Maggio, Bari, Puglia, Italy 2009 inkjet print on photo paper, 22 x 34”

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Gabor Szilasi, Greve, Chianti, Italie 1987 gelatin silver print signed, 8.7 x 13.1 in. (sight) on 11 x 14”

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Jon Rafman, 78 Myrdle St, Poplar, England, UK 2010 inkjet print on photo paper, 22 x 34”.

Gabor Szilasi, Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italie 1987 gelatin silver print signed, 8.5 x 13” (sight) on 11 x 14”

Jon Rafman, 330 R. Herois de Franca, Matosinhos, Portugal 2010 inkjet print on photo paper, 22 x 34”

a rt | internet by c h l o é r o u b e rt

dai l y l i fe temporal i ty hu man condi ti on generati ons vi su al i ty

wit h i n wh i c h all things exist and move The emergence of the Internet naturally saw the rise of artists using the World Wide Web both to comment on its existence and reveal its agency in the non-virtual world. Often deeply rooted in theory, Internet art uses the medium’s infinite aspects – online images, user-generated content, websites, code, algorithms, virtual communities, social networks – as medium, subject matter and inspiration.

Representative of this movement is Nine-Eyes, an on-going series of images selected from Google Street View by artist Jon Rafman. Launched in May 2007 and consistent with Google’s clerical mission ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, Google Street View consists of sending moving vehicles equipped with nine-lens cameras to capture panoramic street-level views of all public space. Begun in 2009, Nine-Eyes is an opulent collection of unplanned public moments captured by a mechanical device and selected by the artist – road kills, abandoned buildings in California, lustful kisses in Paris or prostitutes in the outskirts of Milan. Rafman has never been present for the actual occurrence of these instances but through his collection of their web-accessible reproductions wants to ‘both celebrate Google’s technologies and critique the culture and consciousness it reflects. [My] study of the virtual worlds of modern life reveals these virtual worlds to be roundabout ways of expressing the varieties of modes of alienation in contemporary life.’ 1 In September of 2010 I curated an exhibition in Montreal’s Art45 Gallery to place the issues raised by Nine-Eyes in the context of the older human hesitation towards technological advancements in the fields of photography and archiving.

The exhibit’s title ‘within which all things exist and move’, came from a definition of space – because the theme of the exhibit was not limited to the implications of Rafman’s Net Art or the connotations of Szilasi’s work, but rather embraced the questions that their combination suggests: What is space? Where do we place ourselves within it? What technologies have we created to make sense of it, and how can these devices become agents in this understanding? Do these questions change as archival machines change?

Looking back, the biggest success of the exhibit was to have Szilasi and Rafman’s public confront these similarities. Szilasi did not know of Google Street View’s existence before the project and most of Rafman’s public would not have considered Szilasi’s work as particularly relevant to today’s debates surrounding web culture and virtual archiving. And yet this juxtaposition enables us to rethink what the ‘simplest’ of photographs and the ‘weirdest’ of Google Street Views have in common: they are both part of the cosmology of fears and desires that, since the 1830s, the camera has elicited in the way we make sense of the space around us.

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1 Jon Rafman in Roubert, Chloé. Within which all things exist and move (catalogue).

Montreal, 2010, p. 25 2 Gabor Szilasi in Roubert, Chloé. Within which all things exist and move (catalogue).

Montreal, 2010, p. 19

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3 Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, Mass : The MIT Press, 1997. p. 101

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I did so by juxtaposing some of Nine-Eyes images with the argentic photographs of the well-established Canadian artist Gabor Szilasi.

Working for over fifty years mostly in Québec, his photographs capture the everyday experience of ordinary people, isolated townships, charged interiors, prosaic wastelands, commercial signs and disregarded facades. These are all things – animate or inanimate – that by their day-to-day ordinariness would have been inaccessible or forgotten if it had not been for the photographer’s patient excursions, sensible eye and humanistic curiosity: ‘I like what is overly familiar to me. I like to work in an arena where I am accepted as a photographer. But that is solely because I like to confront and talk to people.’ 2

By bringing these two obviously very different artists together – separated by time, artistic approach and conceptual framework – I wanted to show that their works have uncanny resemblances. If these similarities are at first glance mostly formal, their images are also united by the access they provide to moments past and by their injection of meaning into banal occurrences. These specific photographic attributes that are now taken for granted were, at the time of the photographic invention, nervously felt as deeply dissolving the boundaries between ‘observer and observed, subject and object, self and other, virtual and actual, representation and real’ 3 – the very ideas reiterated in today’s debates about the Internet and its agency over ownership, privacy, surveillance and identity.

Jon Rafman: ‘Google Maps and Street View alter our conception of space and even how we remember certain locations. Just as the automobile and airplanes have changed our conception of space and distances, so has Google in a totally different way. Today we live in a world where everything is recorded, but no particular significance is accorded to anything. We want to matter and we want to matter to somebody but loneliness and anonymity is often our plight.’

Jon Rafman, Conzelman Rd, Sausalito, CA, USA 2010 inkjet print on photo paper, 22 x 34”

Gabor Szilasi: ‘I always photograph in the present. By this I don’t mean literally, because obviously that is all that photography can do, but rather, that I am interested only in the present. When I went to Charlevoix I photographed a lot of old people. Not because of memory or because I wanted to make a statement about the past or what was about to be lost, just more generally because they were there in the present. When I photograph an old person or an old building, however, I feel and know that it will be very valuable in fifty or a hundred years because everything changes constantly. People are born and die. Buildings are built, demolished.’

Gabor Szilasi, Elk Club, Val d’Or, Abitibi 1977 gelatin silver print signed, 8.1 x 10.2” (sight) on 11 x 14”

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Jon Rafman, Near Calle del Puerto de Navacerrada, Arroyomolinos, España 2009 inkjet print on photo paper, 22 x 34”

Gabor Szilasi, Rouyn Noranda, Québec 1977 gelatin silver print signed, 8.9 x 13.4” (sight) on 11 x 14”

Jon Rafman: ‘My collections of Street Views reflect back to viewers their own modern condition in relation to it: disconnected from nature, drowning in the ongoing accumulation of digital noise. As this detached, indifferent mode of recording often parallels our own mode of perceiving the world, by framing and reframing the images, I hope to undo familiar conventions of seeing the world, and highlight this sense of human disconnection.’

Jon Rafman: ‘My own view is that the artist’s role requires moral commitment to critique the real world in which we are trapped. Even from a historic perspective, the role of the artist was not so much to liberate us but to reveal the conditions of our enslavement.’

Jon Rafman, 76 Boulevard de Clichy, Paris, France 2009 inkjet print on photo paper, 22 x 34”

Gabor Szilasi, Supersexe, 696 – 698 Sainte Catherine Ouest, Montréal 1979 gelatin silver print signed, 8.9 x 13.4” (sight) on 11 x 14”

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Jon Rafman, Via Valassa, Rho, Lombardy, Italy 2009 inkjet print on photo paper, 22 x 34”

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Gabor Szilasi: ‘My photographs are all about real things. I am very interested in the quantity of information that is in a photograph. Sometimes I look at exterior elements in terms of composition and that is to an extent an abstraction, but otherwise I am mostly interested in the people, telling their stories. I am interested in them as they are and in no way as abstractions of concepts.’ c

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Gabor Szilasi, La Publicité à l’extérieur fait des prodiges,Val-d’Or, Abitibi, Juillet 1977 gelatin silver print signed, 8.9 x 13.4” (sight) on 11 x 14”

de m o c r a c y n e o - c a r t o g r a p hy en g a g e m e n t gr a s s r o o t s acc e s s

de li be ra t e m a p (p i n g ) the role of citizen cartography

politics | pa rt i c i pat i o n 2.0 by n ata l i a s k o c z y l a s

Mapping has become a complex and difficult field in the dusk of whatever once was democratic society, and within modern political frameworks.1 Increasing discontent with given tools of participation and decision-making, and a growing awareness of the inability of developed practices to establish authentic representation, society is pushed to search for more effective methods.

The delusion of participation and equal access allows those in power to reinforce their own interests; the interest of the commons is to change these dynamics. Mapping is one of the possible ways of dealing with the problem of misrepresentation and muteness.

Reverend James Gall’s Orthographic projection from ‘Use of Cylindrical Projections for Geographical, Astronomical, and Scientific Purposes’ The Scottish Geographical Magazine, volume 1, 1885

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Arno Peters projection, based on Gall’s original orthographic projection. The area of each land mass is mathematically correct.

1 For example, Literary Geographies is a platform for researchers who combine humanistic knowledge with cartography and geography: ‘Geography, Literature, and the African Territory: some observations on the Western map’ or ‘Representation of Territory in the South African Literary Imagination’ or ‘Mapping Knowledge and Power: cartographic representations of empire in Victorian Britain’.

Keywords for such topics are extremely wide: creation, interdisciplinary, graphic rhetoric, power, intertextuality, strategies of mapping, critical cartography, narrative, politics of space, identity, ideology, measure, scale, text, place, space, production of space and users – just to mention a few. See literarygeographies. wordpress.com and www. literarygeographies.net 2 Mark Graham, ‘Neogeography and the Palimpsest of Place: Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth’, www.geospace. co.uk/files/Neogeography.pdf

Maps are necessarily incomplete. If they were ideal graphic depictions of reality with accuracy and objectivity, they would be redundant and unnecessary. A map always suggests a certain perspective, a specific angle; it is the narrative element that shapes it into a graphic point of view. The 1855 James Gall’s orthographic map illustrated how powerful a perspective can be.

Given that distortion is an inevitable part of the discourse of map-making, Gall used new mathematical formulae for what a representation of the world, based on the actual area of the continents, rather than their importance to the Northern hemisphere. This was picked up by Arno Peters in 1973 as a political alternative to Mercator projection which made the northern hemisphere larger than the south. Diverse perspectives, opinions, identities and elements form temporal narratives that describe what we believe is the world, and that becomes the map.

