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102 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 4.7 46.9791° N, 8.2562° E, Xaver Imfeld, Alpen-Panorama vom Pilatus, 1888. Xaver Imfeld was an innovative engineer, a talented draftsman of alpine panoramas, and a master of relief modeling. After 1875, Imfeld completed over forty mountain panoramas, many of which supported the ongoing railway development in the Alps. His diverse training and personal experience with the Alpine landscape led to the creation of meticulously rendered cartographic works. Most of the drawings were based on on-site surveys yet present an impossible view. The result is an elevational representation of the mountainous terrain, where each peak is given equal detail and its own character. 4.8 47.1167° N, 9.2000° E, Eduard Imhof, Karte der Gegend um den Walensee, 1938. The relative truthfulness of the map as an accurate depiction of empirical reality has been questioned over time, notably by Swiss cartographer Eduard Imhof. Imhof used his perceptual understanding of relief to develop a precise, effective, and accessible two-dimensional translation of the Alps. He argued that previous maps, with their reliance on mathematics, did not describe the terrain as perceived by the human eye. Using a combination of scale models and aerial photogrammetry, Imhof developed a shaded-relief system to convey the material expression and phenomenal feel of mountainous Swiss landscapes. 4.9 22.3000° N, 114.1667° E, Zaha Hadid, The Peak, 1982–83. Zaha Hadid’s Blue Slabs painting from the Peak Leisure Club project in Hong Kong depicts the design and its context in rich blocks of color. The painting and the design are inspired by Russian suprematism and local geology. Hadid’s proposal for a manmade mountain of granite slabs set against the intensity of Hong Kong, between mountain and harbor, reads like a landscape. The proposal calls for leveling the ground to the lowest elevation and rebuilding it from excavated rock into a polished mountain. Tones of blue are set against reddish browns and pinks, exquisitely crafted with hard edges defined by color shifts. The tectonic vision is clearly articulated through surficial rendering and a carefully considered palette. Cast shadows highlight the architectural vision, showing the building beams as if flying from the cliffs beyond.
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104 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 4.10 William Morris Davis, The Harvard Geographical Models (Boston: Boston Society of Natural History, 1897), plate 1. In response to the poor quality of physical models used in geography education, William Morris Davis, using a timely monetary donation, oversaw the construction of three models at Harvard. The models were created from highly detailed shaded-relief drawings, reproduced in beeswax and cast in plaster. The models are relatively small—24 by 18 inches— but high-resolution lantern slides allowed the detail to be projected and used in the classroom. His desire was to produce exemplary prototypes that would demonstrate the potential and value of exact modeling for pedagogy. The models depict idealized landscapes, designed to explain precise but generalized geographical conditions.
SHADED RELIEF 105 4.11 41.8819° N, 87.6278° W, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, The Lurie Garden, 2006. Landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson is recognized for her fluid landforms, generated through a process that relies heavily on modeling. Abstract forms are explored through three-dimensional clay models. From the clay maquettes, rubber molds are generated and plaster casts created. The genesis of the project rests with the plaster model, which is often translated into digital form and ultimately cut, carved, and formed into a landscape. Its tactility is expressed through stone, water, earth, and planting.
106 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 4.12 41.1621° N, 8.5830° W, PROAP, Frente Ribeirinha do Porto, 2007. The edge between land and water is explored through the juxtaposition and inversion of the plan and the perspective. Here, the focus is returned to the edge—the Porto waterfront—recovering it from an industrialized past toward a recreational future. A series of architectural projects are linked through an urban strategy that extends along the entire 3.5-kilometer length. The notion of arrival and view, of a reinvented civic facade for the city, is articulated representationally through the dexterous merging of the organizational intent shown in the plan and the experiential quality seen in the perspective.
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SHADED RELIEF 109 4.13 39.5274° N, 119.8134° W, Hal Shelton and Jeppesen Map Company, Reno Area, 1953. Scale: 1:50,000 (shown at half size). 4.14 Hal Shelton, Color Legend, 1957. Hal Shelton, one of the most accomplished American cartographers and terrain artists, was greatly influenced by the aerial and its incongruity with the topographic map. He promoted legibility—without a key—and verisimilitude, arguing that the relief rendering should resemble the landscape subject. Shelton developed a natural-color system to describe the surface of the earth. His maps were often small scale, encompassing countries and continents, with a few exceptions, including this map of the Reno area.
