unmapping maps

lisa rapoport

Mapping is an act of curation, a sorting out of actual lived experience into a series of assembled components that combine into a systematic narrative that we learn to understand and assume is the organisation of the experience. As an architect, urban designer and teacher, I have come to trust this desire for organizing principles, the results being so easily analysed. But my experience of moving through space is much the opposite – haphazard, coincidental, haptic, with many narratives colliding, unconscious, and dominated by time. A map implies time only by distance, without the mess of wandering, pondering or traffic.

Though a city may be organised on a grid, my movement across it may include cutting corners, making diagonal paths, hopping into and through buildings that join streets – anything but linear. My mental map is made of these ingrained routes and shortcuts along with personal markers (where so-and-so lived, where I fell off my bike…); so much more than the organised structure of a street map. This extends to all spatial experience: though I know that the sun is an object at the centre of a series of orbiting planets including earth, and therefore I am the one moving, I still say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Astronomical knowledge simply does not match up to my actual experience of the sun.

In previous articles for this magazine1 I discussed PLANT’s work that focused, in defiance of distillation of place for easy mapping, on the slow revelation of a place by walking, the sense of discovery, savouring the recitative of the spaces in-between more consumable high points more easily mapped. More recently I have started to look more deeply into the facts and physicality of the map itself, trying to understand exactly how a common map fails to capture actual experience of place. A map doesn’t even acknowledge whether you are coming or going – such a fundamental part of our experience of a place. The two projects here map driving experiences to show this. I think of these as unmapping projects – pulling the map and our experience apart, but not really trying to put it back together again. These unmappings unravel experience and revel in the undoing.

1 'Every Walk is Unreproducible' in On Site review 31: mapping | photography, 2014 and 'Material Memory' in On Site review 36: our material future, 2020.

Blink And You Miss It

In 2016, La Maison de l’architecture du Québec (MAQ) commissioned six teams to create solutions to explore and improve the experience of Québec’s Autoroutes for the exhibit S.O.S. Paysages Autoroutiers

Together with poet Ronna Bloom, PLANT explored Highway 10 in a project we called Blink and you miss it. Ronna and I had grown up in Montreal with cottages in the Eastern Townships, and along with my partner Chris Pommer, have had decades of driving this route. This was an opportunity to understand the highway in retrospect. We started just looking at the road map – something I had never done as this was a habitual family drive; we never needed a map. The route had so many inexplicable zig zags – a logic we assumed came from property lines, but even more curious was a regular pattern of bumps in this otherwise flat landscape.

No. 10 is the Highway to the Eastern Townships –the highway to the mountains – the Appalachian Mountains. No. 10 is the highway that passes by and between a set of mountains – not a chain like the Appalachians or the Laurentians, but a sequence – each a singular and bold eruption from the St. Lawrence lowland plain, a totemic sequence –mountain, space, mountain, space….

Blink and you miss it was our proposal to bring the driver and passengers’ attention to the sequence of mountains, both factual and poetic, at high speed and at rest. The project places the driver precisely in a 140km narrative in relation to the passage of these mountains, in three distinct interventions shaped by speed. These are each a way to bring the order of the map to the real space and time.

There are mountains; there is a sequence (East)

Head east toward the weekend on Highway 10. You have driven this route so many times you barely notice the turnoffs marking miles, kilometres towards getting there. Towards sleep or rest or walk, or build or ski. Air or mountain.

You get a note from the architects of the universe saying: you are passing history on your left, on your right quicker than you register, faster than the signs for exits, casse croutes. There are hills older than a hundred million years the magma rose and cooled and displaced crustal rock.

Mont Oka, Mont Royal. With their hidden plumes of light, intrusions in the plain, mouths of earth pressed up against the sky. Mont Saint-Bruno, Mont Saint-Hilaire and space for air and road and farm. These hills –– you've heard their names before ––or live there –– or walked them as a child –– Mont-Saint Gregoire, Mont Rougement, found leaves or apple orchards, uprisings, forests. Mont Yamaska, Mont Shefford, and a car speeds by, a truck. Mont Brome, beyond the belted Appalaches Mont Megantic. The line, the lineage of mountains aligns you to and from the ville, There before the city and after, still there waiting, their language plumes up in whispers saying, attend, attendre, even as you pass.

— Ronna Bloom, 2016

The Experience

Driving this highway at 120 km/h with its distinct angular changes of direction zig-zagging between seigneuries, we can’t tell how many mountains there really are, or which mountain we are looking at. We assume singular mountains are just foothills, eventually gathering boldly together to be the Appalachians, or, returning home to Montréal, that the mountains are slowly petering out like splatters from the real mountains – as if mountains do that. But the real narrative is much better: No. 10 follows the route of seven of the nine Montérégian mountains – Mount Royal, Mount St. Bruno, Mount St. Hilaire, Mount Rougemont, Mount Yamaska, Mount Bromont, and Mount Shefford – each linked by heat on the Great Meteor Hotspot Track. Every school kid is taught (incorrectly) that Montréal is a dead volcano, and although each of these mountains do follow the same fault line, each were created by magma pushing up to create an almost-volcano – its structure made not of horizontal strata, but distorted vertical strata. The whole St. Lawrence plain was volatile. The mountains are linked below the ground to the centre of the earth, but we see them as separate, singular, and enigmatic – holding their own against the erosion of the plain. They are not the Appalachians –they are distinct.

At 120km/h the mountains present themselves in three to thirty-second glimpses. They are like ships on the vast horizon of the plain, but at 120 km/h, with only a fleeting flash in the driver’s peripheral vision, blink and you miss it. The passengers can point – look over there, and there is another one! Which one did I just pass?

120km/h mountain identification Montréal to Sherbrooke: At km 1, the driver is both informed and warned – There are mountains. There is a sequence. Blink and you miss it. Each mountain is identified with a sign made of individual letters pre-warning the driver of the view to come, calling to the depth of the plain: kilometres before, the letters seem scattered between the roads, in the field – near and far, a jumble calling for the attention of the driver – all of a sudden, they coalesce moments before the mountain is seen. Like the bronze pointers at Mount Royal’s Scenic Belvedere lookout (the first mountain in the sequence), they point to and identify these key markers in the landscape.

2 An ode to the mountains: There are mountains; there is a sequence (East)2 is embedded in the roadbed to be read one word at a time at 120 km/h – in English Montréal to Sherbrooke, and in French Il y a des montagnes, il y a une séquence (ouest))3 de Sherbrooke à Montréal. Each word, 642 metres apart, is painted in road paint as an anamorphic illusion to render it readable from the driver’s one point or view, and appears to float in front of the driver.

3 0 km/h mountain encounter Sherbrooke to Montreal: Look-outs with view stations combine a bench and identification panel that aligns with the mountain and its geology below grade. The view station positions the viewer precisely in relation to the mountain and embeds the viewer with the geology of the mountain form in the plain.