The development of new technologies, and access to sophisticated tools such as GIS and GPS in mobile phones, allow anyone to transform themselves into a citizen-cartographer. It is an effect of being exposed to Google Maps censorship: according to diverse agreements and political pressures some areas are either blurred or simply not shown in Google Maps – these are mostly governmental sites demanding special security and discretion, and parts of China and North Korea which did not agree to be shown.

The actual catalogue of omissions is much longer and not necessarily transparent, which again shows how far the current most-used map takes us from democratic standards. The catalogue forms a post-colonial vision of territory, in which many of the conflict areas, still suffering from diverse forms of colonialism, seek their own cartographical representation, drawn within their own boundaries. A nation-state driven vision of the world where boundaries are key in the interpretation and perception of geographical space might not be the main interest of many citizens – as Mark Graham argues, ‘spatial imaginations have traditionally been grounded in the local rather than the global’.2 New democracy is more likely to seek solutions at a smaller scale – and so the scale of the maps also changes.

Zygmunt Bauman argues that the state of modern politics is based on a new division between power and politics – nobody is really responsible for action and a modern democratic citizen has been changed into a handy object rather than a powerful source of great deliberative power.5 However, what creative commons and open technologies claim is that besides the status quo of the big players (corporations, most powerful states and governments, international institutions), there is still enough space for alternative streams which can be used as new digital agoras. Citizen mapping is not only a matter of tagging things on Google Maps. Considering the possible tools, media, knowledge and information that can assist in forming a new vision, everyone can overcome the traditional vision of the world and present a radically new perspective of it, using the principles of graphic rhetoric. Your own map of the world will be a new message, with a determined goal, specific choice of colours, fonts, layouts, images and data, and it will also serve some particular community in order to improve its particular life.

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3 Deliberation – a process of inclusive, open, egalitarian, democratic-to-the-core debate on any topic relevant to a community of people who want to change status quo, make a decision or present their vision of the world.

It is the main ingredient of civil society and most probably a path to establish real democratic decisionmaking processes.

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5 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Times of interregnum’ www.ethicsandglobalpolitics.net/ index.php/egp/article/view/17200

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4 The belief that representation would be a form of political engagement somehow natural to each citizen, in fact demands a large educational effort and the ability to perceive things not present in the curriculum, media or other sources of knowledge – access to real representation was and still is limited to a chosen few.

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A map is a complex work that combines graphic design, geographical knowledge, use of new media and/or traditional forms of aesthetic expression with historical information. It interests the citizen-cartographer who cries for representation and deliberation3 instead of imposed, given, fixed, agreed upon and ‘indisputable’ information Each enthusiast who strolls down the streets with a mobile, photographing and mapping whatever they find accurate, under-represented and relevant, enters a debate on a vision of the world and its figuration, without claiming to have discovered the final state of art – the work of mapping is understood by the citizen-cartographer to be as infinite as the process of democracy.

If a map is meant to ‘illustrate and sustain’ a vision of history, then the natural instinct of an aware citizen is to deeply and critically investigate the content of popular, widespread maps. Thomas Paine argued in his Rights of Man in 1792 that ‘Every man can understand what representation is’ – centuries and inventions later this statement seems as elitist and idealistic as it probably did then, if only to describe a desired condition.4 Now, through open-source solutions, people have a chance to grasp participation and to be represented the way they would like.

A good example of such a map is the result of a collaborative effort between New York Civil Liberties Union volunteers who gathered information about surveillance cameras across Manhattan and then mapped them. The result is not only a map of the locations of cameras, but also a negative map, the map of Big Brother.

An awareness of where surveillance recordings take place empowers citizens who are able to discuss these locations, deciding which cameras should stay in their places and why. This project also warns about how passive and unaware the modern, maturing democratic society can be, and how much has to be done to set it in deliberative motion.

The same democratic principles lie behind the Fix My Street mapping project, an initiative that tags places in the city that need repair, indicating the things that are supposed to be taken care of by people we vote into municipal office. If the tools developed by the system are not efficient enough, citizens will take over part of the responsibility and take matters into their own hands.

Mapping can enable a visual representation of a political and civil struggle against an oppressive regime in a country unregistered by an international community of rightful countries, usually eager to intervene in difficult conflicts. Political Geography Now, deals with this issue by constantly updating, among others, the map of Syria, opposite.6 Thanks to this site’s analysis of media and scientific articles one gets an explanation of very complex data, such as the position of diverse groups engaged in the conflict, the areas recently involved in the conflict, position of government troops, etc. This kind of effort provides us with information that, for certain reasons, remains under-represented in the mainstream media in the Western/Northern hemisphere – and manifests in an accessible way overlooked developments.

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The continually updated Civil Liberties Union Manhattan Surveillance Cameras Map: Manhattan is divided into twelve zones with information on the number of cameras, how many are stationary, rotational and globe cameras, and divided into two main categories: red dots point out private cameras, yellow dots are public ones. The map also marks cameras in green city parks and in blue places of interests – public buildings and squares. right: a detail of the CLUManhattan Surveillance Cameras Map

Political Geography Now sequential maps of Syria: Area of fighting and territorial control in Syria’s civil war.

Map by Evan Centanni, starting from a blank map by German Wikipedia user NordNordWest. License: CC BY-SA Text summaries are included with each update.

This is how an emergent movement of citizencartographers uses the possibilities given by the interactive realm of Web 2.0; this is how they seek actual deliberation, an egalitarian access to democratic rights and means to express their presence, interests and vision of reality. What gains recognition in cyberspace has impact on the economic, cultural, political, social situation of the offline world. No longer can the centre make unilateral decisions about the local.

Citizen maps belong to a stream of ways and means used to establish a new world; they are an exercise for re-establishing a public agora, forgotten by neoliberal lifestyles for whom the notion of representation seems comfortable enough, but which no longer provides accuracy or action. Citizen-cartography is a tool that serves the excluded, ignoring the big declarations of the great political players. As such, these maps attempt to show certain reality. They don’t claim salutary properties, rather they present an important, desired and needed contribution to systemic change. c

Map Map Map Map Map Map

1, 1 February 2012 8, 28 December 2012 10, 25 June 2013 11, 22 August 2013 12, 15 December 2013 12.1, 28 January 2013

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6 Political Geography Now is the project led by geographer Evan Centanni, whose mandate is to ‘chronicle changes to the world’s countries, borders and capitals, as well as real territorial control in conflict zones and disputed territories’. www.polgeonow.com

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E van Ce n tan n i

ar c h ive s do c u m e n t s h i s to r y r ec o ve r y l ati n a m e r ic a

the modern movement | p e r u ’ s wa lt e r w e b e r h o f e r by hector abarca

t h e f or g ot t e n a r t of architectural drawings

The representation of coded factual information, even if carefully laid out, is what stops architectural drawings from being considered art work; however, major art galleries today have recently added historical architectural drawings to their collections, even if they were not meant to be exhibited in museums but in boardrooms and on construction sites as guidance tools for builders throughout the construction process. For many, they are mere documents that after building occupancy should end up in storage or in city hall archives.

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But, is not the aim of an architectural drawing to make feasible an idea? Might this be the reason why artists have flirted with architecture and vice versa? After centuries of trial and error, the arrival of Masolino allowed linear perspective to shape the Renaissance. The architecture of Raphael’s School of Athens used Bramante’s early designs of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as the illusionary meeting point for philosophers. Giovanni Battista Piranesi made a name with his hyper-realistic antic Rome veduti and Bernardo Belloto, nephew of Giovanni Antonio Canal – better known as Canaletto, two centuries after his death surprisingly helped, with his accurate cityscape renderings, to rebuild Warsaw after the destruction of World War II. From antiquity to baroque times, any review of a difference between architecture and art would have been considered irrelevant as all fine arts were completely interwoven.

In their capacity to visually communicate how to build, architectural drawings have the power to present impossible but verisimilar worlds that we believe could exist and be built, even if they escape the limits of reality. Piranesi, M C Escher, Antonio Sant’ Elia and Hugh Ferriss showed us futuristic, fantastic, ethereal, dark and sometimes impossible imaginary explorations of abstract architectures. With the advent of the twenty-first century, as construction technology becomes more complex, building regulations more sophisticated, professional roles more specific, liability mandatory, and expenditure more tightly controlled, architecture faces many more constraints and variables than ever before; the computer files of today travel the world back and forth with exactitude and the soulless precision of anonymity.

Alvarez Calderon, beach house, 1959, Santa Maria del Mar, unbuit.

Main floor; construction set, scale1:50.

Ozalid copy of pencil on vellum original Fernandini beach house, 1959 Santa Maria del Mar, built.

Entrance elevation; construction set, scale1:50. Ozalid copy of original in pencil on vellum, original set used on site, 24x36” Fernandini beach house, 1959 Santa Maria del Mar, built.

Second Floor; construction set, scale1:50 Ozalid copy of originals in pencil on vellum, original set used on site, 24x36” Detail, 1957 to 1959 Santa Maria del Mar. Typical balcony parapet & handrail detail.

Ozalid copy of original pencil on vellum, part of a 24x36” sheet

House in Lima, ca. 1959, probably unbuilt.