110 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 4.15 47.3314° N, 9.4076° E, Eduard Imhof, Relief Map of Appenzell Country, 1923. Scale: 1:75,000 (shown at half size). The relief map of the Appenzell countryside is one of twelve detailed school maps of the Swiss cantons that cartographer Eduard Imhof worked on between 1922 and 1973. The maps employ different cartographic relief techniques. The Appenzell map is watercolor over a print showing topographical information. It balances clear line work with rich, translucent, painterly tones. The shading renders the form of the landscape, giving a much more dramatic reading than the underlying contours.
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The taxonomic method of describing the spatial distribution of the various forms of vegetation and occupation of the land. CHAPTER 05 LAND CLASSIFICATION
113 T he terrestrial ground has multiple physical components: its topographic morphology, its surface material, and its occupation or use. To depict the ground is to describe all of these. Land classification departs from the representation of terrain to describe occupation of the land: cultural and agronomic land uses, vegetation and the material characteristics of the earth’s surface. Land-use maps call out the actual and possible uses of land; they are explanatory and projective. Land classification is based on indices, involving the placing of a symbol, letter, color, or pattern to represent typologies of soil, vegetation, or activity. Categorization and tolerance— how to choose and where to draw the line between categories—create the visual differentiation of the ground plane, whether data is gathered on foot by the surveyor or remotely with Landsat satellites, a family of satellites that are used to collect data necessary to create images of the earth’s surface. The classification is inherently reductive, requiring delineation within a naturally continuous landscape. The idea is to balance clarity and description, to find a hierarchy that translates land use into clear taxonomies. Once the categories are determined, choices must be made as to how the map will be drawn: flat or highly textured, bright or muted, true color or infrared. [FIG. 5.1] Maps that categorize and delineate types of land cover and use require simplification and generalization. These maps are deceptively static, masking the dynamic process of occupation: land owners change, land uses change, vegetation appears and disappears continuously. They are out of date before they can be drawn—a limitation addressed previously through the physical updating of maps and currently with the issuing of revised data sets. Land classification is most prevalent at the large scale, showing regional, national, or even global extent rather than the detailed, evasive, and nuanced characteristics of the local ground. Data is generated remotely, simplified into categories and output to areas on a map. Ground truthing follows as a way to verify airborne remote sensing—data collected by aerial photography, satellite radar, or infrared images checked against field data collected by teams of scientists. In situ land use or cover of the location is compared with the remote imagery. Data and maps are then adjusted accordingly. Until the first half of the twentieth century, natural-resource inventories were done entirely from the ground. Robert N. Colwell, a forestry professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and early
114 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS adopter of aerial photogrammetry, which he employed to assess Imperial Valley cereal crops, told Scientific American readers in January 1968, “Geologists traveled widely in exploring for minerals; foresters and agronomists examined trees and crops at close hand in order to assess their condition; surveyors walked the countryside in the course of preparing the necessary maps. The advent of aerial photography represented a big step forward.” Colwell worked with NASA to recommend specific wavelength bands for mapping resources from space, contributing to one of the first land-classification maps based on remote sensing, later deemed a classic.1 Contemporaneously, significant advances were being made in computer mapping at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, founded by Howard Fisher in 1965. The “Lab” worked to combine georeferenced ecological, topographical, sociological, and demographic data and visualize it through digital cartographic output. Landscape architect and planner Carl Steinitz collaborated with the group and produced an influential body of maps of the Delmarva Peninsula for an academic studio. The maps reflected the technological limitations of computer output, rendering information through black-and-white dot densities (SEE CHAPTER 01). Jack Dangermond, a student at the school at the time, worked in the Lab, and later went on to found Esri, a leader in the creation and dissemination of GIS (Geographic Information System) technology. GIS, a software platform that facilitates the aggregation of spatial data and allows for its translation into maps, underlies much of contemporary cartography. With the advent of GIS, maps can be understood as databases that allow for the layering of data—following the traditions of landscape architects Charles Eliot and Ian McHarg and others—to facilitate comprehensive, systematic formulations of particular landscapes. The layers are superimposed and can be toggled on and off, isolating and aggregating information at the same time on the same map. With the increase in data and the development of computer mapping, the National Land Cover Database (NCLD) emerged as a system to codify land-use data at a national scale in the United States. James R. Anderson made a plea for standardization in 1976, desiring consensus on accepted terminology, easier information transfer, and consistent categorization. He proposed nine primary land-use categories, broken down into thirty-seven secondary units.2 Further differentiation
LAND CLASSIFICATION 115 5.1 34.0500° N, 118.2500° W, Jill Desimini, Land-Classification Techniques: Los Angeles, 2014. After Milne [FIG. 5.3], Pietrusko and Grga Basic [FIG. 5.2], and NASA, Los Angeles and Vicinity Seen from Space, 2001.
