Cartographic Grounds revisits the depiction of geographic morphology as grounds of and for design through a series of foundational representational techniques associated with the two-dimensional depiction of three-dimensional conditions. This necessarily involves a historical and conceptual reunion of the plan and the map. In light of the ascendance of “mapping” and data visualization in design culture in recent decades, and the privileging of abstract forces and flows, Cartographic Grounds reimagines the projective potential of cartographic practices that afford greater proximity to the manifestation and manipulation of the ground itself. The cartographic strategies depicted here offer an instrumental array for describing various conditions: subsurface, temporal, aqueous, and terrestrial. These strategies are organized in a series of ten chapters: sounding/spot elevation, isobath/contour, hachure/hatch, shaded relief, land classification, figure-ground, stratigraphic column, cross section, line symbol, and conventional sign. These ten historical cases are at once analytical and projective, precise yet speculative. Taken together, they form a rich symbolic language capable of describing existing and imagined grounds for the landscape imaginary.
The mapping and visualization of data in design culture has changed the way architects, landscape architects, and urban designers communicate ideas about buildings and landscapes. Projects are supported by the widespread availability of physical and cultural data, and the translation of this data into visual documentation is now a ubiquitous component of the design process. The trajectory of representation—of concept and context—has moved from the material and physical description of the ground toward the depiction of unseen and often immaterial fields, forces, and flows. This has resulted in an important critique of geographical determinism within design culture, privileging, however, the intangible over the material conditions of the site. Between these two schools of thought—the purely geographic and the freely abstract—is a representational project that merges spatial precision and cultural imagination. Herein lies the projective potential of cartographic practices that afford greater connection with the ground itself, making present and vivid the landscape, as it exists and as it could be, both to the eye and to the mind. The approach aspires to reconcile the precision and instrumentality of the plan with the geographic and territorial scope of the map.
Our understanding of the world is increasingly informed by the availability of data. As the complexity of available information increases, greater pressure is placed on the clarity of visualizations for effective communication. Robert Klanten et al. argue that “diagrams, data graphics, and visual confections” are the new tools to “understand, create, and completely experience reality.”1 However, despite Klanten’s assessment, the potential for overreliance on data-driven design can be equally problematic. Design projects ought to be well researched and informed by relevant information while maintaining a critical stance toward the origins, collection, analysis, and visualization of the investigation. Information graphics often are not, in fact, enough to inform the conceptual and spatial development of a project. Instead, data collection and presentation are often disembodied and separated from lived experience and thus divorced from the geographical terrain; they are depicted apart from the ground condition through floating icons, decontextualized structures, and stylized environments. These visualizations too often lack imaginative or projective potential and are used to determine the outcomes of existing conditions or forecast predictions based on patterns and algorithms rather than imagining—and visualizing through drawing—alternative futures. Yet this data can be alluring, both in content and form. It is all too often a crutch for design, eliminating speculation and agency, while supporting a methodology that looks for projects to emerge out of an illusory objectivity.
Through the recovery of cartographic practices capable of envisioning complexity as it intersects with the surface of the earth directly, data can be realigned with geographic fidelity. Topographical maps display a rich array of information—elevation, routes, built structures, land classification—but without the loss of spatial qualities, human associations, relative location, and material form. Maps are defined broadly here by three distinguishing characteristics they share with the plan: projection, scale, and symbolization.2 Two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional models translate physical space into a flattened, measured, reduced form where lines and signs stand for objects and uses. Together, projection, scale, and symbolization allow for the synthesis of data and the compression of information without decontextualization from the built environment.
Maps are too easily mistaken for objective depictions of a geographical condition, and their complexity often obscures the fact that they are, in fact, distortions. Their uses, limitations, and subjectivity must be understood and respected. Distortion can stem from the underlying data, editorial choices, and representational method. Maps utilize a set of malleable yet rigorously defined representational techniques capable of persuasion, description and, above all, projection.
Often as a foundation to intervention, the map—whether it is of networked relationships or a geographically precise location—precedes the plan. The plan, both as an idea-driven spatial strategy and a projective drawing, is forced to respond to the map. This dichotomous and sequential practice has limitations. Instead, the realignment of map and plan as equally projective, precise, detailed investigations allows for a smooth, informed, and nonlinear process. The base material and the project documentation are not separate entities. This is not to say that the project is geospatially or site determined but rather that the making of the map is analogous to the making of the plan.
