Here's some Venice photos of mine...

from when I was there last... There's some photos from a big storm we had while on Murano..-I spent a few nights on the island...
Click here...

From Map to Mapping

My basic thought that mapping was just a map that gives us the information or fact. At last seminar I could realize that mapping has the capability to create one in design. In other words, we can select and combine the information on map with intention; the map is able to be a new creation itself as well as a good tool for designing. And the mapping has widened from these articles. Mapping would help to judge the social or political issues and to show the science. Specially, it is good chance to understand how to make the map from information in ‘Million Dollar Blocks’. When I observed the process of mapping, I could understand the intention of the work more and have an idea about the power of map. To me, mapping is but only the result but also the process. So, during the process of mapping we can think and think something and we can finally create the thing.

Both of William Rees Morrish and Jane Wolff’s drawing make me think if audiences can realize what information the authors of map try to convey. Their drawings demonstrate the way how they extracted the information from the data they received and made them acceptable. I am curious about the role that architects should play. It seems that architects should be the media between the professional and the public and translate the professional language of architecture. Back to our project, I think we should think about the way that could simply address our idea and make sense.

Jane Wolff’s Delta Primer provided both an insight into the destabilizing effects of human interventions in an ecological system and also graphical techniques to represent changes in a system over time. I appreciated the ability of her graphics, particularly the Mount Diablo/The Delta graphic (k), to describe a location as well as the lowering of the agricultural surface over time. Causality was not implied, though, as perhaps it is more so in the section/plan/section graphic (q). However, I do feel that some of the graphics are tracings, such as the maps that appear to be framed excerpts from USGS maps. Also, the graphic explaining the meandering river seems to be more preoccupied with its graphical appearance rather than with the realistic behavior of a meandering river. While I think these graphics can strive to achieve more in the way of analysis and generative qualities, these offerings do seem relevant to our ongoing attempts to understand the complex system of cultural and ecological forces and their affects in the Venice lagoon, and to our anticipated design intervention(s).

To configure earth, human, spiritual information and moments of mutual association, inevitable collision…

Civilizing Terrains draws out a further bend in this conversation, considering the fundamental surfaces where these connections occur a set of models in themselves. In geomorphosis: decomposition of mountain to plain, “each [mountain is] a statement about the relationship between forces of change, material, structure and microclimate. The result is a model [or diagram or map for our purposes] illustrating the transformation of vertical mass and volume through decomposition…”
Matter’s the proxy for the non- particle, for energy? Mention to Ellora’s Kailas intends this maybe– where the mountain itself stands as effigy to the divine version of the same name. Carving a mountain out of a mountain a two hundred year way. A full scale model, the Bourges map.


Cosgrove closed his introduction with the referenced suggestion that the spatial and technical practices and readings pulled through from cartographic history no longer hold. The zoom function discussed in the final page of the Columbia project offers the integral solution to the charge of the rhizomatic map. And how modern an apparatus. Distanced information at once proximate, and the ideal for our age. "Information is the oxygen of the networks that make up our cities" More open source then, for better maps.

What capacities, what stagings, what engagements will be sold in the cartographic future?

Graphic Powers...

These readings do a few really interesting things for me: One, they represent a simple means of graphic codification of human relationships with the earth. Their graphic distillations of big ideas offer another tool for site study and design response. The second interesting topic in the readings is the relationship between justice, democracy and landscape. By codifying somewhat ubiquitous terms, and representing them graphically, the authors offer the reader a simple skeleton of ideas, which can easily serve as a starting point for further inquiry. For me, the means in which the information was presented provided a range of potential outcomes. I will finish this post later, after class. More to come!!

SIDL / delta / terrains

this past break i took a long trip driving around California. since i am from east coast i wanted to find a connection with my new home. i wanted to see what was around me and experience what California means. Jane Wolff, with her maps explains and informs information about California and the delta. i really found her mapping drawings very useful and fascinating. i also appreciated that she place as geographical map next to it in order to give a context.

the planning of Washington dc was really interesting to me. how the city i am from was layed out so planning and rigid planning. my question is why was Texas and most of Northeast/Atlantic region not part of the national survey?

the SIDL essay about architecture and justice was also very informative. they call maps as partial and data never being raw and impartial. they mention they look at maps not as tools but as images to help researchers, but is that a tool as well?