116 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS could be achieved at the local level. This system evolved into the NCLD, a data set of land-use classification, currently with twenty categories grouped into eight themes. The choice of categories drives the resulting maps, yielding a very specific understanding of occupation and distribution. Inherent in the task of land classification is the drawing of boundaries, both literally and figuratively. The land-classification map belongs to a category of maps measuring human occupation and activities that includes administrative and jurisdictional maps, cadastral maps, and insurance maps, among others. Rather than simply depicting natural phenomena, the land-classification map alludes to colonization, commodification, and cultural control. Early property surveys include information on land use alongside boundaries, location, size, value, and ownership of property. Methods of land classification evolved from black-and-white line drawings and annotations into a practice of showing enclosures and occupation through color by the late 1500s, still used on estate and property maps. Due to reproduction constraints, older maps relied on lines, words, alphanumeric annotations, and black-and-white patterned hatches to distinguish land use. These maps were linked to early surveys, representing the first measured drawings of a property or city. Hand coloration was also prevalent and served to pull land use out from background survey information. With the advent of color printing, color becomes the dominant system—either for textural overlays or flat fills. Contemporary designers have experimented with ways to describe land classification, or design’s equivalent, the material and programmatic characteristics of a project. While color fills are still the norm, investigations with textural imagery, numerical coding and hatching, and combinations of GIS data, line work, color, and raster imagery point to the potential for dynamic rendering. Early land-classification maps resulted from an additive process, beginning with a blank topographic slate and filling in occupation and land cover as surveyors gathered information to populate the maps. Now the information is extracted from a fully detailed image, a satellite capture, where land classification is deduced through the reduction of a continuous field into distinct categories. This is a process shared by cartography and design. The representational tools are indexical: simple means of assigning a mark or color to a typology. It is the juxtaposition
LAND CLASSIFICATION 117 1John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 394. 2James R. Anderson, Ernest E. Hardy, John T. Roach, and Richard E. Witmer, “A Land Use and Land Cover Classification System for Use with Remote Sensor Data,” Geological Survey Professional Paper 964 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), 1–28. of these indexical systems with the taxonomic classifications themselves— the categories that are mapped—that give rich contextual and subjective readings of the landscape. As a means of describing land use, the maps reflect the social conceits of their makers. This chapter covers both the technical, categorical, and cultural range evident in visualizing land occupation.
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LAND CLASSIFICATION 119 LAND COVER 1973 PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA 1:250,000 Level 1 Level 2 1. Urban or built-up land 111Residential ~12\ Commercial and services 771 Industrial it\Transportation,communication and utilities "TTjIndustrial and commercial complexes Tel Mixed urban or built-up land 171 Other urban or built-up land 2. Agricultural land 3. Rangeland [21]Cropland and pasture [^2] Orchards, groves, vineyards, nurseries, etc. J23|Confined feeding operations 24]Other agricultural land 31 Herbaceous rangeland 321Shrub and brush rangeland 33 Mixed rangeland 4. Forest land 4l|Deciduous forest land 421Evergreen forest land 471 Mixed forest land 5. Water kl|Streams and canals [^2] Lakes kslReservoirs J54JBays and estuaries 6. Wetland 7. Barren land 61 Forested wetland jTJJNon-forested wetland [^LJDray salt flats |?21 Beaches (73jSandy areas other than beaches [74! Bare exposed rock [75!Strip mines,quarries,and gravel pits [TS] Transitional areas FTT]Mixed barren land 8. Tundra I si jShrub and brush tundra [s2J Herbaceous tundra (si] Bare ground tundra [34] Wet tundra 1851 Mixed tundra [91]Perennial Snowfields [92] Glaciers 9. Perennial snow or ice LAND COVER 1973 PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA 1:250,000 Level 1 Level 2 1. Urban or built-up land 11 Residential 12 Commercial and services 13 Industrial 14 Transportation,communication and utilities 15 Industrial and commercial complexes 16 Mixed urban or built-up land 17 Other urban or built-up land 2. Agricultural land 3. Rangeland 21 Cropland and pasture 22 Orchards, groves, vineyards, nurseries, etc. 23 Confined feeding operations 24 Other agricultural land 31 Herbaceous rangeland 32 Shrub and brush rangeland 33 Mixed rangeland 4. Forest land 41 Deciduous forest land 42 Evergreen forest land 43 Mixed forest land 5. Water 51 Streams and canals 52 Lakes 53 Reservoirs 54 Bays and estuaries 6. Wetland 7. Barren land 61 Forested wetland 62 Non-forested wetland 71 Dray salt flats 72 Beaches 73 Sandy areas other than beaches 74 Bare exposed rock 75 Strip mines,quarries,and gravel pits 76 Transitional areas 77 Mixed barren land 8. Tundra 81 Shrub and brush tundra 82 Herbaceous tundra 83 Bare ground tundra 84 Wet tundra 85 Mixed tundra 91 Perennial Snowfields 92 Glaciers 9. Perennial snow or ice
