This week we worked on a mapping assignment. We had a few prompts to focus our thoughts in specific areas which would guide our mapping exercise. Along with this assignments we were to do some readings exposing us to this idea of mapping and the potentials of what can be mapped. In my This American Life audio study, some examples of things that have and can be mapped are: side walks, neighborhoods, smells, touch, taste etc, as per the usual movement paths we so often associate with this word: “mapping”. Mapping, as put by a guest on this audio episode, is a slice of the world. It exposes it’s viewers to one small piece of the experience. Perhaps with many of these small pieces put together, conclusions and understanding of a place can be extracted. The key with mapping is the ability to highlight just enough information, without introducing too much for fear of too much “clutter”, and with it, to draw meaningful ideas and correlations of a given area.
Mapping Articles:
The readings I focused on for this week are as follows – some are followed by bullet point summaries:
1. McHarg, Ian, Design with Nature, Sea & Survival pp. 7-18, A Step Forward p. 31-42.
2. Corner, James. “The Agency of Mapping”, <http://sds.parsons.edu/lab/category/readings/page/2/>.
3. Roger Tracik’s Finding Lost Space Ch. 4 <http://www.arch.ttu.edu/people/faculty/ellis_c/ARCH4000/Trancik%20Chapter%204.pdf>
I did my mapping exercise based on this example. Snap shot scenes mapped out in plan as to their location on the path.
4. Glass, Ira et. al. This American Life episodes 110: Mapping. See images link at the bottom of the page. <http://ww.thisamericanlife.org/
Ignoring everything in the world except focusing excessively on one item. 99.99% of maps have been made in this century. Most people dealt superficially with road maps, but there are all sorts of maps we use each day: television, weather, hearing, parks, activities. Specialized maps include gas lines, waterlines, power lines, sewage lines.
Interviewee 1- Map of the pools of light shown from street lights at night. Maps of traffic movements at night illuminated by the light of the moving cars. Maps of street signs. Maps of pumpkins that on porches in a neighborhood for Halloween correlated with a frequency on the amount of times that house was mentioned in the newsletters over the last year. What he found was that some homes were mentioned no matter who lived in them. By layering these varying component you begin to build and take away an understanding based on that layering. In the pumpkin/neighborhood mapping, it was also concluded that the pumpkins were found at the houses mentioned the most in the monthly newsletters which happened to also be the richest families.
Maps do not give you the answers, maps aid in an interpretation of ideas. You pick the elements that mean the most to and which aid in an understanding of an area. Maps are one small slice of a world. The thing with mapping is, once you acknowledge and recognize a pattern or a map, it’s hard to ignore that recognition. Its like white noise, or a fan blowing in the background – once you bring that specific element to your recognition, it difficult to make it blend into the background again. It has a tendency of staying at the forefront and not “blending” in.
Interviewee 2 – Sounds and it’s affect on your emotions/feelings. Perhaps it can by hypothesized that since a sound is linked to a pitch and pitches can be linked to emotions, the sounds that surround you could inherently conjure feelings of happiness or sadness. Perhaps there is a connections with the low industrial hum of our surrounding industrial city on our daily lives. How much of this is negatively affected this day and age? Positively affected it? What types of pitches and combinations of pitches surround us daily?
Interviewees discuss mapping based on smells: the Electronic nose. Taste and Touch. Touch – lumps and tumorrs which do not exist. You can get distracted and end up mapping inacurate information.
4. Kemph, Petra. You are the City. Interview: http://www.archdaily.com/36404/you-are-the-city-petra-kempf/
Mapping is meant to make something go from complex to simple. It’s to break something dynamic and confusing down into bit to make it digestible and simple to understand. From the reading, “Albert Einstein wrote once that if one is not able to describe complex things in a simple way, one has failed the purpose of communicating altogether.” A lot of the diagramming examples shown in this article are responsive to individual elements of a site very similar to the discover card assignment we had this week.
5. Spirn, Anne Whiston. Reading the Landscape: Photography as Inquiry class http://architecture.mit.edu/class/landphoto/
From the audio interview: “Landscapes tell us stories which is up to us to decipher. It’s not just for pleasure, but also for survival”. An example presented on the signs nature gives to share negativity or strife: the tree with the white flowers bloomed out of seasons. The passersby noticed this and enjoyed the scene this it was a nice ornamental presentation. Instead it was because the tree was suffering. It was blooming in an attempt to pollinate because it was in stress. The following year it died. Lanscapes tell all sorts of stories which can be mapped, but need to then be interpreted to be correctly deciphered and understood. Map nature to understand what it’s telling you. Mapping, in nature or the built environment is a way to help understand a system or an area or a process.
Mapping my Site Location
The first row shows each of the maps that works on individually in the Rose Quarter area. The row below show a layer of these maps in varying combinations. By picking and choosing specific combinations, it makes evident ideas you may not have considered before – such as a reason why people move in the patterns they do and why there are clusters more in some areas than others. Another things to think about, which is not presented here, is how this changes based on weather/time of day/seasons.
The following sketches are taken as views along a path in my site location. Each picture is equipped with a map in the top right showing the location and viewing angle of the picture. The path taken is via bike from steel bridge heading into the Rose Quarter location and ending with a view to the Willamette on North Interstate Ave.