India Ink with accents in watercolour and coloured pencils on vellum, 24x36” with missing parts Maurer & Ballon beach houses,1958, Santa Maria del Mar, modified. Pencil and watercolour on tracing paper, 11x17” Fernandini beach house, 1958, Santa Maria del Mar, Iconic view from the seawall, 1959, 12x16” Rizo Patron beach house, 1957, Santa Maria del Mar, demolished. Bird’s eye view, from 35mm negative, 1959

al l imag e s co u r te s y o f th e We be rh o f e r A rch i ve , L i ma, P e ru

In contrast, architectural drawings display, on tracing paper, a dream. While most drawings expect to come to fruition with ribbon-cutting ceremonies and applause; others remain as thoughts, as unconsummated ideas. The latter are more common in developing societies where long-awaited projects remain unbuilt, postponed, waiting, until the country finishes dealing with unbudgetted, unplanned but not unexpected emergencies that come after, or might precede, more crises. If projects do materialise in lesser-developed countries, they are often awaited with so much anxiety and hope that they become iconic symbols, a heavy responsibility for the practitioner. In many regions and especially in Latin America, architecture is still practiced in the intimacy of a sunny atelier with lengthy coffee breaks, academic debate and tertulia. Perhaps, because architecture and the arts have struggled to settle an identity, every design exercise is read as a manifesto, and its success or acceptance only will come after conversation and exchange.

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The leading architectural forces in the region, Brazil, and later Chile, were able to reconcile their modernity with tradition in the process of building up a national identity, embracing new technologies but also adapting them to their own terms and needs.

Recently Peru has joined the club of booming economies with current living standards repeating the those of Peruvian success in the mid-twentieth century. In those days Peruvian professionals looking for a new architecture that would satisfy both local idiosyncrasies and the needs of modern society were certainly influenced by the Brazilian experience. However, their project stalled amid economic and social collapse, with decades lost to political violence and economic turmoil. Today, under a new wave of regional development, young design professionals respond quickly and individually, but afraid of seeming naïve in the face of new global societal standards, they are seduced by the flash of globalised ‘sweeteners’ – effective, and shallow, solutions.

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Carmen Apartment building, Ancon (north of Lima), built.

India ink on Canson card stock, 24 x36” Atacocha mixed use building, ca. 1954, downtown Lima, unbuilt.

Photocopy of original india ink drawing on glossy cardstock, 24 x36” Tauro Building & Cinema, 1956-58, downtown Lima, derelict.

Black and white photograph of the rendering, 1959 Las Sirenas apartment building , 1959, Santa Maria del Mar, partially demolished.

Studio black and white photograph of india ink drawing over gloss cardstock, 8 x12”

Looking back to yesterday is sometimes a painful exercise filled with unbuilt broken dreams blighted with memories of naïveté and wasted time, written or drafted on fine decaying paper, as if taken from an old noir fiction novel or Eduardo Galeano’s 1973 classic, Open Veins of Latin America.

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Literature might be considered closer to architecture than any other classical art, for its compositional structure, magnitude and temporal narrative. A careful selection of chapters and pages can bring forward a comprehensive account of the piece, but it is mainly in the verisimilitude that fiction becomes tangible, where the project becomes alive and by simple observation we can make the author’s experiences our own. By admiring the silent beauty of architectural drawings, the support of material acquires another dimension beyond its informative task. This is how we choose the precise chapter where the recent past of our magic realist journey can be found.

One leading, but quiet, figure of Peruvian modern architecture was Walter Weberhofer (1923-2002). In his seminal projects Weberhofer condensed the broad universality of the modern movement with the tectonics of pre-Columbian architecture, and the American-Spanish baroque heritage of dense adobe walls. He achieved this mix through decision, conviction, enthusiasm and three pencil grades highlighted with watercolours, or in ink with applications of tempera or coloured pencil, writing down the new Latin American spirit set by Brazil when postwar South America was living a moment of fast change, the promise of a utopia and long-awaited development.

Atlas Insurance Headquarters, ca. 195355, Lima downtown, built.

India Ink with accents in watercolour on Canson card stock, 24x36” Canziani country house,1964, outside Lima, unbuilt.

Watercolour on tracing paper, 12x18” Alter House, 1956, Lima, demolished.

Photocopy of original India Ink on vellum, 24x36” Las Sirenas apartment building , 1959, Santa Maria del Mar, partially demolished.

Studio black and white photograph of india ink drawing on gloss cardstock, 8x12”

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Weberhofer is one of the few Peruvian architects with a body of work of regional importance, and up to now the only Peruvian architect who has exhibited his work in the United States, invited by an official mission of Canadian and American housing experts that toured South America in 1958.1 They were impressed by Santa Maria del Mar, a modernistic beach resort where Weberhofer was the exclusive architect – a community of bold, extrovert summer houses and apartment buildings crimped into the coastal desert dunes, 50km south of Lima. Between 1953 and 2002 Weberhofer carefully catalogued and organised his own archives; today the Weberhofer archives contain almost 800 original projects, most of them built of exceptional handmade working drawings and renderings done in different techniques, vintage negatives and photographs of models, site work and final occupancy. They are kept in a basement, ready to be rediscovered, waiting to see the light again to show us the way back to the fearless heroic years of Latin American modernism. c

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1 At the 1959 Annual Meeting of the National Association of Home Builders held in Chicago, and then at their Housing Centre in Washington, DC.

l ay e r s | meaning by reza aliabadi

sup e rimposi ti on co rrel ati on ins cri pti on p ercepti on narrati on

t h e m a t i c c ar t o graph y Five years ago, in August 2008, I spent five days driving the Trans Canada Highway. I used that 5000-kilometre trip as the basis for a photo installation that I later called Transimage1, a multi-layered scene resulting from the superimposition of fifty photographs taken at intervals of one hundred kilometres. The outcome, which was a single image, gave me the opportunity to experience at a glance both a thousand kilometres of place and a condensed exposure of a five-day experience. Basically, the superimposed illustration had created new possibilities for new readings and interpretations.

Recently a client of mine, who is also a friend and a graphic designer, surprised me with a diagram. He had overlaid all the architectural drawings that I had prepared for his house (right). The result was a single map/drawing/diagram that had embedded in it all the necessary information to describe this architectural project. Although one cannot build the house out of that single drawing, it characterises the entire project.

While mapping can reduce the complexity of that which is mapped, here we tried the opposite. Since superimposition offers new narratives quite different from each individual component, we responded with a short sentence about each of the illustrations, superimposing our thoughts and interpretations onto the graphic superimpositions. The images are provocative. Familiar concepts defamiliarised by layering upon layers lead us somewhere else. They are triggers, still connected to the collection of original images. c

Design Architect: Reza Aliabadi [rzlbd] Project Manager: Amin Sheivari Construction: Maxamin Corp Building Type: Single family house Location: Toronto Basics: Two storey wood structure Lot: 25’ x 100’ Living Area: 2000 sq ft

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B e h ro u z Ha r i r i

above: Patio House drawings

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These two disconnected (but similar), exploratory (but relevant) experiences led me to superimposition as a method for an experimental mapping. As I understand it, this technique has been also used in cartography to produce maps by overlaying correlated material; sometimes to conceal something but most of the time to add to the depth of information in an overall image. I curated an exercise in our atelier and Lailee Soleimani, Ladan Niknam and I did few experiments in different realms such as identity, nationality, race and religion. The intention was to explore and produce figuration without conscious motivation except for the revealing of a variety of relationships at a glance.

1 Aliabadi, Reza. ‘Transimage’, On Site 21:weather, spring (2009): 50-51 Aliabadi, Reza. ‘A Text for Trans Canada’, rzlbd POST Vol.1 No.08 (2009): 37

There is a dark side to everything — Reza Aliabadi Beliefs are not meant to cloud each other — Ladan Niknam Believe all and believe nothing — Lailee Soleimani

You just need one pair of wings to fly — Reza Aliabadi The more the merrier — Ladan Niknam Sometimes it takes more than one of a kind to be beautiful.— Lailee Soleimani

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I am from nowhere, where are you from? — Reza Aliabadi Planet earth flag! — Ladan Niknam To be from or not to be from, that is the question — Lailee Soleimani

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I wish I could look through your eyes! — Reza Aliabadi This is a mirror that reflects you among everybody else — Ladan Niknam We were all supposed to look alike, we just forgot how! — Lailee Soleimani

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You won’t be a loser nor a winner, just enjoy the game — Reza Aliabadi You could be far in the opponent’s field, or just in the middle of the way; it depends on what game you’re playing — Ladan Niknam How does one play when the rules of different worlds traverse?

— Lailee Soleimani

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c ul t u r e s pa c e + p l a c e chance c om m u nit y en co u n t e r s

mapping process performance by v i c t o r i a s ta n t o n

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h o w pla c e i s p e r f or m e d a manifesto

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Vi c t or i a S t a nt on

The foundation of my research as a performance artist is to keep exploring and attempting to uncover wherein lies ‘the performative’. This research has morphed into several kinds of practices and my most recent work has proposed the crossing over of relational art (that of performative social transactions) with geo-poetic meanderings (performative explorations of place), to produce an in situ / in socius project – that which reveals an intersection; a shared area of interaction, within a specifically chosen site.

From October 2012 to October 2013, I carried out a series of research and creation residencies in three locations (two months in Real del Monte, Mexico; one month in Saint John, New Brunswick and four months in Sainte-Thérèse, Québec (going back and forth from Montréal to Sainte-Thérèse). My intention was to spend the entirety of my time seeing sites that hold meaning for the people who live there. In one-on-one meetings the purpose wasn’t to see tourist attractions, but to experience these cities and towns through the eyes of local people – to discover the myriad stories that make up multiple invisible histories of each place.

Encountering local citizens to encounter a new place, I was also encountering acclimatisation – a personal consideration of how we come to understand a place and feel some sense of belonging; of how place is indeed constructed.

When art is made outside conventional art contexts, when art and life collide in a parallel moment of co-existence, boundaries dissolve and the performance becomes less about an audienceto-artist relationship, and more about human-to-human contact.

This re-defines the roles of art and the artist. To qualify and quantify such an invisible trajectory, and to locate the performative function that I perceive as a deeply inherent and driving force in both my artistic practice and the construction of place, some basic principals were uncovered.

the performative of necessity

the performative of serendipity What I’ve discovered over several years of travelling and monitoring the process of travel, is that spaces only begin to become particularised when I begin to feel a sense of connection to them.