Mapping in design culture has been enhanced and even supplanted by data-driven research, yet the map remains one of the main tools of documentation, though its proximity to the physical properties of the surface of the earth has been de-emphasized. The production of data-dependent drawings by designers has resulted in a distancing from the ground, scale, and materials of the métier and a loss of spatial precision at the human scale. The plan—as a spatially precise drawing of a grounded, material, and topographically rich landscape—has been unseated, rather than enriched by, the complexity of available information. Seen as antiquated, static, and allied with the “master plan,” the plan has been deemed incapable of addressing the dynamic relationships and spatial complexity of design in a globalized context. It could be argued, however, that a reconsideration of the plan as a typological drawing that can express the surficial and spatial qualities of the earth is necessary to complement the complex systemic diagrams that point to the underlying social, economic, and political drivers. Grounding is necessary—and the conceptual framework and representation surrounding the spatial manifestations must match the intricacy and deliberation of the systemic thinking. This implies a greater dedication to the means of drawing as well as a return to visual perception, legibility, and the veracity of the work.
The distinction between spatial visualization of nongeospatial data, cartographic representation driven by advanced systems of projection and symbolization, and speculative design drawing in planar projection at the scale of the map is fundamental. Before elaborating on the advantages and limitations of the overlaps between these approaches, several terms require clarification: the topographic map, the plan, the diagram, the aerial image, and the legend.
The topographic map is a class of general maps that tacitly describe a variety of physical phenomena at large scales (SEE NOTES ON SCALE). The scope of a topographic map once reflected the known observations of the cartographer, or the scale of human perception. It is now a hybrid practice, reliant on highly accessible data, augmented and verified through the personal collection of information and ground truthing. These maps can be distinguished from geographic maps, which used distant means to describe the entire world;3 from topological maps, which ignore scale and geographic location, like a subway map; and from thematic maps, which focus on a single characteristic, often geolocating statistical information. Weather and census maps are common examples. The topographic map, like its counterparts, does not resemble the land itself, but is a flattened representation coded with information illustrated by lines, colors, textures, and conventional signs. It is a constructed depiction of a piece of the surface of the earth (or the sky or another planet), showing the distribution of physical features, with every representational element corresponding to an actual geographical position, following a fixed scale and projection. Information is compressed, edited, and filtered, as well as codified to promote legibility. A topographic map requires a legend, and the act of reading a map requires a back and forth between this key and the drawing. In its final form, the topographic map offers a precise reading of landform, material, and occupation at a humanly accessible scale. It allows for immersion, through which the landscape can be seen, imagined, and ultimately designed.
The plan is a representation of a design or a proposal. It is drawn at a relatively large scale—rarely exceeding 1:10,000—except when denoting broad context or location. By definition, the plan is a projection of a three-dimensional space onto a horizontal plane or surface, though this distinction is of less importance than its purpose as a “directive document that serves as a guide for some action in the future.”4 The plan is a view of the landscape, used to show the relationships between elements as well as the total expression of those parts. It is an abstraction that often favors geographic and geometric coherence but can be embedded with human perception and experience. Like the map, it requires skill in drawing and reading to understand the phenomenological and atmospheric qualities of the landscape. Limited in its ability to express the temporal and dynamic, the plan—as with the map—often expresses one place in one view at one moment in time. It is most revelatory as a compression and notation of a larger spatial idea that can transcend pattern and two-dimensional composition to engage the three-dimensional environment. The plan, then, becomes a generator to envision and make space, a tool to project, design, speculate, imagine, and propose what is possible.
Diagram is a broad term, existing across disciplines, formats, and intentions as a means to compress and reduce information into a readily comprehensible visual. It is an abstract illustrative figure used to describe a scheme, a statement, a definition, a process, or an action, free from representational and typological bounds.5 In design and cartography, the diagram can take the form of a reductive plan or map—maintaining some spatial fidelity while further generalizing and editing information. But unlike the plan and the map, the diagram is defined by its visual accessibility and is not restricted by convention. Instead, it is a way to express ideas, capture process, and explore “the deployment of blobs and splatters to circumvent precision.”6 The diagram has both analytical and generative applications and is widely deployed across drawing type and content. It embraces speculation, explanation, and autonomy at the cost of detail, exactitude, and completeness.
