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David Gissen

Maps of ethnographic distribution, economic data, and socialdisplacements abound in contemporary works of architec-tural analysis. Explorations of economic free trade areas,new border zones, settlements, slums, and emerging urbanconurbations rely on cartographic techniques, data, andfieldwork to articulate both new forms of architecture andnew positions for architecture. This work advances a moreresearch-based role for architectural theory – often labeled“datascaping” and, more recently, “research architecture” –that is materialized within a set of seemingly realist andpost-theoretical approaches and methods.1 But displaced indiscussions of this and similar recent work are the actualtransdisciplinary alignments taking place in our field asarchitects increasingly chart emerging territories and ana-lyze and crunch economic, social, and ethnic data. I wouldargue that an important feature of what is happening withinthis general turn is a more performative turn toward geo-graphical methods and imagery in contemporary architec-ture. This represents less a wholly new form of practice oran abandonment of a previous generation’s critical discoursethan a new actualization of the conceptual links between thediscipline of architectural theory and geography. Architec-ture has a historically deep, though virtually unexplored linkto geographic theory – a field that examines, among manythings, how difference is produced on the earth. Contemp-orary architectural/geographic engagements extend linksbetween these disciplines that are traceable to at least the 16thcentury. In many ways the current research practice frame-work represents less a form of “post-theory” and more thelate stage of a long project within architectural theory, aproject once about cosmography and, within modernity, thearchitectural concept of territory; and a project worthy of anexamination in tandem with contemporary work.

To explore the contemporary relations between architec-ture and geography we might begin by quickly reviewing thehistory of these engagements in early 16th-century Vitruviantexts; 18th-century works funded by nascent states; and 19th-and 20th-century functionalist/rationalist architectural theory. All of these explorations involve key architecturalengagements of the earth – charting, exploration, mapping –

Architecture’sGeographic Turns

Architect with cross-staff.From Cesare Cesariano,Vitruvius, 1521. All images cour-tesy the author.

1. On the datascape concept see JamesCorner, “Eidetic Operations and NewLandscapes,” in Recovering Landscape:Essays in Contemporary LandscapeArchitecture (New York: PrincetonArchitectural Press, 1999); the best sum-mary of research architecture can befound in Kazys Varnelis, “Is thereResearch in the Studio?” Journal ofArchitectural Education (2007): 11–14.

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and the innovative use of instruments and theory. Within theclassical humanist tradition, one of the most notable worksof architectural theory that elaborated links between archi-tecture and geography is Cesare Cesariano’s translation ofVitruvius into Italian.2 In addition to the innovative text andits evocative illustrations of the birth of fire, primitive dwell-ings, and human proportions, Cesariano included illustrationsthat demonstrated links between architectural theories of per-spectival vision and space and the practice of geographic cos-mography. In both his “chorographic map” of Italy and anillustration of an architect using the geographer’s cross-staff,Cesariano intertwines the role of the architect as perspectivalconstructor and geographic cartographer – projecting hisvision onto sky and earth. This cosmographic concept thatlinked architecture and geography through notions of terres-trial and celestial reflection inspired additional geo-architec-tural tracts in Italian treatises, but would eventually bereplaced with more empirical methods by the 18th century –built around concepts of direct observation and state-spon-sored exploration.3 Eighteenth-century French work linkedarchitecture and geography through the charting and devel-opment of national territories – by Pierre Patte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and others – and through the explorationof new social and artistic realms. The work of Julien-DavidLe Roy is remarkable in this latter respect, particularly hisexplorative ventures in Greece. Le Roy’s The Ruins of theMost Beautiful Monuments of Greece (1758) was intensely car-tographic in its representations of both ruins and the territo-ries within which these ruins were found. The work inGreece involves a literal geographical element that is part ofan emerging international practice of cartographic science.The French were replacing the Dutch as the chief Western

2. The geographic proto-science movingthrough Vitruvian treatises is document-ed in Denis Cosgrove, “Ptolemy andVitruvius: Spatial Representation in theSixteenth Century Texts andCommentaries,” in Architecture and theSciences: Exchanging Metaphors, eds.Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte(New York: Princeton ArchitecturalPress, 2003), 20–51.3. The history of concepts of territory inearly-modern French work can be foundin Antoine Picon, French Architects andEngineers in the Age of Enlightenment(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992).