In the Million Dollar Blocks article the use of mapping as a visualization tool allowed the project team to uncover critical relationships between sets of information. From there, trends were uncovered that present a new method of analyzing our criminal justice system, as it revealed concentrated spatial areas, or “blocks” that have a high density of poverty and incarcerated citizens.

What I find exciting about these mapping techniques is their ability to support and argue for change in social public policy that redirects government expenditures from prisons to vulnerable local infrastructure. I’m interested in how other social inequities can be examined and further understood through mapping exercises that reveal structural problems in government policy. The design of mapped data sets therefore has a great potential for arguing for policy change.

Of the three readings, I was particularly struck by Cadora and Kurgan’s piece on Million Dollar Blocks. Besides the cogent graphic explanation of this phenomenon, the article really rang true as I lived in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, amidst clusters of million dollar blocks.
Clinton Hill is a primarily black residential neighborhood with black-owned businesses situated near Pratt, integrating some art-student types into the mix. I had no idea I was living in a community so directly affected by the criminal justice system. My ignorance towards the number of people incarcerated in my neighborhood is very telling of my disconnection with the community. This is partly due to the fact that I was very much a part of the first wave of gentrification in Clinton Hill.
Gentrification seems like a tired debate, but further realizing my detachment to the community in which I once lived, I would like to rehash it in relationship to the mappings presented in this article. Perhaps mapping of the million dollar blocks as they are described by Cadora and Kurgan, overlaid with a mapping of gentrification of these areas. Gentrification in Brooklyn could be another version of the million dollar block, in the millions of dollars Manhattanites are spending on Brooklyn brownstones. More likely than not, these mappings would be inversely related.

landscape

What emerges, for me, from the readings this week is the interrelation of spatiality with information and policy. Indeed SIDL suggests that these forces exist in a cyclical feedback scenario. In the case of Morrish’s description of landscapes Delta and SIDL’s rethinking of prisons as exostructures, there is the position that very way that we view the landscape can shape the way we interact with it. There are some important differences, however.
Morrish, in our excerpt, concludes by saying that we should design in relation to the systems that the landscape has established for itself, and in doing so we might rekindle a previous reverence of the landscape.
SIDL seems to suggest that through the project of mapping, we might uncover an otherwise hidden landscape that socially responsible design must respond to.
As these discussions relate to our explorations of Venice, I can start to conceptualize the challenge of responding to the ecologically sensitive area that is the lagoon, while also taking into account the as yet unrevealed landscape that arises from the intersection of Venice’s history as a land largely formed / informed by tourists with the physical boundaries that relate to Venice’s ecology. What are, if any, the exostructures formed by people trafficking in and out of Venice? What are the images that those people carry with them, and how does that now relate to construction of Venice?

Here (click the title of the post) is a satellite image from the causeway that connects Sacramento to the areas westward (The Bay, ect…) I saw this area flood last year during the record rainfall that the central valley experienced. In certain places only treetops and roof tops were visible. It always struck me as a weird place, swampy, but one can make out roadways that disappear into the marsh.

the delta

It is interesting to think of the California Delta in relation to Venice in that the two locations are so similar in their creation of land, as well as in their settlement/development. Both places created by silt deposited by flowing water creating land that is inbetween solid and liquid, and in a constant state of change. Both resulting dense settlement patterns clinging to the most solid of land.

Of the different methods of visually representing data put forth by these three designers, I found Laura Kragen’s work particularly insightful and compelling. This is due, in part, to my greater interest in her subject matter; hers is a story that is currently unfolding, and it is her maps that are enabling it to be told. In Morrish’s work I often felt as though the images were gratuitous. While I greatly enjoyed his discussion of the role of geographic formations as the drivers of human settlement throughout history, his paragraphs coupled with the definitions he provided told the entirety of the story, and the images were closer to illustrations than maps. This is in direct contract to Kragens’s work, where the maps produced are the story. Kragen’s maps are generative and can be used as tools to begin developing new approaches to the problem of the “geography of incarceration and return” in our inner cities.

I thought that the relationships presented in the Morrish article/drawings were valuable in drawing connections between political moves and geographic formations, especially in the differing ways that geography is used. The stark contrast between the Egyptian settlement along the Nile and the US grid of the West and Midwest begins to speak to grossly different value systems. But the translation of geographic form into an architectural language, represented later in the article, is valuable as an approach to interacting with site.