By contrast, the aerial photograph is synoptic in its grasp, where editing is achieved through frame selection, filter application, and scale. From its advent in the mid-nineteenth century, aerial imagery offers a revelation of spatial order at work—road layouts and urban structures, mountain morphologies, vegetative patterning—that changed the face of mapmaking. The photographs operate both as base material and as a viewpoint previously only approximated through three-dimensional modeling of the landscape. Early cartographers were forced to imagine and construct the view from the sky. Contemporary cartographers can see it and use it. The aerial photograph is complicit “with the map as a modern tool of instrumentality, surveillance, and control, useful for exposing hidden relationships between cultural and environmental processes while establishing new frames for future projects.”7
The aerial photograph can be distinguished from the map as a framed view rather than an edited depiction. Often relegated to base information, the aerial image underlays the designed plan or the cartographic map, mined for its information and manipulated to add hierarchy to seemingly neutral content. The image can be altered through the construction of tolerances—by setting the range of the visible spectrum—or through manual manipulations and tracings. Its ubiquity has undermined its effectiveness as an image; the views and patterns no longer astound, and its precision is taken for granted. In the 1960s, the United States Geological Service published early photogrammetry of marshes in lieu of quadrangle vector maps (SEE NOTES ON SCALE), as the aerials allowed for flat landscapes to register cartographically. [FIG. 5.9] The latest series of quad maps have aerial photographs underlaying vector line work, whose production is enabled by the aerial imagery. The photographs are precise—with given projections and scales—but they are not projective. As representations, they are informational rather than speculative. The aerial does not have blank spaces or depict phenomena through conventional signs. It is represented as a complete image without intentional abstraction (except in its artistic form), explicit information reduction (the deception is clearly masked), or symbolization.
A legend or key is required for the legibility of a topographic map, is often included with a plan drawing, sometimes accompanies a diagram, and is rarely seen with an aerial image. As an explanation and amplification of the symbols and conventions used on a drawing, the legend describes the ingredients of making. The choice of symbolic language defines the character of the representation and its constituent parts, and from those symbols and conventions, the elements of the landscape are revealed. These are then used to construct both the defining relationships and the resultant whole. By inclusion and omission, the determination of what to include on the key mirrors what makes it onto the drawing. The legend requires upfront consideration, regardless of whether it is set first or extracted ex post facto. The first map legends appeared on ancient Egyptian maps in 1200 BCE, but European cartographers did not adopt the convention until the later Middle Ages.8 The complexity of the key and its stylistic qualities reflect the era, genre, intention, and visual qualities of the map or the plan. Navigational charts have entire books devoted to the depiction and explanation of cartographic symbols required for safe maneuvering across the landscape [FIGS. 10.8–10.13], whereas the figure-ground is generally legible without the inclusion of a key. [FIGS. 6.9, 6.10, 6.12]
While the legend is often consigned to the corners of a map or plan, or to the front matter of an atlas or drawing set, this marginalization belies its significance. Without the key—both physically and conceptually—the level of information would be compromised, the representational decisions underplayed, and the richness of the reading of the ground lessened. The legend allows for visual diversity and abstraction. Materials are coded and thus not required to be rendered realistically or accurately reproduced. Phenomenological qualities that affect spatial perception can be layered on top of physical properties. A temporal dimension can be added to an otherwise static representation through the expression of existing and proposed, age of construction, or historical events. The legend brings a subjective character to the drawing and, by association, to the landscape itself. Through characters, words, line types, signs, and pictograms the imagination is stirred. The added necessity of translation—the perceptual gap between the space and its presentation—leaves room for invention. The legend, as the embedded, distilled language of the map, is celebrated herein as the means to construct a culturally specific and spatially precise vision.
The topographic map and the plan share two distinguishing characteristics: spatial fidelity and projective potential. They use historically rigorous, mathematically based drawing conventions to represent physical landscapes. Both rely on representational rather than contextual abstraction, moving away from the aspatial renderings of networks and systems and toward the geographic rendering of concrete elements: lines reference thicker, scalable linear elements found in the landscape. Notational systems of symbols are tied to geographical entities. Data is grounded rather than internally connected—as is often the case in representations of food webs, airline routes, and social networks, with their abstracted lines floating above a field of black or white, connecting symbols and pictures. Data points are related to spatial properties. Habitats are spaces characterized by altitude, topography, hydrology, and vegetation rather than decontextualized images of stylized animals, forests, and mountains compressed in space and time. Airports are physical entities with measurable dimensions, rather than places where flow lines cross and aggregate. Popular destinations have spatial characteristics and descriptions that extend beyond the peaks in a datascape indicating a location of frequent check-in. The data may reveal spots of interest and intensity, but the plan describes grounded, physical properties.
The potential exists in the exploration of techniques that allow for the merging of data with the depiction of the built environment by showcasing examples of maps and drawings that describe complexity and context. For example, a stratigraphic column, a visual device that accompanies a geological map and is used to describe the relative vertical locations of rock units, could be considered data visualization. But the data visualized is locally specific and linked to the depth and composition of Earth’s surface. Plans and maps do display data (topography, land use, routes, and navigational information), but the information is linked to the places being drawn and, most importantly, is not stripped of its context. The data relates to the structure, material, and phenomenological aspects of the built environment.