Map of the Ports of Piraeus,Phaleron, and Munychia. FromThe Ruins of the Most Beau-tiful Monuments of Greece,Claude-Antoine Littret deMontigny, after Julien-David Le Roy, 1770.

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map producers of Europe. The work also contains a meta-phoric conception of the geographical that ties the explo-ration of the world to constant movement (circulation) andthe direct observation of its artifacts while in motion.4

Such links between architecture and geography continuein a more historical mode in the 19th century, primarily asan aspect of modern architectural theory concerned withproblems of historical causality. Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc conjoined architectural and geographic disciplinesthrough Humboldtian and Cuvierian notions of biologicalemergence, documentation, and distribution. Alexander vonHumboldt, the founder of modern geography, observed thedistribution of plant species within specific climatic regions,linking the emergence of plant life to larger bio-regionalprocesses. These radically innovative ideas became part ofthe doctrine of the French Geographic Society, whichHumboldt helped to establish, and his concepts found someexpression in Viollet-le-Duc’s use of maps as contextualmarkers of climatic and social difference, factors he believedinformed the distribution of building practices. Viollet-le-Duc’s geographically inspired work also entailed his exami-nation of the transformations of Mont-Blanc in the FrenchAlps.5 His documentation of Mont-Blanc involved the riggingof instrumentation systems (the “tele-iconograph”) thatspanned geographical and architectural forms of observa-tion.6 Here we see the architectural theorist not only employ-ing geographical concepts and methods, but also practicing asa geographer in documenting natural phenomena. Such effortsthat speak of connections between architecture and geogra-phy specifically, and architecture and science more deeply,extend well into the 20th century with Buckminster Fuller’sdevelopment of the Dymaxion projection of the Earth. Fuller

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4. Information on the geographicalimagination of Le Roy is from RobinMiddleton, “Introduction,” in Julien-David Le Roy, The Ruins of the MostBeautiful Monuments of Greece (LosAngeles: Getty Publications, 2004),137–44.5. See, for example, Eugène EmmanuelViollet-le-Duc, “Architecture,” in TheFoundations of Architecture: Selections fromthe Dictionnaire Raisonné, trans. KennethD. Whitehead (New York: GeorgeBraziller, 1990), 31–102, and Viollet-le-Duc, Mont-Blanc: A Treatise on itsGeodesical and Geological Constitution(London: Sampson Low, 1877). 6. See Paula Young Lee, “The RationalPoint of View: Eugène EmmanuelViollet-le-Duc and the Camera Lucida,”in Landscapes of Memory and Experience,ed. Jan Birksted (London: Routledge,2000), 63–76. I am grateful to MartinBressani, who reminded me of Viollet-le-Duc’s work on Mont-Blanc.

Viollet-Le-Duc, View Takenfrom Pierre-Pontue. From LeMassif du Mont-Blanc, 1876.

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realized a new image of the classical humanist concept thatbuildings and world could be conflated in a single carto-graphic system.

Contemporary negotiations of the geographical in archi-tecture are partially rooted in earlier efforts, and they alsoreflect particular postwar developments. Contemporarypractices negotiate a range of often conflicting geographicconcepts, including the quantitative-empirical turns of post-war geography, the decisive split between physical andhuman geography, the traditions of radical geography (in-fluenced by such diverse sources as the “psycho-geography”of the Situationists and the Marxist geographers DavidHarvey and Neal Smith), and key absorptions of urban geo-graphic concepts in the 1960s by Aldo Rossi and KevinLynch. While specific cultural-geographical methods directlyinfluenced historical projects at architecture schools such asBerkeley or UCLA in the 1970s and 1980s (see the work of J. B. Jackson, Denis Cosgrove, and Paul Groth as examples),evidence of a specific geographic school directly impactingcontemporary architectural design theory is much harder toassess. Within the last 10 years, a looser set of geographic con-cepts that moves through architectural efforts can be found interms such as data and field, the term scape (as absorbed bysocial scientist Arjun Appadurai), and something that is sim-ply termed research, which incorporates maps and data tablesas dominant forms of synthesis and presentation.7

