Mapping Hacks

I am the only one of my friends regularly able to walk past a map shop without skipping a beat. And i’d almost managed to walk past “Mostly Maps” in Hay, before doubletaking at what was in the corner of my eye, rushing back and pressing my nose to the window like an urchin on Christmas Eve (which it was, and which i am).

I thought, kids at Stanford work on algorithms for this sort of thing and think they’re hot shit; these are conceptual route maps, focused on transport networks and orienting feature points. The seventeenth century equivalent of routefinding systems; space unscrolling, unscrolling between keystones on the King’s highway.

Ogilby’s maps formed representational conventions for centuries, standardised the mile, and had unknowable impact on the future of the English transport network. Plus, they are a things of beauty.

On the same trip through Hay i finally picked up a copy of The Oregon Experiment - the small “pragmatic participatory planning” volume of the trilogy otherwise comprised by A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building. It doesn’t have the tensile integrity of the other books, and comes off as quite smug. I wonder if it helped nudge the phrase “architecture of participation” into existence. I’d like to write a pile more about this some other time.

Posted in cartographic, historic |

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