120 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 5.2 ( pp. 118–19 ) 39.9500° N, 75.1667° W, Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Grga Basic, Anderson Land Classification System, 2014. 5.3 51.0000° N, 0.1000° W, Thomas Milne, Milne’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster, 1800. A growing interest in human influence on the environment led to new types of map products, including those focused on land use. Considered one of the first true land-utilization maps, the Milne plan distinguishes seventeen types of land use (including arable land, meadows, market gardens, hop fields, pastures, marsh lands, nurseries, orchards, paddocks, parks, and woods) by key letters. The classification system used on the map focuses on agricultural and cultural landscapes and includes faint watercolors, printed textures, and indexical letters. 5.4 40.6905° N, 74.0165° W, Michel Desvigne Paysagiste, Governor’s Island Summer Park, 2007. Michel Desvigne Paysagiste’s design for the Summer Park on Governor’s Island in New York is a gridded mosaic of fields, forests, and water infrastructures. The design and its representation are deliberately layered and variegated. Taking inspiration from aerial imagery, the plan plays with the patchwork grain of the agricultural field set against the fluvial cuts and treed ribbons. There is an interaction between the land uses confined within the rectilinear structure and those that are connective and extend across and beyond the cellular boundaries. 5.5 ( p. 122 ) 35.6825° N, 139.7521° E, Ranzan Takai, Man'en kaisei O-Edo oezu, 1860. Scale: approx. 1:10,000 (shown at half size). This Edo-period map, a hand-colored woodblock print, illustrates land use, ownership, and building occupation. The tones of pink and gray denote use, while ownership is indicated with text and symbols, including family crests for larger, private homes. The map is designed to be viewed from all sides, with no top or bottom, and therefore no singular orientation for the text. The characters respond to the form of the building, the blocks, and the city while the information reveals the social strata embedded within the urban life. Through the mapping of use and ownership, class distinctions are evident. In 2008, Google made some Edo-period historical maps available as a layer, controversially revealing past social occupations—including areas dominated by the discriminatedagainst Burakumin class—within the contemporary city. While the overlay of past and present makes change evident, the alignment of geographic and social information points to the potential of mapping as a discriminatory practice. 5.6 ( p. 123 ) 35.6825° N, 139.7521° E, Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, Topographic Map (Tokyo), 1990. Scale: 1:10,000 (shown at half size). Building on the Edo period, when intense governmentally driven cartographic efforts attempted to describe the productive potential of property across the country, Japanese cartographers continue to produce maps with great levels of precision. Contemporary city maps are richly coded, including zoning, ownership, and material information atop the infrastructure and built forms of the city. The level of detail gives a clear grain and texture to the depiction of the city. As the complexity and population of the city has increased, the city map no longer has the capacity to show individual ownership information, but each building and parcel are still drawn and coded for material and use.
LAND CLASSIFICATION 121 PERMANENT INFRASTRUCTURE—WOODLANDS Mature woodland Woodland plantations dense Woodland plantations less dense Woodland plantations thin Succession experimentation PERMANENT INFRASTRUCTURE—WATER Marine water elements Irrigation elements Water retention reservoirs Water filtration Gray water filtration
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LAND CLASSIFICATION 123
124 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 5.7 46.9608° N, 1.9944° E, Michel Desvigne Paysagiste, Issoudun District, 2005. Through survey, visual analysis, isolation, and extraction, a landscape structure emerges for Issoudun, France, a set of “fragmented slabs” that form potential sites of future development. The project reorganizes the spaces on the periphery, creating a logical, deliberate, and readable transition from urban core to farmland. The pair of plans shows the radial pattern of available lands, first alone, in red to highlight these “invisible spaces,” and then as part of a continuous landscape with proposed connective corridors. Through drawing, an intrinsic, hidden structure is extracted from the perforated base condition, allowing a different peri-urban identity to surface. 5.8 Stan Allen, The New American City, 2013. The New American City is a proposal for a dense, compact, urban settlement, which incorporates food production, minimizes ecological footprint, and operates independently within the one-mile grid. Taking Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City as its precedent and the Jeffersonian grid as its context, the New American City is prototypical, scalable, and adaptable to local geographical and topographical conditions. Terrain is implied through diagonal parkways, campus wedges, interior gardens, fields, and groves. The city has a mosaiclike quality whereby the overall structure is clear but the units have great variability.
LAND CLASSIFICATION 125 PLAN 1. outdoor market 2. parking with greenhouse roof 3. cottages 4. little factories—dwellings above 5. factory assembly 6. main arterial, replacing the present railway 7. little farms 8. professionals and clinics 9. schools 10. neighborhood guest houses 11. interior park 12. music garden 13. baths and physical culture 14. farmer’s market 15. parkway 16. schools 17. street-in-the air residences 18. courtyard housing 19. block-tower 20. superblock of houses 21. double-houses 22. villini 23. sports fields 24. orchards 25. allotment gardens 26. stables, paddock and track 27. athletic clubs 28. stacked villas 29. small farms 30. light manufacturing 31. cultural institutions 32. civic center/county seat 33. university campus 34. scientific and agricultural research 35. arboretum 36. botanical gardens 37. zoo 38. hotel 39. country club 40. sanitarium 41. artisan incubator 42. little clinics 43. hotel 44. little clinics 45. little apartments 46. creamery 47. school of small children 48. outdoor cinema 49. forest cabins 50. double houses 51. educational center 52. hospital 53. commercial strip 54. open-block towers, mixed-use 12,500 inhabitants per square mile 75% open space
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LAND CLASSIFICATION 127 5.9 30.6188° N, 82.3210° W, United States Geological Service (USGS), Billys Island Quadrangle, 1966. Early orthophotos, used in USGS quadrangles, allowed for the description of flat topography. These landscapes eluded description by the scale and interval of the topographic line but came to life through the photographic image. The first published images were of the Okefenokee Swamp in the 1960s, pictured here. As Rupert B. Southard, chief of the Topographic Division of the USGS, explained, the new maps were revelatory “because there are few contours, there is a low density of cultural features and the standard maps show almost nothing but the marsh symbol pattern.”1 —— 1John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 279.
128 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 5.10 32.9631° N, 115.4876° W, Claude Johnson, Leonard Bowden, and Robert Pease, Agricultural Land Use, Imperial Valley All Vegetables and Specific Crops: Alfalfa, 1969. Remote-sensing data liberated the surveyor from the ground while making the holistic view of the landscape readily accessible. The image from above—and its translation into map form—continues to fascinate. Now quotidian, the ability to document a landscape by interpreting aerialphotographs was revolutionary for the University of California agronomists studying crops and crop disease in the Imperial Valley. ALL VEGETABLES AGRICULTURAL LAND USE IMPERIAL VALLEY AGRICULTURAL LAND USE IMPERIAL VALLEY
LAND CLASSIFICATION 129 5.11 38.5000° N, 75.6667° W, Carl Steinitz, Computer Mapping and the Regional Landscape, A Forest Density; B Areas for Conservancy, 1967. Led by landscape architect Carl Steinitz, the mapping of Delmarva Peninsula was a joint effort of landscape architecture and planning students at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Using the tools and processes developed by the Laboratory for Computer Graphics, the students produced a set of maps designed to determine locations suitable for development. The deterministic and positivistic exercise was facilitated by the availability of geographical data and the ability to code this information with predetermined values. Two maps are shown here. The first, of forest density, is descriptive, produced simply from aerial imagery as a base layer to project where possible. The second is an aggregation of multiple types of data mapped with different weighted values—high soil quality (+3), high wildlife potential (+1), high forest density (+1), and high shoreline indentation (+1)—to yield optimum areas for conservation. The maps use a combination of symbols to create different monochromatic tones that mark the range of data values. DELMARVA DELMARVA
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LAND CLASSIFICATION 131 Vegetables Nuseries Anonna Avocado Banana Carambola Citrus Guava Jack Fruit Lime Longan Lychee Mamey Sapote Mango Mixed Grove Papaya Passion Fruit Sapodilla Legend Vegetables Nurseries Anonna Avocado Banana Carambola Citrus Guava Jack Fruit Lime Longan Lychee Marney Sapote Mango Mixed Grove Papaya Passion Fruit Sapodilla LEGEND 5.12 25.7216° N, 80.2793° W, Valerie Imbruce, Agricultural Biodiversity Study, Florida, 2004. Agricultural ecologist Valerie Imbruce—using data from the University of Florida—maps the distribution of species in small-scale productive plots in the Miami area. The array of tropical fruits, vegetables, and ornamental plants points to the diversity of agricultural practice on the urban periphery. The colorful coding highlights the exuberant nature of the mapped species, while the contrasting hues highlight the new pattern of spatially heterogeneous urban agriculture.
