nothing deep...just a pretty picture...

Beauty and the Book | Libraries in the digital age raise questions about the place of books. | | Building Types Study | Architectural Record

Beauty and the Book | Libraries in the digital age raise questions about the place of books. | | Building Types Study | Architectural Record

W.T.H. is a Nolli map

Giovanni Battista Nolli, "Nuova Topografia di Roma" (12 sheets, total dim. 1760 x 2080 mm), 1748

The 1748 Nolli map of Rome, regarded by scholars and cartographers as one of the most important historical documents of the city, serves to geo-reference a vast body of information to better understand the Eternal City and its key role in shaping Western Civilization. Giambattista Nolli (1701-1756) was an architect and surveyor who lived in Rome and devoted his life to documenting the architectural and urban foundations of the city. The fruit of his labor, La Pianta Grande di Roma ("the great plan of Rome") is one of the most revealing and artistically designed urban plans of all time. The Nolli map is an ichnographic plan map of the city, as opposed to a bird’s eye perspective, which was the dominant cartographic representation style prevalent before his work. Not only was Nolli one of the first people to construct an ichnographic map of Rome, his unique perspective has been copied ever since.

Detail with the Piazza Navona on the left and the Pantheon on the right

The map depicts the city in astonishing detail. Nolli accomplished this by using scientific surveying techniques, careful base drawings, and minutely prepared engravings. The map's graphic representations include a precise architectural scale, as well as a prominent compass rose, which notes both magnetic and astronomical north. The Nolli map is the first accurate map of Rome since antiquity and captures the city at the height of its cultural and artistic achievements. The historic center of Rome has changed little over the last 250 years; therefore, the Nolli map remains one of the best sources for understanding the contemporary city.

The Nolli map reflects Bufalini's map of 1551, with which Nolli readily invited comparison, however Nolli made a number of important innovations. Nolli reoriented the city from east (which was conventional at the time) to magnetic north, reflecting Nolli's reliance on the compass to get a bearing on the city's topography.


How is a Nolli map different than a figure-ground diagram?

Nolli map on the left and contemporary figure-ground diagram of Rome

Though Nolli follows Bufalini in using a figure-ground representation of built space with blocks and building shaded in a dark poché, Nolli represents enclosed public spaces such as the colonnades in St. Peter's Square and the Pantheon as open civic spaces.

A figure-ground diagram is a two-dimensional map of an urban space that shows the relationship between built and unbuilt space. It is akin to but not the same as a Nolli map which denotes public space both within and outside buildings and also akin to a block pattern diagram that records public and private property as simple rectangular blocks. Two of the biggest advocates of its use were Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter (see their canonical book "Collage City", 1978).

In that sense, the white areas of the Nolli map (all the surfaces one can walk) reveal the extension of the public realm into the buildings of the city. Its significance lies in the fact that it is a very immediate communicator of the "permeable" or "porous" ground levels of the city and the more inaccessible ones. Think for example, what would be the difference of a Nolli map along Newbury St. and Downtown Boston? The Midtown on Manhattan and the Downtown area? How can one understand a bit more of the urban fabric he is asked to operate on through such observations?

Sources: The Interactive Nolli Map Website & Wikipedia


Contemporary examples: 

Shen Fei Lam, map from project "A Subdivided Skyscraper", Diploma 9, AA 2010

Lilith van Assen, Lieke van Hooijdonk and Elsbeth Ronner, "The metamorphosis of Coolsingel, or the benign demolition of the City", TU Delft, Netherlands 2010

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.

Border Protection

U.S./Canadian border, Haskell Library, VT.  (photo via The Center for Land Use Interpretation.)

When claiming that libraries represent a defined realm within public space, we are actually reinforcing the notion that there is some border, however ambiguous it may be, between two worlds: the private and the public.  As access to public knowledge depends less on where you are and more on what type of communication technology you may be using, there is a good chance that the distinctions between the public and the private become less perceptible or less important.  That being said, it is unlikely that we will ever fully dispense with the (perhaps evolutionary) need to erect and maintain thresholds between physical public and private space.

An interesting example of how we are prone to express essentially imaginary lines in space is the public library in Derby Line, Vermont (if you are Canadian, you might prefer to call it the public library in Stanstead, Quebec).  The Haskell Public Library deliberately straddles the U.S./Canadian border.  Here, the cartographic image of “border” is rendered visible directly through the library, running uninterrupted between book carts and dusty periodicals.  This painted line embodies our need to maintain boundaries, even when the functional business of the immediate locale (in this case the library) would continue to operate with or without such overt partitioning.  It turns out that boundary-marking is a manifestation of psychological and cultural needs; it satisfies our need to know we are here while everything on the other side of the line is there.  There are, of course, some practical purposes of visible borders as pointed out by The Center for Land Use Interpretation:

“The line painted on the floor inside the library and opera house is more than just a novelty. Apparently it was required in order to show which portions of the structure and furnishings would be covered by the separate Canadian and American insurance policies.”

Insurance and other mundane issues aside, a library is an environment full of major and minor divisions between a whole range of public and private spaces.  If the modern library is virtually unbounded and thus prone to obscure traditional boundaries  within our public environments, should the architect try to maintain images of those fleeting boundaries through programmatic, graphic, or even more subtle strategies?  Maybe a bold, black line on the floor and walls is completely appropriate on our age of shifting informational and social boundaries.

See BLDGBLOG for a discussion of the Haskell Library in geo-political terms.

ANYTHINK

This is a new library organization idea from Colorado I discovered in Library Journal a couple of months ago. It has sparked a growth in library use in the community. (http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/ljinprintcurrentissue/887538-403/in_the_country_of_anythink.html.csp)

SHAPE

Reflecting back upon the site study I completed this week, shape was initially influenced on immediate contextual surroundings. On Parcel 13 I am drawn to connect the old MBTA entrance with the BAC studio space in the old ICA building. After constructing a nolli plan I feel I need to revisit the massing of the site and reflect a larger context of the way blocks are formed in the neighborhood. I think the central void could, similar to the city blocks in the Back Bay, create additional gathering space for students of different arts to converge and collaborate. In addition to the nolli map, Somol's "12 Reasons to Get back into Shape" defines shape as Boyant, among other things. I think that buoyancy could be particularly interesting on the Parcel 13 site because the buildings are "floating" above the Mass Pike. I have not yet resolved how to incorporate this.