Timekept

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The History of Cartography

Mapping (1) is a very ancient way to bring order to one’s spatial surroundings by using graphic techniques. Humans modify the parameters of spatial representations to meet their changing needs (2). Thus originated city plans (3 – 4), route maps, regional (chorographic) maps (5), and world maps (6)—depending on the scale of reduction. Nautical charts (7) came into being with the development of maritime traffic (8-10) in the Mediterranean basin (11). An evolutionary paradigm, which only considers the development of geographic accuracy and precision in mapping, is not applicable to the history of cartography (12). Maps are not always concerned with the depiction of material reality. In the case of religious cartography (13), medieval “Mappaemundi” (14) reflect the anxieties and expectations of Western societies. Modern route maps and the distance maps of antiquity (15-16) serve the same purpose, and their syntax is not substantially different. With the formation of modern states, cartography became an instrument for war and for controlling territory (17). This initiated (18) the mathematical construction of maps (19) and their geometric formalization (20). Along with the standardization of conventional signs and the development of new methods of projection, these developments matured in the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment (21-22).

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“Some have taken a negative stance on BIM and parametrics as they assume so much about the design process and limit any work produced to the user’s knowledge of the program. This can enable a novice designer who has learned how to perform basic commands to become an incredibly prolific producer while a highly educated and experienced architect can be crippled from inexperience with a programs interface or underlying concepts. This creates a potential for a generational break line that becomes more harsh as a new technology gains market parity.”

“OMA is famous for two things: its astounding output, and the extent to which its operations chew through the majority of the human capital that walks through its doors. As an office that had already made a name for itself and was lucky to enjoy a steady flow of applications from aspiring young interns, OMA could organize around a workflow that depended on the maximum variety and quantity of design explorations before electing one to carry forward. Like Turing 60 years prior, OMA’s operations are based on brute forcing through the search space. Whereas Turing relied on something that would later come to be known as computing power, OMA relies on employees who willfully work long hours to be part of the magical machine.”

“The building industry is perhaps unique in that it produces en masse, but cannot mass produce. It is the original and largest case of what we’ve recently begun to call mass customisation.”

“We therefore find ourselves in a somewhat confusing situation where a relatively marginal computational technique has been co-opted to refer to a whole new style of architecture.”

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Among the interesting conclusions drawn by Foz from his experiment is the importance of simulation during the parti design as a way of making decisions. Design was better characterized ‘as a learning activity than as an analytic dissection of a formal problem’. If human information processing capacities seem to be the same for individuals, the performance of the skill designer relies in part on his ability to organize knowledge in well structured chunks and to use these chunks in an efficient sequence. Skill designers make more tests on the ideas that occur to them and tend to delay the arrival at a building form proposal. They use three-dimensional representation often, not as a display of a completed design proposal but as a part of the information process.

Such a study seems to have great significance if we really want to inquire as to what could be a reasonable use of automatized methods during the design process. The idea of computer-aided design has to be discarded. The use of these methods cannot be as an exterior and miraculous help whose effectiveness is dependent on the state of the art of a discipline which has nothing to do with architecture (computer science).

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“This is particularly problematic when the designed site includes architectural form. While the role of the fundamental building block of urbanism may have changed, the Duplo-buildings cannot simply be ignored in favour of the new Technic-landscapes.”

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Considering that none of the allied professions of art, architecture, and engineering seem to have such existential angst,10 the major result of such debate seems to be the revelation that landscape architecture is hamstrung by its own ambiguous nature. Even worse, anything landscape architecture does—whether it’s site engineering, site ecology, environmental art, site design, planting plans, sustainable design, cultural criticism— there is another field that can do it, and do it better.

This conundrum has led to two opposing forces acting on the field: The first is an outward/centrifugal pull, expanding the field to encompass all areas, reducing, eliminating and blurring disciplinary boundaries; the second is an inward/centripetal force which seeks to defend these boundaries and hoard a professional monopoly.11 Together, these forces ensure the field’s lack of directional momentum.

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