The ideas of “datascape” and “research architecture” arearguably the most cutting edge of emerging architectural/geographical entanglements. Datascape (the admittedly morealluring but less-used term) and research architecture oftenpresent a performative use of geographical research methods.Demographic information and space are linked in a new typeof territory that is infused with the image of data – a type ofsite charted by a particular data-driven architectural project.In an article reviewing these contemporary developments in

7. See Winy Maas, “Datascape,” in FARMAX: Excursions on Density, eds.Winy Maas et al. (Rotterdam: 010Publishers, 1996), James Corner, “EideticOperations and New Landscapes,” andKazys Varnelis, “Is There Research in theStudio?”

Buckminster Fuller, DymaxionProjection of the Earth, 2006.Open source version based on1946 version.

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the work of Rem Koolhaas/OMA and MVRDV, James Cornerprovides a summary of the use of geographical forms of dataand maps in contemporary architectural practice: These are revisions of conventional analytical and quantitativemaps and charts that both reveal and construct the shape-forms offorces and processes operating across a given site. . . . Where theydiffer from the quantitative maps of conventional planning is intheir imaging of data in knowingly rhetorical and generativelyinstrumental ways. . . . The artistry lies in the use of the tech-nique, how things are framed and set up. There is no assumptionof truth or positivist methodology.8

Corner recognizes how this contemporary work actuallymarks a suspended empiricism – simultaneously driving andmocking the driving of design by accurate geographicalinformation and imagery. Other authors of this data-drivenapproach – better placed under the broad umbrella ofresearch architecture – often suggest that their work uncov-ers an overwhelming cache of seemingly unprocessable data,revealing staggering levels of (often frightening) statisticalinformation.9 Thus, while not disarticulating the importanceof data, specific conclusions and evaluations based on the dataare often delayed or suspended. Because both forms of thesepractices thrive on the visible use of geographical methods ofacquiring data (versus a more central use of critical theory)they have been associated with a “post-theoretical” approachto architecture.10 However, they are anything but. This is notonly because they emerge out of practices situated deep withinarchitectural theory – the geographical project of architec-tural theory – but also because geography is a deeply theoret-ical discipline. There is no “post-theoretical” project that isalso at one and the same time driven by cartographic imagesand data.

Contemporary geographical methods in architecturaldesign raise a series of significant issues that touch on, butare not solely about, interdisciplinarity, the presence orabsence of theory, or the quality of statistical data. As wehave seen, in the 19th century and mid-20th century, archi-tects who explored geographical concepts happened to makecartographic representations, but what is significant aboutcontemporary work is that the map is becoming more domi-nant. Data- and research-driven practices operationalizemaps as they explore issues of population distribution, con-gestion, distributions of nature, and economic exchange.The territorial nature of cartography appears to be replacingplans, or even site drawings, as the fundamental conveyor ofa building’s operative strategy – that is, its daily workings.

8. Corner, 165 (emphasis in original).9. See, for example, Keller Easterling,Enduring Innocence: Global Architectureand Its Political Masquerades (Cambridge:MIT Press, 2005) and Fernando Romero,Hyper-Border: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and its Future (New York:Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).Both authors share enormous sympathyfor the inequities their work uncovers,but they often suspend an explicit evalu-ation of the data.10. On post-criticality in recent researchwork see Varnelis; in recent designefforts see George Baird, “Criticality andits Discontents,” Harvard DesignMagazine 21 (Fall 2004/Winter 2005),and Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting,“Notes Around the Doppler Effect andOther Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta 33(2002): 72–77.