Geographical information has been central to the development of digital representation in design, and the Harvard University Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, housed in the Graduate School of Design, has supported these early environmental-planning projects. Landscape professor Carl Steinitz used geospatial data to aggregate base layers in his 1967 Delmarva studio. Topography, land cover, and soil maps, rendered with dot grids, approximated a continuous landscape that led him to question the need for vector line work to describe terrain. [FIG. 5.11] This new data output rendered an alternative landscape reading as well as a method for determining the suitability of different development types. Similarly, the Scottish landscape planner Ian McHarg, in his seminal 1969 book Design with Nature, devised a system that depended heavily on geospatial data to codify and intervene in the landscape. McHarg relied on the map—and the layers embedded within it—while rejecting the plan as a formal device of predetermined geometries set apart from the workings of the world. The making of maps was essential to McHarg’s process, as a means to reveal relationships and determine locations appropriate for future development. The process was deterministic, relying on data as truth, and underplaying the unexpected, experiential, and intuitive.
If these projects from the 1960s and 1970s separated the map from the plan and recognized the importance of geographically specific data for expanding the purview of landscape practice, the mapping agendas of the 1990s divorced the map from the ground. In James Corner’s influential 1999 essay, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention,” mapping is freed from its close alliance with the ground, allowing for multiple spatiotemporal readings and contexts to emerge. The mapmaker is given the tools to construct context—and mapping is no longer thought to be a tool of description or representation, but rather an instrument to produce ideas and actions. The explicit goal is not to undermine cartographic precision but to expand the methodological potential or agency of the practice. The ambition is admirable, but the expanded context has generated an unintended looseness to mapping in design culture.
Cartographic Grounds argues for a realignment of the plan and the map within globalized design practice whereby the rigorous practices of cartography and the precise conventions of the plan allow complex, coded data-rich drawings to read again as representations of the spatial qualities of the terrain. The move is away from generalized and inaccessible representations and toward specific, immersive depictions of the ground plane. The morphological and material characteristics are rediscovered through the techniques of cartography: from the 1:25,000 topographic map (contour) to the 1:5,000 city plan (figure-ground) to the 1:2,500 walking itinerary (line symbol) to the 1:300 ground-cover planting plan (hachure). The projective drawing is enriched through precision, proximity, and visual clarity.
The parallel between maps and plan drawings is not a new idea, but one that deserves contemporary reconsideration to bring together the meticulous detail of cartography, the prevalence of data, and the ambition of design. Through a revival of the critical craft of drawing and an emphasis on the precision, specificity, and invention found across these disciplines, there is potential to reengage the terrain and influence the way designs are enacted.
While there are no absolute standards or conventions in cartography, there are logics, systems, and precise techniques for describing the ground that are capable of transcending scales—from the body to the territory—and materials—from the aqueous to the terrestrial. Fifty years ago, cartographers Eduard Imhof and Hal Shelton reacted against loose drawing practices and pushed for the careful rendering of terrain, the foundational layer of many maps and landscape plans. Their painting, like maps, eliminated visual confusions, which included the arbitrary use of the color blue to represent the flatness of terrain—producing mirages in the desert—or harsh, definitive cartographic lines representing boundaries that are absent in the landscape. Imhof and Shelton developed alternative shading, coloration, and coding practices capable of reflecting the light and material qualities of the earth. As design extends its purview and scale, it is time again to look closely at maps and plans, to uncover their logics, to mine their systems of drawing, to immerse ourselves in their beauty, and to embrace their projective qualities. Cartographic Grounds aspires to return design practice to those tools, offering a close reading of landscape organized around ten diverse representational techniques in relation to the challenges of contemporary design culture. Together, they project the landscape imaginary.
1Robert Klanten et al., eds., Data Flow: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design (Berlin: Gestalten, 2008).
2Mark S. Monmonier, “Maps, Distortion, and Meaning,” Association of American Geographers Resource Paper 75-4 (1977).
3P.D.A. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980).
4Marc Treib, “On Plans,” in Representing Landscape Architecture, ed. Marc Trieb (London and New York: Taylor and Francis, 2008), 113.
5Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, Move (Amsterdam: UN Studio and Goose Press, 1999).
6Jackie Bowring and Simon Swaffield, “Diagrams in Landscape Architecture,” in The Diagrams of Architecture: AD Reader, ed. Mark Garcia (Chichester: Wiley, 2010), 150.
7Charles Waldheim, “Aerial Representation and the Recovery of Landscape,” in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Theory, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 132.
8Helen Wallis, Arthur Howard Robinson, and Cartographic Association International, Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900 (Tring, Hertfordshire, UK: Map Collector Publications in association with the International Cartographic Association, 1987).