Slowly, space (general) becomes place (specific). Encounters with others contribute significantly toward a connection to place. To this end, travelling provides the ideal circumstance for a heightened observation of how we connect – to ourselves, to our environments, to others. Momentarily away from home and from the person who we usually know ourselves to be, we give ourselves the space to discover and reveal other less developed parts of ourselves.

In encounters with new surroundings: other people, situations and the built and natural environment there is an opening up of consciousness and a charged peripheral vision. Intuition finds a privileged position, and intimacy – the willingness to let down one’s guard – is offered a platform in which to flourish.

With all our senses activated and when openness coalesces with these landscapes of exploration, we encounter serendipity: a spontaneous and unexpected action / reaction that connects various points of contact in both planned and chance encounters. Within that space of encounter, all kinds of unexpected outcomes emerge.

A planned encounter can lead to several unplanned encounters and a chain of events unfolds, pointing both back toward a previous sign and forward to as yet unknown possibilities.

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the performative of place

1 David Seamon in Anne Buttimer and David Seamon, The Human Experience of Space and Place. London: Croom Helm, 1980

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A place is made up of its histories, its landscape, its architecture, its socio-political structures and economies. Place is a construct of the identities that make up its existence – place is the localised and particularised assemblage of the people, and communities that move through, inhabit and constitute it. In the individual sequences of repeated activities that make up daily existence, an assemblage of many individuals (even a whole population) becomes a ‘place ballet’: the performance of place.1

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The revelation of an evolving, interconnected constellation – an embracing of one’s internal map – discovers the unfolding performativity of place. c

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Performatives of necessity are acts with which we navigate a place in fulfilment of essential needs: buying groceries, getting a morning coffee, picking up a newspaper. They bring us into contact with others through service transactions. When we find ourselves returning to the café on a daily basis, coinciding with the morning shift of the young woman who works there, the manner and quality of interaction shifts from the more or less formal to the personal.

the performative of encounter With each site of performance (and in the performance of place), I encounter another element: the meeting, a movement and moment in time and space that presents another version of the location: a walking talking living history. Each person is a specific and particular perspective on this place. Encounters are intersections (where you meet me and we step into each other’s orbit thereby crossing from my world into yours, yours into mine) that produce a dynamic of exchange, two worlds overlapping. The space between us is now a shared area of interaction. That space between us, in a performance of transaction, is a zone of fertile potential where even as we come together in real time, neither of us can know the eventual impact of our encounter.

ar r i v a l di s pl a c e m e nt gr oun d in g me mo r y i den ti t y m i g r at i o n | writing by a s h e r g h a f fa r

mappi n g t h e f u r n a c e r o o m 1

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When he was a child he had a passion for mapping the house, the earth: archaeology, de-stratifying and stratifying. Imagining maps in his cobbled mind. He walked around the block with a question in his mind that had been bottled in the furnace of the house. A question like ‘who am I, here?’ and upon arriving at the same point on the block, the same question would blaze up. An inflammatory question forged in the furnace of his house when he went to fill a pitcher with distilled water and clambered over a mountain of photo albums to arrive at the distiller.

We never arrived, having never left. And always we would leave a door open to a past, to a bullock cart, to a servant, to congenial conversations in the living room. The grammar is still there, but the words would be for our children to figure.

We never taught them a mater tongue. We never tongued them. We weaned them in white.

At one point in my little brother’s dreams, I went back to Thunder Bay. I was terrified at arriving in an absent place, a buried gable. This would add another scale to an already bat-like existence, where stumbling was the same as walking through the heat of another place. If one kept oneself open this long, the heat would either sear them, or the cold would make the bones release stories. Either way there would be stories. * The furnace room was where we kept distilled water, picture albums, newspaper clipping of father topping his class in Pakistan, but never getting a job because he wasn’t white enough in Pakistan. He was no gentleman, bric a brac from Britain, old clocks, telephones. The floor was cold and uninviting and there were skis and imaginary mountains as soon as he walked in — objects could yearn in absence and have an independent life when doors closed those doors could be an opening in another room: a hinge unhinge another place. Dogs could still run in dreams when their paws twitched; the furnace could die and when it did there would be a fight and in the argument a landscape vast as an atom — a disappearance into white maps — or there could be the topics. And we could love white. And we could act our parts and slightly change our names, but those lost letters now are living in another room unhinged, where there is no furnace and the heat could kill you.

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First published in UnderCurrents.

Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, volume 15, Spring 2006.

* Already space is auditory, clacking hinges, a furnace humming in the morning, bamboo frames (somewhere else). Already space is a mackerel slipping from fingers back into sugar cane clattering, hexing the way that a sentence could move if it remembered. A word dismembered is a new member of the family.

Plates underneath the earth could quake or cleave and forge another signature over and over again.

We shift from India to Pakistan to Canada. There are scattered clothes of a dead brother whose name we must archive at some point. There are sounds that twist and wind, arriving nowhere.

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Father says something like: I should have one more wrinkle, but I desired immortality, before that I had noble intentions to send money home.

In 1947 I was a child. In 1947, I gave a speech for the formation of a new country. In 1947 I will never grow old. In 1947 I killed a Hindu. In 1947 I may have thrown a knife in the Indus. The Indus eats away the shore, an autoimmune disease.

I release dead bodies from my mouth who were killed on a train to Jalandhar to Amritsar. There was confusion — now I am. * Someone tried to get on a train to Pakistan and he was shot dead with his leg left dangling from the platform. These are portraits now draped in white linen and the snow covers my tracks. I am a detour to another room. I could unwalk and unwalking could mean mapping backwards. If I let the snow melt I’ll find my feet. Winged, perhaps. c

m a p p ing infr a s t r u c t u r e r ive r s id e n t it y p a r t it io n d o c u m e n ta ry | wat e r way s by keesic douglas

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K e e s i c D ou gl a s

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From an interview of Keesic David by Riley Wallace for Upfront, a Harbourfront visual arts blog, June 23, 2010

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Ancestor’s Path. Beyond Imaginings: eight artists encounter Ontario’s greenbelt.

A photographic exhibition, 2010-2012, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto.

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I listened to the frogs and the bugs, the birds and the trees. I watched beavers and muskrats. It made me think about pollution and carbon emissions. It made me think about littering and garbage production.

Because of my heritage I am automatically considered to be connected to the natural world and fighting mercilessly to protect it. I drive a car. I remember driving my car two hours each way to Toronto and back just to get a haircut. Being in a canoe travelling the same route really put some perspective on what is necessary for the world to survive. Looking back on the images I captured and being involved in such an amazing project as Beyond Imaginings, I am really starting to see the value in making art about the natural world. Maybe I am beginning to be an artist activist after all. c

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I’ve always explored my Aboriginal identity through my work and my own perspective on the world around me. It’s not so much that I am trying to figure out who I am for myself, but more who we are as Indigenous peoples negotiating our place in this world. I’ve always used historical notions of Aboriginal-ness but this project had me focusing on a very specific history, that of the historical trading route of my ancestors. As I canoed and explored the winding Holland River over many days, it became apparent that there was this natural world that I was a part of and connected to at the water level, and there was another world slightly above, crossing the bridges and zooming down straight roads in cars and trucks.

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r e a d i n g m at e r i a l | resource extraction by stephanie white

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c ar t o gra p h i c m e t a p h or s petropolis as archipelago

A tome crashed through my mailbox last month – a 2 x 9 x 6 block of book, The Petropolis of Tomorrow, edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper, a triangulation of essays and projects between Toronto, Infranet lab, Harvard GSD South American Project and Rice University where Casper studies and Bhatia taught. It is published

by ACTAR (Barcelona) and Rice, printed in the EU, distributed

by ACTAR Din NY. I mention this array of links and dispersed institutions because their very atomisation parallels the overriding metaphor that directs The Petropolis of Tomorrow, the archipelago.

Mason White tells us in his essay that the petropia archipelago is not to be taken as a metaphor, but a geologically based reality.

But why this reality and not another? A successful metaphor encapsulates complex theory, backed by theoretical development and describes, in an instant, all sorts of conditions, ideas and situations. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome was such a metaphor: it provided a new way of visualising loose and indefinable connections that were moiling around unable to coalesce in a traditional, centralised metaphor of knowledge.

One might say that all theory is meant to describe the world as any one culture finds it. A full generation ago when I applied literary theory to architecture, it was revelatory: Foucault and Derrida, relativism and semiotics still in play. My formulation of a postcolonial architecture along the lines of postcolonial literature, led me to world systems theory and core-periphery relations.

Bingo. This made total sense: asymmetrical power relationships, travelling theory – all was clear. Everything I looked at, everything I knew, could be explained by my position on the periphery of the semi-periphery with its false consciousness of core ambitions.

What both postcolonial studies and world systems theory did was to diminish the hegemony of the centre – it lost its critical and cultural dominance. The world is no longer first, second and third worlds but BRICS and MINTS; there has been a levelling of economic power, military might and control (asymmetrical warfare is now the norm) and Europe and the United States are no longer the arbiters of cultural excellence. I found this all very useful.

Then came the rise of the internet which presented the world as a vast multidimensional web, then a cloud, where paths, routes, nodes and edges (the vocabulary by which we have described cities since Kevin Lynch) are completely random, provisional, seemingly arbitrary and un-replicable. Algorithms collect and sort data, but there is so much raw data it is possible that the algorithms cannot be checked.

Enter archipelago as an organising metaphor; nominally, in The Petropolis of Tomorrow, a way to articulate sites of oil resource extraction. This can be the array of drilling platforms in the Campos and Santos Basin off the coast of Brazil, or the rigs of the North Sea, or the oil capitals whose executive personnel seem to be interchangeable and highly mobile – the Al Qaeda attack on the Algerian gas plant in 2012 collected hostages from ten countries.