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One of the goals in data architecture and research architec-ture is to give the cartographic project a status that rises to, ifit is not equivalent to, the traditional relation between plans,sections, and the architectural image that they often appearto pre- (or partially) determine. Today, buildings and archi-tectural concepts often are being represented as territorialprocesses, and the drawing technique used to represent themis cartographic – that is, geographical in concept. Such a car-tographic imagination links the seemingly disparate practicesof contemporary Dutch efforts (mentioned earlier) thatebulliently chart the spaces of capital and their more guardedAmerican counterparts.11

All of these recent developments, which begin to collapseanew the geographical and the architectural, also raise anotherseries of important questions that touch on architecturalresearch and theory – such as, how effective are the geo-graphical methods and how accurate the results? How do weevaluate the answer to this question as architects? And howdo we evaluate this when some architects may claim (asCorner notes above) that their geography is either the imageof geography or represents the impossibility of an accurategeography? Some geographic work by architects is trulyextraordinary. For example, contemporary physical geogra-phers who examine glaciers still refer to work by Viollet-le-Duc on the glaciers of Mont-Blanc; and contemporary urbangeographers often refer to Keller Easterling’s work onAmerican cities; but some contemporary geographers alsofind that contemporary geographical work by architects isfraught by its lack of attention to geographical theory andconcepts.12 The geographer Matthew Gandy recently ex-plored Rem Koolhaas’s and the Harvard Project on the City’swork in Lagos, essentially reviewing the geography of thatimportant (and generally favorably reviewed) project,

11. See, for example, the similaritiesbetween Winy Maas, Metacity/Datatown(Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1999) andKeller Easterling, Organization Space(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).12. See Matthew Gandy, “Learning fromLagos,” New Left Review 33 (May/June2005): 37–52, and Stephen Graham andSimon Marvin, Splintered Urbanism(London: Routledge, 2002).

MVRDV, still from the anima-tion, “MetaCity/Datatown,” 1999.Image courtesy MVRDV.

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which is a significant aspect of the emerging field of researcharchitecture.13 From Gandy’s perspective, the geographicalmethods in that project contain several problems in theoryand method, and this comes from a relatively sympatheticcontemporary geographer. On one level, Gandy probes thelack of auto-critique concerning the position and methodol-ogy (documentation) of the researchers. This entails the siteof observation, the literal positions from which data is col-lected, and the drawing techniques that convey the overallgeographical conception of the space. Both the text andimagery emerging from Koolhaas’s project suggest thatLagos is a dynamic world-force set to redefine urban geo-spatial relations. Gandy considers this and Koolhaas’s asser-tion that Lagos is the future of modern urbanism and that“we,” in the West, “may be catching up to Lagos.” But heargues that Lagos’s true geography is obscured fromKoolhaas via his team’s methods, and that the “informaleconomy of poverty celebrated by the Harvard team is theresult of a specific set of policies pursued by Nigeria’s mili-tary dictatorships over the last decades under IMF and WorldBank guidance.” Gandy claims that it is these specificallyinternal and Western processes of restructuring “which deci-mated the metropolitan economy.”14 In other words, heclaims that Lagos is the endgame of a Western project of laissez-faire or intentional de-modernization (versus some-thing projective), enacted through processes of corruptionand indebtedness – a conclusion drawn from Gandy’s explo-

13. On the Lagos project, see HarvardProject on the City (2002), “Lagos,” inMutations (Barcelona: Actar, 2002),651–719, and Gandy, “Learning fromLagos.”14. Gandy, 42.

Harvard Project on the City,Alaban Pangaea. From “Lagos,”Mutations, 2002. Image courtesyOMA.

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ration of the cash streams in and out of the city. Such a con-clusion sadly disentangles the dynamic networks of emergenceidentified by Koolhaas and the Harvard team, even as itappears to restore a more accurate geo-historical causality ofLagos’s current state.

