Re-cartographies of Landscape: New Narratives in Architectural Atlases

TLDR: In this article, a critical reading of five different architectural atlases and their construction and design reveals how "re-cartographies" can narrate novel stories about places, and how the cartographic imagination can escape from standard and accepted orthodoxies.

Abstract: This paper explores the potential of a different kind of counter-mapping. It focuses upon a critical reading of five different architectural atlases and argues that their construction and design reveals how ‘re-cartographies’ can narrate novel stories about places. The narrative power of these atlases is traced back to a focus upon relations between phenomena, and a careful consideration of how to map the mutability and dynamism of the built and natural environment. They offer new kinds of selection, classification and symbolisation; deploy hybrid forms to destabilize taken for granted binary distinctions between nature and culture; use montage and juxtaposition to reveal scalar linkages; re-imagine figure–ground relationships to reveal functional city forms and processes; and explore the potential of meta-structures in the relations between different maps in an atlas layout. Taken together, they show how the cartographic imagination can escape from standard and accepted orthodoxies. They also rev...