Mapping is an act of curation, a sorting out of actual lived experience into a series of assembled components that combine into a systematic narrative that we learn to understand and assume is the organisation of the experience. As an architect, urban designer and teacher, I have come to trust this desire for organizing principles, the results being so easily analysed. But my experience of moving through space is much the opposite – haphazard, coincidental, haptic, with many narratives colliding, unconscious, and dominated by time. A map implies time only by distance, without the mess of wandering, pondering or traffic. Though a city may be organised on a grid, my movement across it may include cutting corners, making diagonal paths, hopping into and through buildings that join streets – anything but linear. My mental map is made of these ingrained routes and shortcuts along with personal markers (where so-and-so lived, where I fell off my bike…); so much more than the organised structure of a street map. This extends to all spatial experience: though I know that the sun is an object at the centre of a series of orbiting planets including earth, and therefore I unmapping maps lisa rapoport
1 'Every Walk is Unreproducible' in On Site review 31: mapping | photography , 2014 and 'Material Memory' in On Site review 36: our material future , 2020. In previous articles for this magazine 1 I discussed PLANT’s work that focused, in defiance of distillation of place for easy mapping, on the slow revelation of a place by walking, the sense of discovery, savouring the recitative of the spaces in-between more consumable high points more easily mapped. More recently I have started to look more deeply into the facts and physicality of the map itself, trying to understand exactly how a common map fails to capture actual experience of place. A map doesn’t even acknowledge whether you are coming or going – such a fundamental part of our experience of a place. The two projects here map driving experiences to show this. I think of these as unmapping projects – pulling the map and our experience apart, but not really trying to put it back together again. These unmappings unravel experience and revel in the undoing. am the one moving, I still say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Astronomical knowledge simply does not match up to my actual experience of the sun.
No. 10 is the Highway to the Eastern Townships – the highway to the mountains – the Appalachian Mountains. No. 10 is the highway that passes by and between a set of mountains – not a chain like the Appalachians or the Laurentians, but a sequence – each a singular and bold eruption from the St. Lawrence lowland plain, a totemic sequence – mountain, space, mountain, space…. Blink and you miss it was our proposal to bring the driver and passengers’ attention to the sequence of mountains, both factual and poetic, at high speed and at rest. The project places the driver precisely in a 140km narrative in relation to the passage of these mountains, in three distinct interventions shaped by speed. These are each a way to bring the order of the map to the real space and time.
blink and you miss it In 2016, La Maison de l’architecture du Québec (MAQ) commissioned six teams to create solutions to explore and improve the experience of Québec’s Autoroutes for the exhibit S.O.S. Paysages Autoroutiers . Together with poet Ronna Bloom, PLANT explored Highway 10 in a project we called Blink and you miss it . Ronna and I had grown up in Montreal with cottages in the Eastern Townships, and along with my partner Chris Pommer, have had decades of driving this route. This was an opportunity to understand the highway in retrospect. We started just looking at the road map – something I had never done as this was a habitual family drive; we never needed a map. The route had so many inexplicable zig zags – a logic we assumed came from property lines, but even more curious was a regular pattern of bumps in this otherwise flat landscape.
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
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