Gandy’s analysis might serve as a cautionary tale forentanglements between geography and architecture afoot incontemporary practices. But even when properly researched,or exceedingly critical in mode, other geographic problemsrear their heads. Some “geo-architectural” projects, such asEyal Weizman’s work in Israel/Palestine, are lauded bygeographers for their brilliant politicization of architectureand planning in geographical literature.15 But there are someproblems of geographic image in this work as well. Weizmandraws on many geographical techniques and concepts tobuild a series of incisive arguments about the role of thebuilt environment in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; it hasexpanded the political discussion of architecture, for sure.But the project also includes images that appeal to a type ofenvironmental determinism to articulate some points. Anotable (and well-publicized) image authored by Weizman isof the current Israeli barrier wall bisecting a swath of culti-vated nature; it appears to suggest the land’s seemingly naturalinterconnectedness. But from the perspective of a radicalizedgeography (one concerned with the politics of territorialrights), the earth does not speak of a natural desire to connect;the earth does not contain its own political will. This image istied to a particular political program that might never be real-ized precisely because representatives of the current Israeligovernment continue to work the actual ground (in waysbetter understood by Weizman and the residents of this areathan anyone). If research architecture is to be a more criticalanalytical/theoretical project, as the work of Weizman andhis students at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecturesuggests, it is not clear whether architects, already shackledby the critical limitations of their own discipline, can simul-taneously be the most well-seasoned critical architecturalthinkers and turn to geographic data in such a way as to be

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15. See, for example, Cities, War andTerrorism, ed. Stephen Graham (London:Blackwell, 2004).

Eyal Weizman, Israeli BarrierWall. Photocollage, 2004.Background photo: DanielBauer.

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also the most critical geographic producers, particularly inthe production of incisive geographical images.

Looking back on the history of disciplinary engagementsbetween architecture, geography, and its contemporary iter-ation, something enormously powerful does appear betweenthese two disciplines. If anything, the relation between geog-raphy and architecture is linked less by concepts of geology,cartography, data, research, and “scape,” and more specifi-cally through what a whole host of theorists discuss as terri-tory, territoriality, and territorialization.16 This movesthrough the long history of “geo-architecture,” and this latter project is neither wholly aesthetic and subjective norempirical, but rather explorative of the particular materialand discursive strategies that tie concepts to the earth – topoints of fixity. This particular geographic project is lessabout architects drawing on maps, or making them, or geo-graphically oriented tables; it is more about architects con-sidering how the architect and the architect’s creations tieconcepts to the earth, produce difference on the earth, andfoster an earthen political subjectivity. It might be most com-prehensible in a cartographic enterprise, but it can takeother, less explicitly geo-visual forms. We might discuss theway buildings negotiate society/nature dynamics, cognizantof the truly brilliant critiques of our efforts to be more “sus-tainable” and “green” that move through contemporarygeographical writing. In absorbing geographic concepts wemight also review the way architecture provides a populace’sprimary conceptualization of the relation between scale andrights – yet another contemporary geographic obsession inthe face of fast-diminishing “naturalized” rights. In additionto concepts of individuality, “houses” and “neighborhoods”produce the political context through which we often arguefor rights; why not reconceptualize the spatial monads ofcitizenry with and within architecture? Neither of theseexamples involves reproducing the image of geography, butsomething far more interesting and frightening for architec-ture. This project might rewire cartographic impulses suchthat buildings no longer simply emerge from maps. Instead,the architectural concept might produce an entirely newcartographic reality. This is the spirit of the most recentform of geo-architecture at its best, and it represents the bestpossibilities latent within the historical examples.

16. The most influential works in con-temporary “human geography” includeGilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s two-volume opus Capitalism and Schizophrenia– Anti-Œdipus (1972) and A ThousandPlateaus (1980) – and recent transcrip-tions and translations of MichelFoucault’s lectures “Security, Territory,Population” (1977-78). Geographicalsyntheses of these concepts can be foundin the work of Erik Swyngedouw, NoelCastree, and Sarah Whatmore.

David Gissen is assistant profes-sor of architecture and visualstudies at California College ofthe Arts. His forthcoming workincludes Minor Nature:Architecture and its ImmanentEnvironments (PrincetonArchitectural Press, 2009) and aspecial issue of AD, TerritorialTechniques in ContemporaryArchitecture.

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