This blog is a research platform organizing projects, examples, and thoughts surrounding the idea of an urban mapping which reads the city as a network of individual activities and relationships in time rather than as a static form. This research looks at the city both from within and from above as kind of urban cat-scan.
One of a series of drawings by Architect Louis Kahn in 1953 of Philadelphia which illustrate the city through the movement, speed, and flow of its vehicles rather than by its physical configuration. Building blocks are simply suggested as a residual space defined via the accumulation of marks which define the traffic flow.
In this living map the city of San Francisco is studied via the trajectories of individual cabs moving through the city. The map is created by these multiple itineraries and also analyzed by an array of artists. Social, economical and cultural tendencies of the city begin to become evident.
An animated and absorbent wall barrier designed by my design studio fieldoffice. The superABSORBER is a new proposal for highway sounds barrier which in addition to absorbing sound pollution will also absorb airborne and light pollution.
This animated diagram done using MAYA conveys the main attributes of the superABSORBER highway wall barrier system. In this project we are using video as a tool to understand the moving forces that affect the design of the wall.
As an ever changing material, the superABSORBER is affected by the daily rhythms of traffic movement that it mediates and exploits as a cinematic experience. This video shows one of the sides that the superABSORBER interfaces – the highway and the neighborhood by the projection of light across and through its surface. The superABSORBER is enlivened by the passing light of the automobile while mitigating this potentially negative by-product of the roadway into an intimate play of light on the side of the residences.
"Immersive's Telemmersion® System is a compact, lightweight, unified camera system. The system generates synchronized, high resolution video streams representing a full-motion spherical world that can be experienced live or in a recorded form."
Immersive Media Corp. signed a contract to license street-level images of North American cities to Google Inc. to create an experience based mapping that you move through. Could this cartography be moving towards the simultaneous representation and reality depicted in Jorge Luis's tale and the Lewis Carroll's tale Sylvie and Bruno?
Martha Skinner is founder of 10^10, co-founder of fieldoffice and assistant professor at Clemson University. She studies our built environment as a delicate ecology using representation methods that visualize the cycles of life in order to more acutely address temporal, social and environmental issues. Her work includes several Living Maps of cities, which include NY A/V and BiCi_N, projects that involve the inhabitants of our cities in their daily routines to affect, in real-time, possibilities for social and environmental change. As the 1999 Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan, Martha developed Notation A/V, a seminar about the merging of drawing and moving image, a methodology she exploits in her work to filter, transmit, capture, and celebrate the intangible qualities of the passing of time with solutions that address the relationships between humans and the ecologies in which they are situated.
Allen, Stan. “Mapping the Unmappable: On Notation.” In Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation
Batty, Michael "Thinking About Cities as Spatial Events", in *Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design l29*, No. 1
Corner, James. “The agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention” in Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove
Cosgrove, Denis. “Carto-City” in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (ed.), Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
De Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. (S. Rendall, Trans.).
Hajer, Maarten and Reijndorp, Arnold. In Search of New Public Domain
Hall, Peter. "Flight Paths." in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (ed.). Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. Vision in Motion
Nuti, Lucia. Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance. In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove
Nuti, Lucia. Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance. In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove
Ross, Rebecca. "Perils of Precision." in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (ed.), Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
Schwarzer, Mitchel. Zoomscape, Architecture in Motion and Media
Tschumi, Bernard, Event-Cities series
Tschumi, Bernard. Manhattan Transcripts
Tufte, Edward. “Multiples in Space and Time” in Visual Explanations
uploading
Vetters, Trui. ‘Night on Earth’: Urban Practices and the Blindness of Metatheory. In The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis
