From "Man with a movie camera" 1929

I'm not a fan of silent movies, but what can I say about "Man with a movie camera" ? That's great, absolutely great. This is an experimental, documentary film from 1929, directed by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. The film depicts the everyday life of these Union Soviet cities: Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev.  

The film has no plot, it's just a record of places, people, situations, objects, even graphic design, the habitat and life of progressive crowded cities, filmed by a man who goes everywhere with a big camera that cant' be hidden. And somebody is recording him for the movie.

As the images have double exposure, one doubts if they are really to be trusted, but the overall impression is that of a progressive country where Communism doesn't show up; everybody is happy, working, enjoying the beach, the games, smiles everywhere.

This is one of the few images of the Communist built environment

An upside down view of a building, think about it! A shot from 1929

What's even more, the film that has not a continuation in scenes, it shows images that are pretty out of the standard in those years: a woman giving birth to a child, half naked women, and lots of surrealist shots.

Needless to say, the camera is everywhere, taking people in surprise and in the most weird places: up in towers, in scaffoldings, in train tracks (let's say in a hole between the tracks), the cameraman is trying to achieve his balance on the doors of a convertible car. It's impossible to avoid smiling while watching the absurd situations. And in the meantime, we enjoy the old cities.

What is interesting is the effort to show a connection between the theatre, the literature and cinema, non existing at that time.

Finally, the camera has a life of its own. It shows up at the theatre, "walking,"  greeting everybody, bowing itself, that's a funny sequence.

Then the airplanes, remember it was between wars, and the faces of emotioned people, at the theatre, of course, watching this " must see" movie.

For further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_with_a_Movie_Camera

Different concepts of maps

Map of the River Nile Estuary by Piri Reis, a 16th century Ottoman Admiral famous for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation)

Medieval Hereford Mapa Mundi

When I was kid, I enjoyed copying two maps of the Nile Estuary from an archaeology book, an edition for kids and teenagers. I loved to make them in India (we called it China) ink, depicting the Egyptian monuments that were part of the map. And the river meanders, ah, they were so beautiful!

Apart from these two maps, I hated maps and geography in general. Why was it? I blame it on my professors, though good ones for those years, it was so easy for them to say ¨buy this map.... with this projection at the kiosk. Then paint in color the provinces of....¨ , or ¨study from page....... to page¨ and all explanations were given in those old huge school maps on the blackboard. Boring, absolutely boring; they are currently sold as ¨vintage.¨ 

Old school maps. Picture from http://www.oldschoolmaps.com/

My school mates and me had never seen a National Geographic magazine in class, I suppose they were not imported to Argentina, we were missing banks of information, pictures, and what we saw on TV, was the old family programs and movies. Nothing cultural that I remember. And in the 60´s we could never have imagined computers at home, and Internet, we began to ¨navigate¨ in 1997, as far as I remember, with the first emails to companies.

Many years after, a colleague of mine was taking courses with me, I was researching on urban morphology and she was analyzing maps. I thought then, what an architect could find in maps. And she opened my eyes, explaining about the different projections, representations, and the philosophical theory implied on them. And I realized how much I was missing in my learning.

Molly Dilworth, Naked City 1, Naked City 2, 2008; acrylic on paper. Dilworth transposed satellite maps of the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles with communications patterns from telecommunications networks and other invisible forces. From artlies.org

A map from Joseph and James Churchman's 1833 volume "Rudiments of National Knowledge, Presented To The Youth Of The United States, And To Enquiring Foreigners" (David Rumsey/DPLA). Oh the Places You'll Go: 38,000 Historical Maps to Explore at New Online Library 

A map of a city. My screen shot from ¨A walk through H¨

A map of ancient ruins depicted in a dove. My screen shot from ¨A walk through H¨

When I began this blog, I´ve also read about psychogeography and their own maps, representing the ¨driftings¨, street wanderings, some of them induced by opium. And I learnt about the artistic side of them. The concepts were reinforced when I was contacted by Phil Smith, founder of Mythogeography; a map can also contain history, mythology, it can have a world of meanings. Finally, I was absolutely delighted to watch the short film ¨A walk through H¨, directed and written by Peter Greenaway, where the maps are paintings, even a pigeon shows the archaeological remains of one of the cities.

At this point, the old school geography teachings were out of my mind and I gave maps a second opportunity. 

