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number 31 spring 2014
mapping | photography 31
CAN/USA $16 sell until September 2014
Akrotiri André de Alencar Lyon, technical notes by Peter C Nomikos London: Jane&Jeremy, 2014 santozeum.com jane-jeremy.co.uk
Terra Infirma. Geography’s visual culture Irit Rogoff London and New York: Routledge, 2000 ISBN 0-415-09616-2
Historical Atlas of the Arctic Derek Hayes Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003 ISBN 0-295-98358-2
The Irish Ordnance Survey, history, culture and memory Gillian M Doherty Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004 ISBN 1-85182-861-3
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
The View From the Train, cities and other landscapes Patrick Keiller London + Brooklyn: Verso, 2013 ISBN-13 978-1-78168-140-4
The Petropolis of Tomorrow Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper, editors Barcelona + Houston: Actar + Architecture at Rice, 2013 ISBN 978-0-989331-7-84
Maps of Meaning Peter Jackson London: Unwin Hyman, 1989 ISBN 0-04-445365-5
Map of a Nation, a biography of the Ordnance Survey Rachel Hewitt London: Granta, 2010 ISBN 978-1-84708-098-1
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 spring 2014 mapping photography
photographing architecture Nora Wendl Robin Wilson documentary photography Pascal Greco Keesic Douglas
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Attempts at breaking into a glass house Fragmenting the architectural photograph
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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
Maria Alexandrescu Espen Lund Nielsen Lisa Rapoport
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 drawing Hector Abarca Reza Aliabadi Victoria Stanton Asher Ghaffar
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Google, maps, ideology With which all things exist and move Deliberate map(ping): the role of citizen cartography
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The forgotten art of architectural drawings Thematic cartography How place is performed: a manifesto Mapping the furnace room
cartographic mataphors Keesic Douglas Stephanie White Rodrigo Barros Will Craig Kennis Keen
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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 Radford Watson and Sean Burkholder
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Charted Displacement, Butte Montana
details calls for articles: issues 31 + 32 subscription form masthead
70 71 72
fall 2014 weak systems | spring 2015 land: landscape
who we are
cover front: Jacob Whibley back: Jessica Craig
‘Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?’ ‘je ne sais quoi – déjà vu?’
Nora Wendl, Glass House (Levitation) , 2013. 24 x 36” C-print
inhabitation | control by nora wendl
historiography modernism poetry architecture projection
attempts at breaking into a glass house
Nora Wendl, Glass House (Levitation) 2 , 2013. 24 x 36” C-print
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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.
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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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 light- sensitive 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
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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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Nora Wendl, Glass House (Bedroom) , 2013. 24 x 36” C-print
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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Nora Wendl, Glass House (Kitchen), 2013. 36 x 24” C-print
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.
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.
courtesy The Architects Journal
documentation complicity critique process collaboration
architectural journals | imaging by robin wilson
fragmenting the architectural photograph a critical contribution to the architectural media
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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 large- format 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.
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.
Nigel Green
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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. 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.
courtesy The Architects Journal
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.
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
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.
Nigel Green
A house in the Surrey countryside by London- based 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.
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Nigel Green
no cliché Iceland
photography books | pascal greco by stephanie white
Pascal Greco
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, cloth- wrapped, 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
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.
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Jane & Jeremy
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Jane & Jeremy
memorials | streets by keesic douglas
Warrior’s Path marking the trail
1812-2012
paths allegiances wars trees vulnerabilities
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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
Keesic Douglas
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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.
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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Keesic Douglas
frame weeds
inventory fragment park
framing landscape misreading urbanism
urban landscape | destablisation by maria alexandrescu
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 Condorelli 1
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. 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? 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
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? 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. 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. 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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ephemera impermanence time
‘[…] the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.’ – Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science
collections encounters
microcartography | secret cameras by espen lunde nielsen
the map of the camel driver
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 camel- driver, 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. 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 in- between as a flat tone of nothingness.
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top: A Leconte. ‘Plan Monumental Paris & Environs Itineraire Metropolitan’, published in the 1928 tourist pocket map of Paris, Nouveau Paris Monu- mental 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, 5 e Arrondissement, Paris, France. From the portfolio 20 pho- tographs 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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Espen Lunde Neilsen
above: Memory Tape / Strata Recorder
right: Rackpickers Archive of Ephemera
1 Perec, Georges, trans. John Sturrock. ‘L’Infra-ordinaire’, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces . London and New York: Penguin Books, 1997
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
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.
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above and below: Stairway Camera
Espen Lunde Neilsen
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. 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). 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
walking as reproduction
exhibitions | sequences by lisa rapoport plant architect inc
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 Venice 2, one in Cambridge, Ontario 3: : the Podium Roof Garden at Nathan Phillips Square 4 , 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. …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
landscapes walking stopping seeing recording
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
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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
Steven Evans
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. 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.
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Chris Pommer
Chris Pommer
Steven Evans
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 map 6 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.
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
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PLANT Team: Lisa Rapoport, Chris Pommer, Mary Tremain, Vanessa Eickhoff, Peter Os- borne, Angelica Demetriou and Zac Mollica Photography: Dublin: Stephen Evans and Chris Pommer Nathan Phillips Square: Steven Evans
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
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
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. 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.
Chris Pommer
Chris Pommer
travels experience recording methods culture
documentation | senses by michael blois
above: the original project: the experience of traditional and urban tea house spatiality
the camera and the tea house the photograph and the place
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.
context 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.
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Michael Blois
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