5
SPACE OF REPRESENTATION
The Generative Maps of Perry Kulper and Smout Allen
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “The farmers object: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well. Now let me ask you another question. What is the smallest world you would care to inhabit…?”
Lewis Carroll “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded”
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
Borges “On Exactitude in Science”
Based on an earlier writing by Lewis Carroll, this well-known extract by Borges from the short story “On Exactitude in Science” about the art of cartography and the role of maps, while overtly referring to scale alludes to broader issues of representation and reality in addition to engaging and occupying representational space. Both narratives point to questions of spatial abstraction and the role of representation that is instrumental in creating it. These aspects become pronounced when it comes to architecture and it is this that the chapter focuses on. It examines mapping as a mode of representation, its role in the construction of the design brief and ultimately design generation. What is perhaps of significance to note at least for the purpose of this discussion is that the act of mapping suggests translation – translation from a phenomenon into visual abstraction. How this translation occurs is, therefore, critical when mapping is the apparatus through which design is generated.
Notations (symbols) and indexes are integral to this technique so Peirce’s well-known categories of the sign directly apply to the act of mapping. Using symbols and indexes to depict patterns and relationships between elements in space, mapping has often been used to suggest ordering, classification, and revealing the invisible or comprehending the incomprehensible. As a mode of representation that uses notational systems, mapping when deployed in architectural drawing would be what Nelson Goodman would call allographic. Goodman in his distinction between the allographic and autographic arts discusses the unusual nature of architecture which has aspects of both: “The architect’s papers are a curious mixture,” he writes, further stating that “the specifications are written in ordinary discursive verbal and numerical language. The renderings made to convey the appearance of the finished building are sketches.”1 This unusual mixture makes certain architectural representations particularly interesting, since, for Goodman, it is the codified nature of graphic information present in architectural drawings that make them allographic in nature. This make mapping as a technique that influences design that has become more prevalent in last few decades particularly fascinating. This is apparent when one considers the creative use of data mapping in MVRDV’s work or FOA’s mapping of programmatic usage and spatial flow that inform the Yokohama Terminal design. My interest in this chapter is to examine certain drawings used in architectural design wherein the technique of mapping as a design tool seems specifically apparent. The notion that mapping is integral to design is especially prevalent in the writing of certain designers such as James Corner who stresses that, “the very basis upon which projects are imagined and realized derives precisely from how maps are made,” further elaborating that “mapping is perhaps the most formative and creative act of any design process, first disclosing and then staging the conditions of the emergence of new realities.”2 It is this construction of “new realities” that makes this representative tool especially significant in design formulation. So the question becomes, how does mapping become a generative process? What is it in the representative tool kit of techniques that lends itself to mapping being generative?
Mapping as an act of visual translation could be in terms of specific information, site data, programmatic issues, or other analogical and metaphoric aspects that are directly significant to context and program. This act of translation makes it an important generative tool in design. In this chapter, I make the case that Constant Nieuwyenhuys’ collage-like New Babylon maps are certainly generative; Perry Kulper’s drawings, I argue, can be considered as metaphorical maps that are instrumental in generating a design brief; Smout Allen’s projects Panorama Landmarks and Retreating Village which transform architecture to an instrument of registering and mapping the landscape are almost a manifestation of the Carroll and Borges story, and finally, Lebbeus Woods’ project, System Wein, is an enactment of a map.
Collage vs Montage Maps
Situationists treated maps as terrains for exploration that were appropriated and operated upon to give a new understanding of the city. This is evident in the now famous cut-up collage maps created by Debord and Jorn of Paris highlighting “psychogeographic” sites. The aim of these collage maps was to question the status-quo and deliberately distort the conventional understanding of the city. In a similar manner, Constant Nieuwyenhuys’ New Babylon collage maps rearrange and reorder the existing city into a new city. The symbolic representation of New Babylon has cut-out sectors from maps of various cities in Europe that are overlapped and form ring-like entities which are connected by lines around a center. Overlapped gray boxes go across the collaged maps like connectors between the pieces.
These collage maps of New Babylon have all the notations of conventional maps since they are created from individual parts of existing maps to form a new whole that becomes the register of new ideas. This representational space has been called, “a calculated assault on disciplinary limits, and drawing is a key part of that arsenal.”3 While initially the drawings explored the spaces that had been generated, according to Wigley, as more collage techniques were added to these drawings, new kinds of spaces had been generated within them.4 So while the use of maps was significant, it was the technique of collage that was instrumental in the generation of new kind of spaces and therefore, it is the transformation into collage maps that is important for design generation.
The representation technique of collage complements the idea of play that is embedded in the continual changes that the inhabitants of New Babylon could make within their architectural environment and naturally alters how one views the maps. The collage maps transform the understanding of this project from being viewed as a stable condition (that is almost crystallized and static) to depicting effects that are already present and would be in a continuously evolving condition. The New Babylon maps provide a structure or frame for a combinatorial game and a snapshot at a moment in time:
The inhabitants drift by foot though the huge labyrinthine interiors, perpetually reconstructing every aspect of the environment by changing the lighting and reconfiguring the mobile and temporary walls. For this homo ludens, social life becomes architectural play and the multiply interpretable architecture becomes a shimmering display of interacting desires – a collective form of creativity, as it were, displacing the traditional arts altogether.5
FIGURE 5.1 Constant Nieuwyenhuys, Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon [Symbolic representation of New Babylon], 1969 (collage 48¹∕₁₆ × 52⅜ in. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague)
This description is very much like a combinatorial game that points to a living map which is not frozen in representation but is constantly evolving. For Wigley this “blurriness” of what actually happens within the living space, an undefined indeterminacy seen in Constant’s models and drawings, is set against the exacting and specific demonstrations of how the space is made possible. He writes, “inside, things are always blurry… Constant continually blurs both the play of desire, which cannot be specified without blocking it, and the support of that play, which cannot be represented without it being mistaken for frozen play.”6 The collage technique used in Constant’s mapping highlights juxtapositions of materials and fragmentary conditions this is seen in the etched plastic and acrylic pieces with symbolic notations that are deployed in some representations. The use of different traditional maps as well as other means of representation give the sense of various possibilities and project a sense of multiplicity of experiences as well.