Jerry Gretzinger´s imaginary map of Ukrania. 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/jerry-gretzinger-map-ukrania/?mbid=social11683754#slideid-227741

Jerry Gretzinger´s imaginary map of Ukrania. 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/jerry-gretzinger-map-ukrania/?mbid=social11683754#slideid-227741

Today, after years of enjoying different maps representations (or projections), something weird happened to me, and it reminded me all I´ve read about new meanings assigned to objects out of context. I was pinning maps in my Pinterest and in one of the repins, I saw a thumbnail of one of Kevin Lynch´s maps. I began reading the brief reference, the well known story of people creating their own maps of Boston, etc. on their ways to home, to their jobs, etc, walking, always walking.  

¨To study the form of cities, Kevin Lynch asked dozens of people to draw the features and neighborhoods of Boston. He then aggregated the drawings to form a composite map, yielding an archetypical representation of how people view the city.¨

But what I saw at first was a map represented in a ¨shoe¨, let´s say a ¨tennis shoe¨ or ¨zapatilla¨, a model to walk.  And I thought, ¨that is bright! Kevin Lynch has depicted a map of Boston in a shoe, where the borders are the laces, and the red color the design of the modern walking shoes!¨ 

And of course I´ve read and have in my library Lynch´s The Image of the City and Good City Form. And suddenly, it came to me that Lynch hasn´t published any map in the shape of a shoe, that it was all in my imagination, that the Image of the City was from 1960, and it was not Lynch´s intention to play with the maps morphology in an artistic sense, but to analyze the city through them.

Anyway, I leave the idea to my readers, I still see the shoe........

An old poster on Angkor Vat, Cambodia

I´m sharing this poster from Wikipedia, it was designed by Georges Groslier, Paris, 1911.

What took my attention was the depiction of ¨exotic¨ people, instead of the ruins themselves. And I remembered, more or less, at the same time, Los Angeles city was promoted by realtors, during the boom of construction. And they said ¨come and see the exotic Indians and Mexicans.¨ So, people that looked different from Europeans was referred to as a means to get investors and tourists.

Now, this picture from National Geographic.com, that shows the beauty of the ruins in Cambodia:

Ta Prohm Temple, Angkor Wat Photograph by Gray Martin Giant strangler fig tree roots embrace the crumbling Ta Prohm temple at Angkor. Although the forest has overrun this sacred site, it has largely escaped the looting that decimated many of its fellow Cambodian temples.

Great design of maps and land cross sections

Felipe Correa/Somatic Collaborative, The Section as a Tool: A Regional Framework for Alexander von Humboldt’s Avenue of the Volcanoes, 2004.

I am sharing these great maps, land cross sections, cartography designs in general, from the post by landscape professor in Harvard, Jill Desimini: Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary- It´s only my selection, click below to see the gallery in full:

http://places.designobserver.com/slideshow/cartographic-grounds-exhibition/37632/2574/1#slide

Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldt’s Distribution of Plants in Equinoctial America: According to Elevation above the Level of the Sea, 1854.[Courtesy of Harvard Map Collection] 

George F. Becker, Comstock Mine Maps—Numbers IV and V, 1882 [© 2000 Cartography Associates]

STUDIO 09, Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò, Le Grand Paris, The After Kyoto Metropolis, 2009

Matthew Paris, Map of the British Isles, 1250. [© British Library Board]

Alison and Peter Smithson, Cambridge Walks, 1976. [Alison and Peter Smithson Archive, Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University]

Yamashiro no Kuni ezu, 1800. [Courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division]

Zoom of the Yamashiro no Kuni ezu, 1800 (map above)

Eduard Imhof, Karte der Gegend um den Walensee, 1938. .[Courtesy of Alpines Museum der Schweiz, Bern] 

Zaha Hadid, The Peak Leisure Club, Hong Kong, 1982–1983.

NYC´s subways: different maps through the years

 1939

1958

1972

1979

2010

What´s right and wrong about the graphic design for those maps?

¨The most iconic edition remains the most controversial.  Designer Massimo Vignelli’s clean modern lines and bold colors changed the branding of the subway in 1972 and elevated the map to the level of modern art. It also distorts geography. His map lasted just seven years before confused passengers convinced the MTA to replace it. Vignelli still staunchly defends his design, and in doing so, has offered some choice observations about other versions.¨

Keep on reading:

http://transportationnation.org/2012/12/21/vignelli-designer-of-famous-subway-map-defends-his-version-over-these-others-images/