The "Architecture and Justice" article brings together more disparate information to imply a mroe specific point, which I find encouraging. The progression of presentation throughout the article offers insight into the effects of reorganizing data to prove a point. And while they are explicit in acknowledging their purpose, Kurgan and Cadora also bring about new conclusions simply in the juxtaposition of mappings of different elements, for example, the poverty and incarcerated peoples maps.

I found Eric Cadora and Laura Kurgan’s "Architecture and Justice" particularly compelling as a discussion of visual imagery and spatial representation due to the social justice issues that saturate their work and lend real world urgency to questions of aesthetics, design and visual communication. From lists of “hard data,” the team generates visual statements via graphic language that employs mappings in order to aid in the visualization of social ills. In the use of striking visual representation, the group responds to their own question: “what can we do with this data?” Here, one sees how raw data is implemented—designed—in the analysis of criminal justice concerns. Presenting multiple layers of information, "Architecture and Justice" uses information as a resource in order to examine and evaluate issues of public policy and inadequate social structures. By reconfiguring data in a visually compelling manner by means of mappings, the project not only emphasizes its own implications, but also successfully adds greater depth to the consideration of the given information. Thus, spatial imagery proves influential on a public and cultural scale, a reality that I find inspiring as a novice designer concerned with social justice issues.

lodging info.

here is the website of the student hostel on guidecca that is one of your housing options.

testing

testing

Louis Sullivan

I paraphrased Louis Sullivan on ornament in our recent meeting. Here is the full quotation (rather more articulate than my rendering):

"The ornament, as a matter of fact, is applied in the sense of being cut in or cut on, or otherwise done: yet it should appear, when completed, as though by the outworking of some beneficent agency it had come forth from the very substance of the material and was there by the same right that a flower appears amid the leaves of its parent plant."

"Ornament in Architecture," in Kindergarten Chats and other writings (N.Y.: George Wittenborn, Inc., 1947), p. 189.

Light and Atmosphere--inspiration from Olafur Eliasson

check the article here---maybe this can inspire our atlas?

mcmaster-carr

is on the web here.

the 2 books I reccomend purchasing

here are the two books I reccomend you get and keep for the semester; they are of particular relevance to our program and approach.

venice against the sea, john keahey.: this one is out of print but there are a lot of used copies on amazon, paperback and hardcover. try also abebooks and barnes and noble

venice, the tourist maze, davis and marvin: new on amazon, used on abebooks

a good, readable history of venice (as well as the more academic frederic lane already reccomended) is

venice: biography of a city, christopher hibbert (out of print): abebooks and amazon

Mapping Ideas Abound...

Denis Cosgrove's deconstructions of mapping and maps offer a refreshing and challenging perspective on a topic that is so subtly ubiquitous yet ephemeral. To me, his critical lens on authorship, power, culture and intention in mapping do two things: One, he shatters the idea of objectivity in mapping, and deconstructs the embedded, inherent power structures that mapping requires, stating that "the map as an inescapably classificatory device...selection is aesthetic and moral as much as it is oppressive and exclusionary."(Cosgrove 11). However, in doing so, he inaugurates the ubiquitous power that mapping wields, professing its true power. "Mappings inaugurate as well as trace poetics of space." (Cosgrove 17)

Some of the most interesting parts of his essay:

"Maps are thus intensely familiar, naturalized, but not natural..."

"authorship-once critical to, yet obscured within, its final product, the map itself." (Cosgrove 7)

"the map as a determined cultural outcome...an element of of material culture." (Cosgrove 9)

"Kinetic Cartography"
This term made me think of mapping processes....like google earth, or GIS, where information is layered over time, attempting to defy the dishonest stasis inherent in traditional mapping.

This also made me think of the time-lapse portraits by artists posted online in video format. Such as this one:



This provocative essay brought to mind SO many ideas about how we record and communicate ideas and space. One artist that came to mind is Francesca Berrini. She appropriates map pieces to collage into her own maps, utilizing the traditional map aesthetic which we so blindly trust, while creating her own virtual landscapes which only exist in her mind. Her appropriation of data that we know to be "true" to create something the is 'imaginary' is a powerful act. You can find her work here:
http://www.viveza.com/artist_portfolio.asp?artistid=10


As I get back to work in the laser lab, I can think of one last quote from Cosgrove.
"Mapping begets further mappings."