With the New Babylon maps, one observes individual pieces that use conventional maps which have notational techniques that are essentially allographic nature but it is the nature of the overall composition using the collage technique that makes this generative mapping autographic. Constant’s collage is another way of considering mapping that combines and exhibits information simultaneously, whether layered, or fragmented. The visual synchronicity – a simultaneous manner of revealing and juxtaposing information – seen in Constant’s representations seems to be a hallmark and a significant trigger for design generation in the work of other designers as well.
In contrast to Constant’s maps that use the collage technique, James Corner writes about his maps as montages. For Corner, the rhizomatic mapping process that he describes is as “a mode of work integral to collage” and functions “connotatively” which is by suggestion. This process is different to the typical mapping process that for Corner “systematizes its materials into more analytical and denotative schemas. Where mappings may become more inclusive and suggestive, then, is less through collage, which works with fragments, and more through a form of systematic montage, where multiple and independent layers are incorporated as a synthetic composite.”7 According to this distinction, data maps form a closed system that is systematic and analytical, moreover, denotative schemas through a “systematic montage” situate it more towards one end of the spectrum that constitutes disjointed notational systems while connotative schemas that are inherent in the collage technique – an autographic practice – situates it towards the other end of the spectrum. While Corner’s distinction between collage and montage maps is accurate, where this distinction gets a little tricky is in the actual separation between denotative and connotative schemas in montage and collage. For instance, even if Corner considers his own work to be more akin to a systematic montage, one finds connotative aspects within it that have metaphorical projective capacities, and, while Corner himself admits that his own maps which subvert the geological maps are “not as open or rhizomatic as they might be owing to their thematic focus,”8 since to a certain extent these are systematic, and analytical in conveying information, they also reveal connotative schemas. The mode in which they do so is through the employment of three operations: defining the field or geographic conditions, deterretorialization, and reterritorialization.9 These methods, then, offer new readings in the manner in which cartographic relationships are established and are statements of projective capabilities of mapping. Quite elegant in themselves, one can argue that Corner’s own maps are not strictly notational systems but can be considered as artifacts in their own right and in that sense more akin to paintings when considered in the spectrum from disjointed notational systems to dense systems. His maps reveal an interesting mix of the informative and the projective, the connotative and the denotative, the codified and the suggestive.
Maps as a Design Briefs in Perry Kulper’s Work
Visual flights of the imagination, Perry Kulper’s striking architectural drawings at first glance almost look like paintings. A closer look, however, unveils layers of relational meaning – they come across as maps complete with symbolic notations on the one hand to figurative imagery on the other hand. In Perry Kulper’s case, his drawings that have attributes of mapping can be considered a device through which he develops the design brief. Here I’m using the art historian Michael Baxandall’s explanation of “charge” and “brief” wherein he says: “The Charge is featureless. Character begins with the Brief.”10 The “charge” essentially refers to the typology or function and it is the local and circumstantial conditions that formulate the design brief. In the projects discussed further, I contend that the creative mapping of conditions becomes a way to develop not only the design “brief” but in some instances, such as the David’s Island Project, the “charge” itself. Kulper’s drawings have been referred to as a kind of personal cartography.11 Three projects by Kulper are especially pertinent in this discussion: the David’s Island project (drawings made: 1996–97), the Central California History Museum (drawings made: 2001–02, 2009–10), and the Fast Twitch Desert House (drawings made: 2004, 2008, 2010).
The David’s Island competition project was an ideas competition without a prescribed program. Formulating the design brief was therefore an integral component of the representations. Historical events, indigenous populations, earlier building typologies and programs that occurred on the island, as well as the natural environment and geographical features, are all important features that are mapped. Drawings for this project therefore are distinctive mappings that constitute a layered construction, which registers various features, events, and significant landmarks of the island. To this system of layering there are also layers of photographs of found images and text. In addition, Kulper uses a combination of codified military and nautical cartography and notational systems that construct and question theoretical and ideological relations such as the very boundary and margins of events, ideas, and site. For him all aspects that are important to formulate both the design charge an brief are embedded in the construction of these collage drawings, including essential features of the site in terms of history, experience, and projected purpose,
the islander’s experience of remoteness and isolation, the propagation of maritime mythologies and folklore, the manifestations of successive insurgencies and divergent occupations, the cultural import of drift, migration and transience, the latent potential for constructed inundations, the real and imagined sensing of suppressive scopic (panoramic and panoptic) regimes, the representational practices and influences of nautical cartography, the prospective elusiveness of nocturnal ephemera and the literal and strategic deployment of military jargon,
FIGURE 5.2 David’s Island Competition project, Strategic Plot and Site Drawing, 1996–97, (24 × 36 in, materials: Mylar, x-rays, assorted found imagery, cut paper, foil, transfer letters, transfer film, tape, graphite, ink, courtesy Perry Kulper)
FIGURE 5.3 Central California History Museum, Thematic Drawing, 2001–02, 2009, 2010, (24 × 36 in, materials: Mylar, assorted found imagery, cut paper, acetate, transfer letters, tape, graphite, ink, courtesy Perry Kulper)