The archipelago that is the Athabasca Bitumen Sands not only has a geographic dimension, but a larger cultural field that extends to Newfoundland, yes, but also to Venezuela and Nigeria.

o il in f ra s t ru ct u re geo gra p h y u rb a n is m n et w o rks

The Petropolis of Tomorrow, a curiously nostalgic Buck Rogers sort of title, carefully presents the historic roots of archipelagic relations: a University of Toronto architecture studio went to the islands of the Aegean, the tops of a mountain range, the original archipelago. Ungers and Koolhaas’s 1977 plan for Berlin which re-defined the city as an archipelago of sub-centres with green belt in between (mentioned often throughout this book) underpins discussion of the figure-ground of island and ocean: which is the figure, which is the ground? The oceans are our future, hold most of our resources and control our weather. The islands are where we live and what we know. Although connections between islands are often clumsy, the archipelago works as a collective territory.

In systematised territory, say The Interstate Highway System, a mesh of American cities connected by traffic arteries of numbing utility where highway verges block out the rural hinterland behind, everything is given an equivalency. The usefulness of the archipelago as a metaphor is to select, out of this flattened blur, islands that can be thematically connected: the petroleum archipelago: Anchorage - Edmonton - Calgary - Houston - Caracas — big islands with smaller islands nearby, such as Fort MacMurray and Corpus Christi.

Conceptually, the archipelago can be very elastic. This is its strength – a fresh way to conceptualise one’s way through the cloud[s]. It is also cartographically based, which allows a default to the basic condition of islands afloat in an undifferentiated sea whenever the metaphor is stretched too far. Although our economic, resource, military, political and cultural systems can be detached from geography, they are also indisputably grounded in physical space and time. Petropolis occurs where oil is either extracted, refined, transported or used. Which is everywhere.

Neeraj Bhatia references Frederick Douglas Turner in his description of the Campos Basin archipelago of oil wells and rigs off Rio de Janeiro as a frontier – the meeting point of wilderness and civilisation. He recasts Turner’s nineteenth century American frontier that stepped ever-westward away from the entrenched and corrupt old centres of the eastern seaboard (connected by the Atlantic to the even more corrupt centres of Europe) as structurally similar to the stepping away in a spirit of independence and freedom from mainland Brazil, out into the ocean in an archipelago of oil wells and rigs. Perhaps. The frontier thesis seems to fit better core-periphery relations and the system of resource exploitation in the periphery, (the frontier) by the core (the mainland, the cities, the centres of commerce). All that can be done to redress an imbalance of power is for the periphery to withhold its labour and its resources – the ultimate spirit of independence and freedom. However, the periphery needs the core to supply it with, baldly, market. The petropia archipelago, fascinating, fragmented, complex, is not and cannot be autonomous simply because its product is petroleum.

Freedom and independence of spirit are useful nationalist qualities, but nation-states appear irrelevant in this book. This is its ambiguous core: is a book of maps that often coincide with cartography, representations of land mass, but without political representation. **

The graphic style of The Petropolis of Tomorrow: huge fonts and microscopically detailed drawings, tiny print and whole pages given over to background pattern, redistributes hierarchies of information. The essays and projects, precedents and photographs, titles and footnotes are all equal in their position in the archipelagic layout of the book: you can enter it anywhere. There is no linear narrative, the tracks are set to shuffle. Because of this, it is an irony that an essentially optimistic re-visioning of resource-extraction infrastructural installations as a new kind of polis is set next to the photographed reality of Baku and the Athabasca Bitumen Sands, both of which show the environment of these resource extraction sites as toxic and irredeemable – the damage is done. To build a positive petropolis one would have to equal, if not supersede, both the Soviet system that built Baku and the unfettered transnational corporate world of resource extraction that is the Athabasca region.

In The Petropolis of Tomorrow the negatives of the petroleum landscape, are acknowledged with copious researched references, and then suspended in favour of dealing opportunistically with the hardware potential of the petroleum industry – whether it be a pipeline, a drilling rig or a refinery tank – as the physical foundation for a future petropolis. This aerial strategy is a fundamental modernist belief: if it can be diagrammed, it can happen. Farmers, pipeline bombers and people with strange new forms of cancer at the front line of petropia do not impinge on the design of these petropoli. Where is the long term care island in the archipelago? **

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1 Bomin Park, Peter Stone. ‘Cidade Recorrente’, The Petropolis of Tomorrow. Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper, editors. Barcelona and Houston: Actar and Architecture at Rice, 2013. p448 m a ppi n g a n d p h oto g ra ph y

disclosure: a few years ago, before the hail Mary pass that is shale gas and all the pipeline controversies, On Site review asked for contributions to what a new town in the Athabasca oil sands would be: not that we thought it should be built, but that it will be built.

The Petropolis of Tomorrow, developed with such resources, such intelligence and thought, is the first serious response, not to us, but to the subject.

The Petropolis of Tomorrow is valuable, for its engagement with the pariah industry of the twenty-first century, its thoughtful theoretical arguments and its snapshot of how, willingly, architectural thought discards on-the-ground reality in favour of the utopian design.

From the introduction to one of the projects, Park and Stone’s Cidade Recorrente: ‘In the middle of the ocean, water both isolates islands of activity and connects these objects within a broader network.

The scale of mobility at sea has no dry analogue – ships can transport cargo the size of city blocks with relative ease.

With such capacity, it is possible to condense the spatially dispersed population of the oil fields into a single network scheduled through time. While land-based mobility remains relatively limited, by way of the ocean, people and city can move omnidirectionally.

Optimising this condition, Frequencity deploys a diverse range of programme shared through three moving networks that interface between a series of static points to offer the complexity and diversity of the city in a dispersed logistical environment.’1 This about sums it up: the new frontier, huge, ripe for rethinking, almost a tabula rasa for the ongoing pursuit of logistics, technology, industry and archipelagic urbanism. c

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ro dri go b a r r os

perception | geography by rodrigo barros

h e g e m o ny c on ve nt io n po w e r i s o l a t io n

i de o lo gic al c a r t og r a p h y o f A m e r i c a

Latitude:

Longitude:

The four cardinal points are three: South and North.

— Vicente Huidobro, Altazor

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’­­ —­Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass

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3 Written after a long journey through America by founders of the School of Architecture of the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Godofredo Iommi, Alberto Cruz, Fabio Cruz, Miguel Eyquem, Michel Deguy, Edison Simons), Amereida was first published in 1967. Spanish version can be found at: www. memoriachilena.cl/archivos2/pdfs/MC0047461.pdf

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2 ‘I have said School of the South; because our north is the south. There should not be north, to us, but by opposition to our South. That is why we set the map upside down, so we can have a precise idea of our position, and not how the rest of the world wants it.’ Joaquín Garcia-Torres, Universalismo Constructivo. Poseidón, 1944

We are confronted with the task of mapping to reveal what is hidden in America, to unveil the internal relationships of dominance that are keeping us away from understanding and embracing the real continuity of the land we live in. It is definitely not up to cartographers, urbanists or architects alone to redefine, through maps, the shape of this new America: ‘Interrupting my train of thought, Lines of longitude and latitude, Define and refine my altitude’, as the band Wire used to sing, might give us some hints about our position and how to move. c

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1 Vicente Huidobro, Altazor, 1931. Wesleyan University Press, 01-01-2003. www.vicentehuidobro.uchile.cl/altazor.htm

If maps work as a linguistic sign, the same way as words do, we could suppose that the question is also not about the meaning of these signs, but about ‘who masters them’.

The superficially neutral and objective characteristics of maps have been shown not to be so. It is instead the physical relationship we establish with the map, as an object that offers a rationalisation of space, that seduces us into thinking and perceiving this language as being a perfectly accurate presentation of any given territory. By this remarkable capacity of abstraction and objectivation happening at the same time, maps can become a powerful tool for ideology, or at least something incapable of being absolutely neutral. It is only within a certain context of technical possibilities, cultural views, political conditions and economic relationships that a map can arise and become a standard. And at the same time, ironically, it is this quality of free and abstract construction of language that allows mapping to be a critical practice.

Whether it is through technology, its democratisation, the urgency and rise of critical theory and practice of map making, or the interdisciplinary development of cartography, we are now capable of giving new limits and possibilities to the representation of the territories we inhabit. For the first time in a few centuries, we are able to question the formerly unquestioned structure of the world that shaped our relationship with the territory and with ourselves.

Is it possible to use mapping as creative force to depict the hierarchical relationship of dominance that exists between these two parts of the same piece of land called America? Can a map illustrate the way Latinos think about this parted America? Or maybe the way the northern part of America silently fades into the arctic? Or even the way the country so-called ‘America’ sets itself far away from everything and at the centre of everything?

Each constructed territory with its own strong identity, forming a whole, relating to each other, being part of a social superstructure, determines the way we understand reality and the measure of space.

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The continent called America goes far beyond the boundaries of the country so-called America. Martín Waldseemüller, who first depicted it as a piece of land separated from the rest of the world, surrounded by water and consisting of two main extensions of land united by a thin string, was well aware of the continuity of this territory he named after one of its first and most prominent European explorers. Not too long after him Mercator’s cylindrical projection of the world was crystallised in the imaginary of every sailor and navigator of the northern hemisphere; it seems it was a commonsense decision to orientate the map to the north. To them we owe this convention and fundamental structure of the world that sometimes appears to be the natural condition of the planet. Every continent and territory, especially in western culture, started to be defined according to this new set of relationships. America was, of course, no exception.

The iconic shape of the continent illustrated in these early maps has developed over the centuries, but its main characteristic of duality has remained intact. Furthermore, history has made out of this dual relationship between north and south a leitmotiv: two cultures in opposition. The map’s simple logic of north and south, up and down, has grown into a much more elaborate and subjective interpretation of reality: developed and undeveloped, free and bound, modern and primitive, even good and evil.

Attempts have being made to subvert the hegemony of western cardinal points, and to question the domination of north on top.