I found exclusive architecture vocabulary picked from everyday fascinating. First time I read james corner essay on map I was confused as ever about the words such as mapping, field, extracts, plotting or layering. These terms that I would use in everyday life in very different applications than what he proposes in architecture. This time I read it again it made more sense and kind of made a full cycle in my struggle to decide what is mapping and what is not. What would be tracing vs. mapping. The process of mapping is reproductive, generative, its about relationship of different components or elements in order to create new findings. Its carefully edited information, elements or extracts in order to explore new information which would help us design. It does not have a beginning nor an end. It continuous, perhaps in cycle and part of other relationships. I could not help to notice the huge different between where james corner and denis cosgrove over the term map. Cosgrove, is more appreciative of vast varieties of maps, representational or analytical. Where corner dismisses representational maps as merely tracings but cosgrove indicates maps in history has had different economical and political intentions and current rethinking of mappings has to do with changing techniques of seeing and making. I appreciate the four different types of mapping that corner mentions but I am not really satisfy with his examples of which has come up with.

Rereading Corner’s essay I felt much more connected to the mapping operations he presents through our study of Venice and its surrounding lagoon.
I was again fascinated by what Corner describes as ‘drift’ and am temped to conduct a derive in Venice to acquaint my self with the city when we arrive. The question is, how does one conduct a derive in the most touristed city in the world? Has every nook and cranny already been discovered by the masses? How would a derive of a city made of canals differ from the derive Debord conducted in Paris? In other words, how does one drift through a city where there are so many barriers?
In addition, Corner’s essay sparked my curiosity about mapping Venice through layering. Although layering may not be the most effective method of representation for our site model, it seems as though it has a lot of potential in capturing the layered character of the region. From the layers of history to layers of sediment creating ‘the fish’, it seems only appropriate to approach the mapping of Venice in a similar way.
Mostly what I took from these essays is the open-ended nature of our task. That we are not to trace, and in mapping Venice we may not find a secret nook undiscovered by tourists, but perhaps a deeper understanding of a city and its design.

To me, the mapping connects different kinds of information. According to intentions of the author, it is represented in different graphic ways. Not only conveying information but it has to represent the potentiality and possibility. After my second time reading Corner’s article, I realized more what he tried to illuminate. Applying to our project of Venice, it makes me try to think things beyond the information I've already gained. Further, it is important for me to think the the way I want to demonstrate my cognition about the map and represent the potentiality of the site. Keep the map objective and open. In addition, Cosgrove said, "To map is in one way or another to take the measure of a world, and more than merely take it, to figure the measure so taken in such a way that it may be communicated between people, places or times.”I would like to use creative ways to explore things beyond our understandings and try to communicate to the readers.

homeless heat map

I think that Ceara makes a good point in relating the permeability of meaning that both Cosgrove and Corner attribute to mapping in their essays to the stickiness that we return to often in our conceptualizing of Venice. This stickiness also extends, I think, beyond the vacillating boundaries between sea and land, and into the intersection of the cultural/historical/built environmental forces at work in shaping the perception of Venice as a city that exists as an imagined space (perhaps something of what Calvino gets at in his retellings). I think that mapping Venice rhizomatically in both its imagined cultural context and very real environmental milieu might be quite fruitful in this light.

Further what I found most compelling in both Cosgrove and Corners work is their suggesting that the efficacy of mapping lies in its referencing of the power inherent in the perceived objective status granted to the mapping logos. The idea, as I read it, that this fetishization could be used to overturn the very power structures that gave rise to the illusion of objectivity is one that has vast potential. Most of us sat through “An Inconvenient Truth” this morning and can attest to the seductive power that a well-illustrated map can have in conveying an argument/dogma. At the same time we are seeing potential globally disastrous scenarios mapped out, we are told that the powers that be are not currently interested in changing the situation. This stands a particularly relevant (if not immediate) example of using the tools that once reproduced power into tools that subvert it.

Certainly mapping as it is given in these readings is presented as an open-ended enterprise, but what occurred to me as lacking the discussion is how mapping might be conveyed in a more universally sensory realm. A possible example, and one that I am not wholly familiar with, is what Herzog and de Meuron did with their creation of scents that evoked various materials. I can see an argument being created using a sequence of scents mapped in such a way as to convey a possible set of ideas, and one that was necessarily open/permeable in that the associations made by those who experienced the scents would be different.