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LAND CLASSIFICATION 133 5.13 43.6396° N, 79.3800° W, Wallace McHarg Roberts & Todd (WMRT), Environmental Resources of the Toronto Central Waterfront, 1976. After the issuance of the seminal 1964 Plan for the Valleys, WMRT became known for their environmental planning expertise. WMRT, under the direction of landscape architect Narendra Juneja, prepared an extensive environmental synthesis study of the Toronto Central Waterfront in 1976 to guide the city’s future development efforts along 5.14 39.9100° N, 116.4000° E, Turenscape, Let Landscape Lead Urbanism—Growth Planning for Beijing, 2008. Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, through his firm Turenscape and his teachings at Peking University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has advanced ecological planning methods to develop ecological security plans and guides to development both in the Beijing area and across China. Geospatial data is layered to reveal underlying the waterfront. The team collected extensive data on the environmental context relating to climate, air quality, noise, geology, physiography, hydrology, sediment, vegetation, wildlife, and land use. This data was weighted based on its effects—direct and indirect—on the quality of urban life. This resulted in an extensive matrix equating environmental resource with social objectives. The matrix was translated into a series of maps describing the air, land, water, and life of the city. spatial relationships between the built, impermeable, and landscape spaces within the city. Land uses are evaluated and classified into low-, medium-, and high-security areas based on their performance related to long-term water management, resilience against geological disaster, biodiversity, cultural heritage, and recreation potential. Area at lower security Area at medium security Area at higher security Built-up area River and Water Roads Area at lower security Area at medium security Area at higher security Built-up area River and Water Roads
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LAND CLASSIFICATION 135 5.15 37.6374° N, 122.3601° W, Stamen Design, Map Stacks, 2013. Stamen Design is dedicated to increasing the quality of cartographic representation in digital maps, maps that are designed to be interactive, multiscalar with multiple zoom levels, user manipulated, and seen onscreen. Stamen uses OpenStreetMap data to create maps and offer a simple, user-friendly, free, readily available mapmaking Web interface. The company offers maps with three representational styles: the Toner (a high-contrast black-and-white map), the Terrain (featuring shaded relief and natural land-classification colors), and the Watercolor (a map with raster-effect area washes, organic edges, and paper texture). The MapStack interface allows for variation within a controlled representational environment, catering to the desires of the amateur cartographer. 5.16 37.6374° N, 122.3601° W, LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio, Bayou Bienvenue, 2010. This image layers a number of restoration and protection strategies proposed for the eastern portions of greater New Orleans, with a primary focus on the St. Bernard Parish Central Wetland Unit, indicated in green. The drawing codes the strategies—as projected land uses—including sedimentdiversion tactics in blue, wastewater treatment and resulting cypress forest regeneration in radiating dashed white lines, and relocated and densified neighborhood development away from the marshlands in yellow. Corridor developments are shown with solid white lines. The drawing combines data with color-coded line work, fills, and raster imagery to render a complex and dynamic marsh environment.