Joaquin Garcia-Torres was probably one of the first to transform this questioning into a radical critique through the explicit language of drawing; América invertida2 – South America ‘upside down’, a simple outline of the continent with a big S on top.

Amereida continued Garcia-Torres’s rebellious critique in the form of a long collectively-created poem that tells the story and destiny of a continent ‘seen from the earth, from the underneath said in a different way, from where Dante comes and the dead reside’.3 The north pointing down, the south pointing up: the popular culture of America’s Backyard has its own way of thinking and referring to the north; ‘empire’ is the most common word. And beyond the geographical expanses and limits, we have come to realise through Hollywood that for ‘America’ the south is further than it really is or could be, and the north is just a far away country that dissolves into the arctic.

The continuity of the land depicted in the maps is fading away, and the thin string that unites the north and the south seems to be getting thinner and thinner with time.

w ar pai n tin g ex ti n c t io n oc c up a t io n s en ti m e n t

identity | landscape by will craig

go in g mo d e r n a n d b e i n g B r i t i s h critical geographies in the art of Paul Nash

“[…]to go modern and still ‘be British’ is a question vexing quite a few people today. We may see the struggle going on behind various masks, both animate and inanimate; in the faces of elderly painters and young architects, manufacturers, shop windows, facades of buildings…This is serious we say, we are at war, don’t you see, we are at war with ourselves.”

— Paul Nash

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1 Being that English Landscape Painting or the Picturesque is a tradition that developed primarily in the south of England, where Nash was primarily focused, the term is regional-specific (however, there is debate about whether the common terminology should be adapted, not just a reference to England as a whole). Curiously, Nash mentions Britain, which is perhaps an attempt to present a more modern or unified nation, responding to the calls of an international movement,‘Britain’ hsving more appeal globally, in an historic, imperial sense.

William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ can still be heard chanted at English soccer matches by die-hard supporters of ‘England’s mountains green’. How has this sense of landscape-based patriotism that still beats within British hearts been maintained despite the country’s rise as an industrial power?

Two world wars have something to do with it. During the First World War, imagery and propaganda played a crucial role in galvanising public patriotic duty.

Paul Nash, a landscape painter in a tradition strongly associated with rural romanticism, became a war artist. His war paintings reveal the contested nature of the English landscape, its uncertainty, its introversion and its resilience, compounded by war. The eighteenth century painting tradition of the picturesque, evocative and romantic, positioned the landscape as a container for memory and desire.

Nash’s depictions of the British countryside refer to places he inhabited throughout his life; his appreciation for the past is tied to these places of memory. Nash sought sanctuary in the landscape,

a response and a logical consequence of the disturbance of war, something he associated with the arrival of International Modernism.1 Although an escape to landscape could be seen as English sentimentalism, on closer inspection his work itself harbours disturbances that generate a feeling of placelessness through uncanny depictions of the land. Nash uses a traditional medium, painting, to depict a reorganisation of the landscape through modern processes, symbolising a contemporary, territorial shift.

Territories

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cause and effect: aggressive tendencies repressed in people and society. There is clearly a tension in Nash as an Englishman ‘going forward’ to embrace the modern era.

Conflict experienced by those at the Front intensified the desire for both England and Home.

But the totalising experience of the War was evident both at home and abroad; the actual effect was of a dissolution of place.

Nash painted the war vividly in all its brutality.

He depicts an uninhabited landscape of human suffering; nature and modernity collide to leave a timeless, human-less vacuum. Modernity, in the form of war, is perceived as an aggressor towards a landscape continually under territorial threat.

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The First World War planted the beginnings of a critical geography, breaching territories and effectively eradicating localities to a tabula rasa.

In Nash’s turbulent mind the war was paralleled by a threatening interplay of modern effects on the landscape, equal to a loss of territory. The re-mapping of the countryside had enduring consequences for cultural consciousness traditionally embedded in the soil.

The common thread in the discussion of Nash relates landscape, territories, war and settlement as universal phenomena. However, Nash’s sense of fear (of invasion) combined with a sense of duty (or patriotism) for England is also significant. The Picturesque was a movement originating in England, founded on the basis of ‘moving through’ the landscape. On one hand, Nash seems to be an evolution (or response) to the Picturesque. On the other hand, human response to war is arguably universal and it could also be said that the phenomenon of a ‘World War’ supports this. Sigmund Freud discussed a universal emotional response to War through

Fig. 1 Paul Nash, Pyramids in the Sea, 1912. Tate, London An island fortress, English and resistant, set against the sea and the waves, has risen to form the bond of Englishness to the land, and to subdue the sea, a foreign, invading enemy.

Fig.2 Paul Nash, Void,1918.

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa The War is portrayed through a breach of the landscape, producing an effect of disorientation between natural and man-made.

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1 Leach, Neil. The dark side of the domus’, Journal of Architecture, 3(1): 31-42, 1998

Soil and Identity Throughout history, rural England has been galvanised (shedding parts that do not fit) as an image of authenticity to oppose the rise of industrialism, capitalism and the modern – things that become critical in times of disturbance and war. Landscape as sanctuary re-characterises the land when set against the violence and political turmoil of both cities and battlefields.

Rural romanticism calls up an ancient feeling of freedom and equality before the threat of invasion. It is in the tradition of landscape painting that the power of memory was evoked to create a holistic picture of the rural and consequently, of England. The symbolic nature of the landscape is precisely what landscape painters attempted to preserve – a deliberate appeal to memory, even if falsified.

Nash follows in the line of traditional landscape painting but never falls neatly into any particular category. Sometimes termed a neo-romanticist, he also relates to aspects of surrealism and abstract painting. Traditional he was not, but elements of his work do reference traditional sources, borrowed and adapted from other (English) artists. Nash travelled and painted abroad, but felt he belonged in the English landscape. It was a feeling inherited from a childhood of escaping his house in the city. In painting the English landscape, he felt he gained sanctuary.

A cultural bond to the landscape is an oneirism emanating from emotional responses to place making. Neil Leach alludes to a process of identification with the landscape as being mythic.

It is the resoluteness of ‘an identity rooted to the soil’ that causes such strong associations.

Ground and Figure

In a scene made so uninhabitable, there can be no imaginable resting place for human life. This is probably something which struck Nash, living in the trenches, walled-in by the earth and surrounded by death and the dying. Through the threat of annihilation and the gas poisoning of the atmosphere, all figures are now dissolved into the landscape.

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2 Appleton, Jay. The Experience of Landscape. Wiley, 1996 3 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an analysis of the concept of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. Douglas equates domestic acts to an ordering of the environment. The home, therefore, contains the seed of violent juxtapositions between nature and dwelling.

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or of unease and disturbance, and it is on these emotional responses rather than on the real potency of the danger, the refuge or the prospect that our aesthetic reactions will depend.’

In emotional responses to the landscape based on the perception of threat, we see the figure, or settlement, as an attempt to establish a defendable location. We may also see the inversion of this – that the creation of the figure is a violent act which disrupts the landscape. 3 The English landscape can be read as a container for memory and rural imagery, but it can also be seen, in relation to the figure, as a plane onto which a new human order (the modern city) is to be imposed. This flattening-out threatens the landscape’s existing relationship to memory, but composes new acts associated with human settlement.

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Landscape defined in direct relation to settlement, is an idea embedded in the original meaning of the word country, derived from contra – against or opposite. Language reveals a reflexivity of terms, country and settlement, that can be compared to the figure-ground relationship – a visual sense of an object, or settlement, being supported by a stable ground, or campo. Often this seemingly balanced arrangement functions as a threatrelationship, in which figure or settlement maintains visual authority over the landscape.

In The Experience of Landscape2, Jay Appleton interprets this relationship in landscape painting in terms of the danger one perceives from one’s surroundings. The figure can present itself as either maintaining a view or prospect over the surroundings or as a refuge in which the viewer may find shelter. In both instances, the aesthetic response to landscape is based upon a survival response to potential dangers.

‘[T]he symbolic impact of these environmental phenomena can induce in us a sense either of ease and satisfaction

Fig. 3 Paul Nash, We are Making a New World, 1918. Imperial War Museum, London Possibly Nash’s most successful depiction of human absence is symbolic of the de-humanising effects of the War. The trees are observers of a human tragedy, which is revealed in stark effect by the rays of the sun. The land has assumed the changeable, threatening and uninhabitable, wavelike forms from Pyramids in the Sea.

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Fig. 4 Paul Nash, Landscape at Iden 192. Tate, London Painted shortly after the death of Nash’s father, emits absent presences, and tells us a story of the imminent threat of nature’s undoing.

The elements displayed in the scene, are arranged like a stage set, which immediately opens us to a sense of arrival and departure.

It is full of symbolism, as if we are about to witness a disturbing event. The scene shows signs of inhabitation by rural workers, but they, themselves, are absent. It seems as though their role in the scene is gradually being replaced by mechanisation. The sense of movement and duration grows from the stillness of the objects. Natural elements are subjected to a geometric ordering, causing a haunting, derived from the workers’ absences.

In this painting, Nash finally realizes the undoing of the English landscape, through a gradual and methodic organisation by modern processes.

4 Paul Virilio. Bunker Archaeology (1975) Princeton Architectural Press, 1997.

Homeless Nash’s landscape images are imbued with an energy that stems from the absence of human figures. There is both loss and a desire for home that leaves a persistent void. In scenes made so uninhabitable, there can be no imaginable resting place for human life.

To identify with a place there must be territories: places for memory to embed itself.

When figure and ground are eroded, identity is lost. In Bunker Archaeology, Paul Virilio describes an effect of the here and there, simultaneously and harshly realised on the battlefield. It becomes a place, determined by an invasion, where ‘energy’s area has become the locus of power.’ In this void of the battlefield ‘it is here, and not over there, that the critical is from now on played out.’ 4 This loss of reference, placement, possession, accounts for an inversion between the home and the foreign.

