UE U : Cartography

Maps are visual tools for thinking about the world at many scales. They shape scientific hypotheses, organize political and military power, delineate private property, and reflect mental conceptions about landscapes and nonhuman nature. In the Western tradition, medieval maps were less territorial descriptions than conceptual cosmologies, occasionally depicting biblical stories, mythology, history, flora, fauna, and exotic peoples and species. With the advent of modernity, an important shift took place. Cartesian perspectives began to trace the world in relation to a fixed a fixed human subject, while mathematical God's eye views surveyed the land from an abstract elevated "nowhere." Accurate maps, stripped of all elements of fantasy, religious belief, and authorship, became essential tools for modern scholars and states who sought rational progress through scientific prediction, social engineering, and planning. Cartography became concerned with analyzing and measuring the res extensa, and the land survey emerged as a crucial instrument of capitalist development.

As Neil Smith explained, capitalism required the invention of "space as emptiness, as a universal receptacle in which objects exist and events occur, as a frame of reference, a coordinate system (along with time) within which all reality exists." But the flip side of treating the environment as an abstract container is treating architecture as an abstract object, disembedded, consumed, and aestheticized for its own sake. From this radical separation, maps become quantitative systems for managing phenomena, while buildings become circulating commodities for the valorization of land rent. In today's context of ecological crisis, this separation is visibly contradictory. The environment is not a backdrop or a container of natural resources, just as architecture is not a collection of objects floating in a vacuum. Buildings and landscapes constitute each other dialectically, regardless of whether their relationship is collaborative or antagonistic, and cartography can render this dynamic concrete.

This teaching unit proposes a cartographic method for embedding architecture in its environment. By mapping buildings in their space and time, we reveal the invisible backgrounds that make up their material conditions of possibility. The aesthetic choices conveyed in the so-called "object" thus appear no longer disinterested, but complex, as a rich totality of environmental relations. Throughout the course students should keep in mind the following questions: how should architecture reflect society's relation to the environment; how should it constitute a critique of said relation; and how should it predict a collective ideal?

Sessions

1. Cartography and Modern Abstraction
2. Drawing: Visual Layers
3. Planning: Spatial Figures
4. History: Social Formations
5. The Dialectical Method
6. GIS Workshop with Aurèle Pulfer (ALICE)
7. Midterm Reviews
8. Environmental Thresholds
9. Territorial Conduits
10. Domestic Enclosures
11. Wilderness Frontiers
12. Final Reviews