A representation of space, often urban, that uses a fill or poché to show the relationship between built structure and fabric. CHAPTER 06 FIGURE-GROUND
137 F igure-ground is a binary method that affords a clear and powerful spatial reading of the landscape. The separation of object from field underlies all cartographic and design drawings. While a figure can represent anything, the most fundamental figure-ground relationships in design and cartography include three oppositions: landmass versus water, landform versus flat ground, and built structure versus urban fabric. This chapter focuses on the latter, as a reductive yet revealing form of land-use division. Devoid of lines, figure-ground depends on the perception of fills and voids as shapes. The default method for making a figureground drawing is to fill the figure, or built space, dark, often black, leaving the ground empty or white. The opposite—white figure and black ground—is also used. The ultimate legibility of this system depends on how recognizable the figure is to the eye. The Rubin face vase is a classic example of ambiguity in figure-ground. The choice of the two colors also affects the legibility, with black and white being easiest and blue and black significantly more difficult. With regard to urban fabric, the built form is usually legible through a simple poché, and the representational questions are ones of classification, hierarchy, and differentiation. Representation begins with the precise definition of the figure and the ground, followed by a determination as to whether the figure or ground should read more strongly or whether the opposition should be minimized, and ending with a choice whether to embed more information—time, material, structure, use—within the drawing. A conventional figure-ground drawing has only two layers, described by solid fills and voids. However, designers and cartographers have challenged the articulation and number of layers while embracing the conceptual conceit of the figure-ground as a means of distinguishing between different types of built form. The more layers added, the less faithful the drawing is to the binary division of the figure-ground but the more capable it is of articulating gradations and nuance. The figure-ground has been used to support ideological claims, to inform the design of cities, to reframe territories, and to describe urban morphology over time. Because of its representational simplicity and graphic boldness, the figure-ground is persuasive and adaptable. It can stand alone or be embedded with additional layers of information. The traditional blackand-white figure-ground presents a clear but limited reading of the distribution of buildings and nonbuildings within a city. It reveals density but occludes the character of the built fabric—age, height, style,
138 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS and material. It can be augmented to allow for greater differentiation. The human eye can handle more information without losing the clear articulation of building and nonbuilding. City atlases, such as the 1906 Übersichtsplan (general plan) of Berlin, are easily understood through the fundamental distinction between figure and ground. [FIG. 6.16] These atlas plates are incredibly clear, with varying shades of gray for building typologies, pale yellow for roads, pale green for parks and squares, and blue for waterways. The remaining page space is a combination of small pathways and private open spaces that read as a fragmented, rather than connective, tissue. The information is rich, but the immediacy is lessened. The masses and voids, patterns and structures, opportunities and restraints for urban design are not as immediately legible as they would be in a classic figure-ground. However, the increased quantity of information encoded in the coloring allows for a more nuanced and less reductive reading of urban form. In the technique of figure-ground and its derivatives there is a trade-off between wealth of information and clarity of intention. This chapter tests the limits and legibility of the figure-ground drawing, extending from the classic monochromatic poché to the rendered fabric while exposing critical uses of the drawing typology.
FIGURE-GROUND 139 6.1 41.3833° N, 2.1833° E, Jill Desimini, Figure-Ground Techniques: Barcelona, 2014. After Joan Busquets [FIG. 6.6], Andreas Matschenz and Julius Straube [FIG. 6.16], and OMA [FIG. 6.10].
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142 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 6.2 ( pp. 140–41 ) 41.3857° N, 2.1699° E, Robert Gerard Pietrusko, Animation Still, 2012. 6.3 41.9000° N, 12.5000° E, Giambattista Nolli, Nuova pianta di Roma moderna, 1823. Giambattista Nolli first published his Nuova pianta di Roma moderna in 1748, noteworthy for its revolutionary way of measuring and drawing the city. Truly a hybrid of map and plan, the Nolli drawing changed the perception of public space in Rome by drawing the figures of the buildings with the courtyards open, allowing the civic realm to penetrate the street enclosure. For over a century, until 1870, when Rome became the capital of Italy, most maps of Rome were variations of the original Nolli plan, a testament to its representational quality and an indication of its importance in cartographic history.
FIGURE-GROUND 143 6.4 51.5063° N, 0.1271° W, David Grahame Shane, Field Study London, 1971. The work of urban designer and theoretician David Grahame Shane is dedicated to the relationship between urban form and time, to the transient nature of urban morphologies. His Field Study London, a drawing from his thesis work with Colin Rowe at Cornell, reveals the patterns, forms, scales, and codes behind the Georgian estates along the Thames tributary beds. The drawing uses tone and line to describe the organization of the estates relative to the river, uncovering the relationships between hydrology and urban development. 6.5 43.6667° N, 4.6167° N, Bureau Bas Smets, Parc des Ateliers, 2009 Cartographic practice is central to the design methodology of Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets. His projects begin with an act of reproduction, of drawing the existing condition from a particular lens to read the territory anew and to reveal what is visible but unseen. These maps create a customized and specific base for the project. The site is interpreted through drawing and the project continues as an ongoing exchange between drawing and imagining. The two maps of the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, France, isolate the specific landscape elements— the geomorphology of the ancient Roman city, the artificial platform of the Parc des Ateliers, and the vegetation, creating a loop of trees around the site—and articulate the design potential atop the redrawn base maps.
