Shape of Berlin

Berlin in pieces; cartography-based artwork by French artist Armelle Caron (via Landscape+Urbanism)

Christine’s post reminded me of a “shape-related” project that I recently saw online.  The cartography-based artwork by French artist Armelle Caron concentrates solely on the shape of urban blocks.  Taken out of topographic context, a re-ordering of the city blocks with respect to shape and size reveals an underlying organization of scale.  This project might add another dimension to Somol’s concept of the empty shape.  Somol suggests that shape involves itself with the “contextual and situational.”  Caron’s work demonstrates that even without context and situation, shape has its own native order which enables it to relate to other shapes.  The density (or lack thereof) of our urban environments is therefore a product of these many shapes and how they relate to one another to produce context.