In Cosgrove's introduction to the book, and in Corner's article, time jumps out at me as an important relationship to the act of mapping. Just the pile of maps we have of Venice in the studio speak to how apparent time is in their creation. Someone could put the maps in chronological order relatively easily. Each map speaks of the time in which it was created. Many build on information that already exists in previous versions. Both writers refer to finding new relationships in mapping, Corner more specifically in his breakdown of his various answers to a new way to map that more deeply explores relationships outside the purely physical. But I think time presents a more complex problem to consider. It is physical, yet it is rarely mapped as a physical presence, outside perhaps series of things shown to be progressively different. I am wondering then about the possibilities of creating new ways to generate maps that account for time. Must it necessarily be linear? Richard Long's Seven Day Circle of Ground, and the 'drift' ideas Corner presents break time barriers; I'd like to do more of that.

It’s hard for me to believe that before I read Corner’s essay for the first time I had never consciously questioned the indisputable absoluteness and neutrality of maps (tracings) as tools for navigating city streets, foreign cities, and backwoods hikes. I had never intellectually engaged with the obvious, that maps are made from a series of conscious choices and omissions by the map maker, and that the same piece of land can be mapped in almost inexhaustible ways and reveal something different every time. For me, then, it has been incredibly interesting and useful to begin to engage with mapping as a subjective and creative process.

With this in mind, the exploration of Venice that we are now undertaking as a class, with the aid of a thorough GIS dataset of the region, seems overwhelmed with possibilities. I very much look forward to engaging with the issues presented by Cosgrove and Corner as well as the opportunities presented by this data while exploring Venice in more depth. I’m hard pressed to imagine a region of the world more widely known and studied than Venice yet, as Corner says of mapping: “its agency 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 remakes territory over and over again…”

It is interesting to think about some of the issues introduced by Cosgrove in light of our current investigation of Venice. On the one hand, the conventional use of mapping as a tool capable of “social efficacy and disruptions,” as well as definition of socio-territorial entities becomes pertinent as we examine the set boundaries of Venice both as an island as well as a mainland city, both of which with rather arbitrary delineations. With the consideration of Venice as a coastal city, Cosgrove directly addresses some of the concerns that we must consider in our representation of the region. As Cosgrove asserts, “an implicit claim of mapping has conventionally been to represent spatial stability, at times to act as a tool in achieving it.” He continues: “all coasts [are] in fact zones rather than lines—the unstable space between high and low water in tidal zones.” In our discussions of Venice, his point has become clear. Mapping and defining a continually shifting boundary—or coastline—poses a problem; and the question is raised as to whether we want to impose spatial stability on an inherently unstable system. In turn, this dilemma exemplifies the “questions of representation and reality” that Cosgrove identifies and which we now face as we choose which information to present and with what graphic language in which to do so. Luckily, these questions allow for a stimulating exercise as we seek to utilize mapping in its most generative capacity.

Mappings

These two readings really got me thinking about the process of selecting and editing information in an effort to creating a mapping. I spent a good deal of my childhood tromping through the woods with my surveyor dad, holding a prism in "key" points in order to create a mapping of a particular area of land. To think now of the responsibility that was put in my hands; finding the toe and break of a hill, balancing the prism precisely on a point at the boundry corner and estimating the height to a tenth of an inch of a stonewall. The selection of those points becomes the starting point of a mapping process. The process of then translating the three dimensions of the land into a two dimensional drawing then has another version of selection and editing. This mapping then goes on to be used to fight property ownership battles, create a deed, or to aid in a design process.

This made me think of my experience in architecture firms where we use civil engineers drawings, usually without question, to create a three dimensional intervention in a three dimensional world, but represented in two dimensions. It seems that the process of mapping once it is put in the hands of the designer is totally dependent on the decisions already made by someone else, thereby making the selecting and editing process completely dependent on the measurements and decisions made by someone you may never have met, or in my case by some kid who was more worried about keeping the mosquitos off than putting a prism in the proper place.

see also here> and here for the competition competiors to below.

all the models, btw, were made in 6 days.

plastic manhattan

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54112970@N00/sets/72157594483012847/

adam yarinsky of ARO (with whom I taught a laser-cutter based studio at U.Va,) just sent this link to a large, hypothetical model of Manhattan recently built by thier office.

test post.

a test post of the class blog. you need a google account to contribute, presumably not a huge chore.
url for the blog only is 200b.blogspot.com