Nash’s work as a war artist in France, unveiling alternative depictions of uninhabitable landscapes, reveals much about his own sub-conscious and the collective memory of a nation coming to terms with the invasion of the international modern

movement. Nash’s landscape paintings are narratives upon which an interplay is carried out – from an indulgence of memory to paradoxes of terror, violence and contradiction.

What is reflected is the drama of modern encroachment. In the wake of territorialisation, through war, cities and infrastructure, the rural landscape is being remapped in such a way as to become uninhabitable. Violent tendencies suppressed in Nash’s work are exhibited through absences, pointing to an imminent collapse of the figure-ground arrangement. Fundamentally it concerns a feeling of homelessness, experienced by the artist, intensified by war and emotionally depicted with all its implications for humanity. c

geography | f r o m s pa c e by dennis keen

s i g n i f y i n g n ot h i n g seeing something

Until the advent of satellite imagery, maps were made of signifiers.

The grey ribbons that wove their way through the atlases of Central Asia could not claim to be rivers themselves – they merely stood in for them, a necessary and accepted substitution. The satellite map in its purest form, without the overlaid labels and lines, is as close we’ve ever gotten to eliminating this mediating step. The river you see before you is no longer just the mark of a pen or some software approximation. It is a photograph of the Amu Darya itself. A cartographic caricature has been turned into a dignified portrait.

On a traditional map, there is only so much information that one can fit in. Look at the map’s legend, and you can see that decisions are made to portray only the most important features of a landscape – the cities, the rivers, the mountains. On a satellite map, you can see everything. The city is no longer a dot on a map, but an oozing, rectilinear mess. A desert is not white space but smudgy patterns of sand in motion. A river’s every tributary can be seen, even just a trickle. It makes for a captivating mode of discovery – one can get lost in these pictures for hours, dragging and pulling the picture around, zooming in on the things that look as if they have a story to tell. Without the labels telling you what is what, it becomes a game of matching this strange new perspective to the forms with which we’re familiar, with the maps in our head or the views on the ground.

la n d p a t t er n s riv ers a gricu lt u re a b s t ra ct io n p o lit ica l ma rkin g

One thing that becomes quite obvious is how physical geography shapes our settlements. Look at a satellite map of the desertous centre of Central Asia and you can see, on the periphery of those smudgy sands, grey and brown quilts hugging the rivers.

These are the oases, the urban foundations of Transoxianan civilisation. The major rivers, the Syr Darya, the Amu Darya, the Zeravshan, are all lined by these pads of farmland. Each family’s field is pushed against the next in a tessellated patchwork. If you wanted to make this a political map, you could go crazy with it.

Every field is a man’s domain.

But that’s part of the appeal of the satellite picture – not having those political constructions there at all. We tend to reify borders on a map, and though some follow rivers and physical features we can see, others are simply arbitrary decisions of a man with a slide rule.

The ribbon on the map, that’s a sign for a river; the dot, it stands for a city. But the county line? It’s a sign with nothing to signify.

There is nothing there to stand for.

On the satellite map, man’s strange divisions are tossed aside and we can only see what is truly there – the earth in infinite detail, too vast to be made into marks. c

Türkmenabat, Turkmenistan

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Im ager y © 2 014 C n es /Spot I mag e, Dig it al G l obe, L andsat

urbanism | terrain by sean burkholder and b r a d f o r d wat s o n

c h ar t e d d i s p l a c e m e n t Butte, Montana

b la s t d ig haul sort rep ea t

In 1969 Michael Heizer conceived and constructed displaced / replaced mass, which called for the excavation of three large holes in a dry lakebed in Nevada in which three boulders were placed, each weighing the same as the excavated material. This piece created a dialogue of not only the mass of different materials, but also of the movement and transformation of that material – a sorting perhaps. It also raised the question of where the excavated material went, for there is no displacement without replacement. We move mass every day, for many reasons, but an example as geologic (and obvious) as is Heizer’s does promote some reflection upon the anthropological movement of raw material and the sorting regimes that instigate this movement. This piece foreshadowed the anthropo-geomorphological condition in which we currently find ourselves; a byproduct landscape created by industrialised sorting regimes.

Butte in 1900. Washoe Hoist and mine dump at left side of image.

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B u tte - Si lve r B ow P u b l i c L i b r a r y

Butte, Montana is a displaced / replaced mass at an immense scale. For over a century this landscape has been extracted, sorted and deposited, a process that began in the 1860s with the minimal displacement of material by placer miners working in streambeds. It quickly grew in scale from small individual shaft mines, dug with a shovel and bucket, to the explosive removal of an entire mountain to quench the world’s thirst for copper. From the moment material is dislodged from its parent mass, decisions must be made as to where it will go. A value is placed on the removed material that determines feasibility and degree of displacement. Rock containing precious metals is moved great distances for processing while the residual material is deemed waste rock and displaced only as far as necessary (see

the photograph of Butte in 1900, above). These valuable metals – primarily copper, molybdenum and lead – are the only materials exported from the region, and constitute only 0.5-2% of the total material removed from the earth. The remaining 99% is dumped, spread and washed over the landscape in various ways. This large scale extractive process has created a landscape significantly defined by displacement and subsequent replacement.

While this or some similar process of sorting is common in most mining operations, many are located in somewhat uninhabited landscapes.

In Butte however, this process resulted in the displacement of a community founded around and governed by a geologic condition. The city’s

B u tte - Si lve r B o w P u bli c A rch i ve s

Page 124 from Stope Book M-27 Volume 2 of the Washoe Mine at the 500 sill level of the Steward, created by the Anaconda Mining Company.

Detail of the ‘Weed Map’ showing topography, streets and buildings in detail with only notational attention paid to the growing collection of mine dumps. An X” represents a mine shaft and the horseshoe shaped dashed outlines are general areas of mine dumps of waste rock. From the Butte Special Map Folio #38 by Walter H Weed, Samuel F Emmons and George W Tower, published by the United States Department of the Interior in 1897

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1 Corner, James. ‘The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention’, Chapter 10 in Mappings. Reaktion Books, 1999

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Mapping, by its nature, records what is of value to the maker. The innocent map does not exist.

In addition to indexing the valuable, the process of mapping also projects value. It provides an understanding of what is recorded, as it is a requirement of commodification. Thus the map contains a projective agency for a geographically specific place. Landscape Architect James Corner probably states this best: ‘...its agency (mapping) lies in neither reproduction nor imposition but rather in uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds. Thus mapping unfolds potential; it re-makes territory over and over again, each time with new and diverse consequences.’ 1

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development on the surface was documented through traditional maps while the growth of the shaft mines were catalogued in the massive volumes of hand drawn maps collected in the Stope Books by the Anaconda Mining Company.

Both the traditional surface maps of the City of Butte (Sanborn, Property and Topographic maps, above) and the Stope Books (detailed accounts of the underground workings, top) are an incredibly detailed account of the growth and shape of Butte above and below ground. These maps pursue a clear agenda of value. However, there is little documentation of the massive amounts of waste rock replaced back onto the city – rock that has profoundly shaped this urban landscape – once the precious metals were displaced for use around the world.

Sorting / Displacement diagram From 1880 until 2000, the mines in Butte produced 9.6 million tonnes of copper. In addition to copper another 4 million tonnes of other metals also came from the mines over this period. This 13.6 million tonnes of material was conservatively 2% of the total material displaced within the city, resulting in approximately 661.5 million tonnes of undesired material being left behind after the various process of sorting.

This diagram illustrates a section through the open Berkeley Pit and the Yankee Doodle Tailings Pond and indicates where the vast majority of this ‘waste’ material was placed once open pit mining began.

Sources: USGS maps from 1897 Butte Special Map Folio #38 (the ‘Weed’ map) 1914 Butte Photo from the U.S. Library of Congress /www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/2007662459/ Aerial imagery Personal photographs

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B u r k hol d e r a nd Wa t s on

This text submits two maps to the discourse; two new readings / realities of Butte. Unlike the historic recordings both above and below the ground of the region, these new maps have a specific focus on the condition of the displaced / replaced landscape, thus producing a new understanding of place. This new understanding generates an alternative dialogue of value in order to move beyond the myopic tracing of extraction.

Sorting / Displacement diagram of the displaced landscape at the Washoe Mine located at Copper and Arizona Streets.

The diagram shows the 400 level workings of the Washoe Mine overlaid on the Weed map of Butte.

Waste rock from the mines was piled immediately downhill from the mine shaft until the EPA clean-up of the Butte Hill that began in 1987.

The BPSOU requires that all waste rock be graded to a maximum of 1:3 slope and capped with a minimum of 18 inches of soil and grasses. This waste-left-in-place cap now defines the landscape of the Butte Hill.

Sources: Stope Books of underground workings, Butte Silver-Bow Archives Historic Plat of the City of Butte 1876, Butte Silver-Bow Archives USGS map from 1897 Butte Special Map Folio #38 (the ‘Weed’ map)

Anaconda Mining Company Mine Shaft records Weed, Walter Harvey. Geology and ore deposits of the Butte district, Montana. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1912.

Sanborn Insurance Maps of Butte Personal Photographs

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B u r k hol d e r a nd Wa t s on

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These maps aim to create a new discourse around the possible futures of this place; futures that are possible in part to a new understanding of this ‘given’ landscape. The maps become instruments that both document and project simultaneously.

They reveal a landscape that is no longer an unknown byproduct of industrialised sorting, but one that is a newly understood topography of possible occupation and intervention. c

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cal l s for ar t ic le s: On Sit e re v ie w 3 2 : wea k sys t e ms

On Site review 33: land + landscape

Weak form: form without clear links to meaning, appropriate to the times (the late 20th century when Eisenmann wrote about this), whereby buildings can be thought of as media carrying messages and meaning to lots of diverse constituencies. Any meaning that accrues to form is both relative and ambiguous.