144 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS listed buildings national monuments artisan or suburban houses archaeological remains major open spaces seigniorial houses or townhouses “casalots” or large residences passages rented apartments pre-Eixample houses modern or contemporary buildings special cases special cases modern or contemporary buildings listed buildings national monuments archaeological remains major open spaces artisan or suburban houses seigniorial houses or townhouses “casalots” or large residences rented apartments pre-Eixample houses passages modern or contemporary buildings modern or contemporary buildings special cases special cases 6.6 41.3857° N, 2.1699° E, Joan Busquets, Old Town Barcelona, 2000. Urban designer Joan Busquets has devoted much of his career to the city of Barcelona, as a researcher, a planner, and a designer. His analytical drawings reveal the morphology of the city and describe its transformation through time. His plan of the Old Town, an adaptation of a Nolli-type plan, uses a rich coding system to depict monuments, open spaces, and building typologies of the historic city. Listed buildings and archaeological ruins are drawn as architectural plans, showing the scale and texture of the urban fabric, allowing the viewer to enter the buildings through the drawing. National monuments are hatched over in red, linking them to the similarly rendered contemporary and modern public buildings. The residential fabric is shown in tones of black and gray.
146 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS
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148 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 6.7 ( p. 146 ) 50.9462° N, 5.3633° E, Bureau Bas Smets, Euro Delta, 2010–12. As part of his 2040 Territorial Vision for Brussels, landscape architect Bas Smets explored the extents of the hydrological systems affecting the city. The figure-ground of the large deltaic region to the north shows the relationship between water and urbanization, contrasting the conditions in Holland and Belgium. Smets demonstrates, through the drawing, that both the absence of a strong landscape character reinforces the extensive urbanity and that the flatland is laced with a robust system of rivers and small tributaries. This hydrological network has the potential to reframe the seemingly banal countryside and to produce a strong landscape identity capable of resisting the pervasive urban development. 6.8 ( p. 147 ) 45.4333° N, 12.3167° E, Bernardo Secchi, Paola Viganò, Lorenzo Fabian, and Paola Pellegrini, Water and Asphalt: The Project of Isotropy, 2008. Italian urbanists Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò and their collaborators explore the dispersed qualities of the Venice region, articulating an isotropic condition formed through major infrastructural transformations over time. The cartographic endeavor relates the hydrological and transportation networks to the geological substrate, describing the relationships between water (red) and asphalt (gray) across the territory. The drawing reformulates the image of the region and its public realm, uncovering the logics embedded in the infrastructural systems through a reading of the material conditions of the ground. 6.9 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Drawing of Wiesbaden Street Plan, 1978. Originally published in Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 82, © 1979 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter embrace the binary and celebrate the figureground and the juxtaposition of contrasting images to illustrate a set of design principles. The cover image of their seminal 1978 treatise on urban planning and design, Collage City, a figure-ground of Wiesbaden pictured above, exemplifies the use of the binary. One side of the image is a collection of solids with little void, the other a network of voids peppered with unstructured solids. Through this image and the accompanying text, the authors argue that the city must support both conditions: “the overtly planned and the genuinely unplanned.” For Rowe and Koetter, the figure and the ground should both read as positives within the city, as a continuous, interwoven texture rather than an unrelated positive and negative.
FIGURE-GROUND 149 6.10 25.7833° N, 55.9500° E, OMA, Ras al Khaimah Structure Plans, 2007. OMA and its research counterpart, AMO, were commissioned to create a conceptual plan for a new city in the United Arab Emirates. The plan promotes programmatic diversity while creating flexible areas to negotiate the anticipated population growth. After studying land uses and identifying them by color, OMA created a plan based around key urban functions: residential, community, and industrial. The black-and-white plan is a modified figure-ground of the proposed city. By removing the building fills and filling only the exterior walls, the interior spaces can be read as ground. This structure-based drawing approach provides a different reading of the city, one focused on the occupational similarities of the interior and exterior spaces.
150 CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS 6.11 48.8917° N, 2.2408° E, OMA, La Défense Grand Axes, 1991. The creation of a void—a liberated ground—underlies OMA’s project for the transformation of La Défense. The ground becomes a figure, a central form that evolves over time by selectively removing all the buildings over the age of twenty-five every five years. Key elements are retained—a beautiful courthouse, a park, a station, the Grande Arche, the CNIT, and the Tour Areva. Yet as the void expands, it outweighs the city and becomes a space to imagine a future project, to restructure in support of ongoing urbanization. Through the manipulation of the figure-ground of the city, the image of the city is fundamentally transformed, freeing both the physical ground for design invention and the design mind for unencumbered imagination.