Weak form is purposely zelig-like: it can be many things to many people. It can also be as nothing-like as media itself, physical form irrelevant, a strange reality found in the processes of consumption rather than in the bricks and mortar of traditional strong-form architecture. This curiously autonomous architecture is threaded into a web of all architecture, part of an array of things that act together to produce ever-mutable meaning.

While it may seem that we have been here before with dirt, geology and mapping, land is a different thing. Land is territory, surface; landscapes exist between geology and agricultural patterns; land is what we traverse and often try to own.

Land in the service of the nation: environmental preserves of greater and lesser vulnerability.

Land at the civic scale: fallow, parks often just waiting for development.

Land at the domestic scale: the garden. Is this the only bit of land we are personally responsible for?

Weak systems: this is a term that could cover most construction: thin components, weak and insignificant in themselves, threaded into a system that makes them opaque and enveloping. This ranges from tensegrity systems to thin skins to break-away walls in hurricane zones. The assemblage of component parts make a whole quite different from any one part; again, an array of things act together to produce an infinite variety of form.

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Weak urbanism: informal housing and settlement. The rules are arcane, intimate and tribal, rather than legal, bureaucratic or democratic. Using weak materials, built without code, limited by money or lack of it, nonetheless informal settlements are resilient, adaptable, motile, opportunistic. There is much to be learned from their very provisionality.

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In this Fall 2014 issue of On Site review, we would like to look at fragile, weak, unfinished, mutable, hopeful against-allodds architecture, urbanism, landscapes, infrastructure and construction.

Proposals due 15 June 2014 Finished articles 1 August 2014 All inquires and proposals: www.onsitereview.ca/contact-onsite The call for articles is also repeated at: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles with futher links to specifications, editing policies, contributor contracts.

What is landscape architecture? Do sustainability ambitions invalidate or reinvigorate the history of landscape as the mediation between urbanism and wilderness?

What is landscape? Is the difference between land and landscape the lens by which we transform land into some sort of human endeavour?

What is the role of land in – land claims land patterns land marks land registry land grabs land art

gardens agriculture cities transportation development

architecture design culture identity

All things landscape: Proposals due 15 December 2014 Finished articles 1 February 2015 All inquires and proposals: www.onsitereview.ca/contact-onsite

t o subsc ribe t o O n S i t e r e v i e w , t h i s i s h o w : starting with the next issue: 32 weak systems, Fall 2014 fill out this form and mail it to us, or, online at www.onsitereview.ca/subscribe o 1 year / 2 issues (32-33) $28 o 2 years / 4 issues (32-35) $40 o 3 years / 6 issues (32-37) $50 * this is the best rate, 50% of $16 news stand price

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THE CAPILANO REVIEW

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Ruth Scheuing ‘GPS Tracks: technology, narratives, nature, and patterns’.

The Capilano Review 3:22, Winter 2014 :32-48

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www.thecapilanoreview.ca

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www.criticat.fr

ON SITE r e v i e w

sp r ing 20 1 4

mappi n g photography

On Site review is published twice annually (Spring and Fall) by the Association for non-profit architectural fieldwork [alberta] which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.

c o n t r i b ut or s hector abarca, a Peruvian architect with masters from Spain and Poland, and further post graduate study from Italy and Sweden, has recently joined the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. His non-affiliated personal research interest is built and unbuilt Latin American Modern architecture. maria alexandrescu is studying landscape architecture at TU Delft. mlxndrsc.wordpress.com reza aliabadi [M.Arch 1999, M.Phil.Arch 2006] ICEO, MRAIC, OAA is the founder of atelier rzlbd in Toronto. He splits his time between his architectural practice, rzlbd POST, and atelier rzlbd. www.rzlbd.com rodrigo barros is an architect, musician and activist from Valparaíso, Chile. He is as interested in a critical and emancipatory practice and thinking of architecture as in freejazz-punk-dub and the poetry of everyday life. rodrigoebarros@gmail.com michael blois has an MArch degree from Ryerson University and is an intern architect working in Toronto. mikeblois@gmail.com sean burkholder is Assistant Professor of Landscape and Urban Design at the University at Buffalo.

His research coalesces around the ‘extra’ landscapes that are the unconsidered resultant of various anthropological processes. jessica craig is an architectural designer and researcher with forays into photography. Her work stems from an interest in the psychological tones of inhabited space, particularly regarding identity and culture in post-national societies. will craig is a practising architect with Dialog in Calgary. He has had the opportunity to contribute to significant place-making projects in Calgary and maintains a passion for urbanism research. keesic douglas is an Ojibway artist from the Rama/Mnjikaning First Nation in central Ontario, Canada.

Keesic focuses on sharing his Indigenous perspectives as well as his Aboriginal heritage and stories in his photography and films. www.keesic.com asher ghaffar is a doctoral candidate completing his dissertation on British Pakistani literature and political philosophy. He is the author of one collection of poetry, Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music, published with ECW Press in 2008. sean irwin is a writer and designer based in Toronto. dennis keen is a writer and ethnographer living in Almaty, Kazakhstan. His website is EurasiaEurasia.com and you’re encouraged to write to him at DennisThorstedKeen@gmail.com

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eric klaver is Senior Landscape Architect at PLANT Architect in Toronto. Working internationally for 20 years, Eric has cultivated an interest in areas of art, science, nature and culture that intersect with our designed environments. espen lunde nielsen is currently a PhD Fellow at Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark, with the project ‘Architectural Probes of the Infraordinary’. Teaching since 2012 and holds a M.A. in Architecture (AAA, January 2012). no38.org lisa rapoport, a founding partner of Toronto’s PLANT Architect Inc., is widely known for her work exploring the relationship between architecture and landscape through a combination of commissioned public space, private projects and self-initiated research.

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chloé roubert is an anthropologist interested in the social lives of things, organic beings and the everyday. She is currently in Shanghai mapping fauna as a means to rethink the city’s urban and social changes. natalia skoczylas, a typical modern nomad born in Poland. Freelance journalist, event organiser, self-made cultural animator, leftist, political scientist with aspirations for PhD for two years now as a candidate, culture addict, word maniac, optimist.

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The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. cover price $16 subscriptions — per year/two issues: $28 two years/four issues: $40 three years/six issues: $50 in Canada: shipping and handling included. for USA: add $12/year for International: add $24/year back issues: $7.50 Libraries and institutions with multiple readers: $38/ year. order through SWETS, Harrasowitz or EBSCO subscription forms: www.onsitereview.ca/subscribe PayPal or cheque to On Site 1326 11 Avenue SE Calgary, Alberta T2G 0Z5 editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary, Alberta distribution: Magazines Canada 416 504 0274 Ubiquity Distributors USA 718 875 5491 On Site review gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of our contributors, our volunteers, our subscribers and the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts through their Publishing Grants to Arts and Literary Magazines.

victoria stanton is a performance artist, video-maker, and writer. She has presented actions, exhibitions, and videos internationally, has been published in anthologies and art/literary/lifestyle magazines and is CEO of her own bank: www.bankofvictoria.com bradford watson is an Architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Montana State University.

His research focuses on the agency of mapping and terrain as constructors of place and the infrastructure this requires. nora wendl questions the composition of architecture – seeking to expand the perception of what the discipline’s built forms and histories are (and could be). She is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Portland State University. www.norawendl.com jacob whibley is a Toronto based artist working with collage, sculpture and drawing. His practice focuses on the information and experiences embedded within objects and forms by intuitively blending histories, architecture, and ambiguous temporalities into formal structures. stephanie white is the editor of On Site review, a journal with an archipelagic relationship to sites of architectural production. robin wilson PhD, is a writer on art and architecture, and teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He is co-founder of the art practice Photolanguage with artist and photographer Nigel Green. robinwilsonprojects@hotmail.co.uk

On Site review also acknowledges the kind support of Calgary Arts Development, City of Calgary.

Photographing the Arab city in the 19th century 30 January to 25 May 2014 Photographing the Arab city in the 19th century asks the visitor to abandon stereotypes and interpret the traditional Islamic city without the frame of Orientalism. A survey of the CCA Collection showcases early photography of Arab cities and proposes a morphological turn, inspecting panoramas, streets and monuments as material expressions of a complex society rather than elements in a picturesque vision of an exotic Other.

Emile Béchard.

General view of the Tombs of the Caliphs, Cairo.

Plate 14 from the portfolio L’Égypte et la Nubie : Grand Album Monumental, Historique, Architectural.

Published 1887.

Collotype, 37.5x27.8 cm.

CCA Collection PH1979:0613:014

The selection of photographs invites the spectator to distinguish between halal, what is public, allowed or profane, and haram, the private, forbidden or sacred. This dichotomy is present at all levels of Islamic culture and thus of the city organization, configuring limits, routes and buildings. From bird’s eye to ground views, from outdoor vistas to interior domains, examining these photographs provides a portrait of an urban reality brought to light one century and half ago but at the time only partially understood.

Curated by 2013 Visiting Scholar Jorge Correia, Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Minho (Escola de Arquitectura da Universidade do Minho – EAUM) in Portugal, the exhibition interprets the ways in which the traditional Islamic city was represented by several European photographers including Francis Frith, Emile Béchard, Félix Bonfils and Maxime Du Camp.

More than 50 photographs from the CCA’s Collection are presented and displayed as single photographs, detached plates, albums and portfolios, all of which represented major Arab cities of the nineteenth century such as Cairo and Damascus. They are examples of the first photographic printing and dissemination processes, such as salted prints, albumen prints, photo-mechanical prints, lantern slides and stereocards. These images constitute part of an important body of work on the Middle East held at the CCA. Their acquisition dates to the first years of the formation of the CCA Collection (in the 70s and 80s), demonstrating their value and significance for the institution.

www.cca.qc.ca

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back cover: Jessica Craig. Je ne sais quoi, 2011 front cover: Jacob Whibley, the recent history of history part 2. 2013. gallery: Narwhal Projects, Toronto narwhalprojects.com