Observational Cartographies

Georges Kubler The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, Yale University Press, 2008Georges Kubler’s The Shape of Time is a delicate investigation about the history of man-made objects and things under the rubric of visual forms. Facing the requirement to devise better ways of considering the whole range of man-made things, Kubler traces a way to identify human desires and thoughts through the resilience, evolution and abandon of forms. This reading and this way of considering the objects and the built environment is immeasurably useful to us as presents ways to directly interrogate things themselves, awakening an attitude that has to help us to establish methods and principles in our own work. Ryszard Kapuscinski Travels with Herodotus, London: Penguin, 2008In this captivating travel report taking place over millennia and different continents, the reader accompanies both Kapuscinski and Herodotus in their exploration of the world. Thanks to their endless curiosity, they will encounter many new cultures and people, hearing and recording their stories for the sole purpose of preserving memory. Herodotus’ Histories, Kapuscinski’s faithful companion on his journey, was written in 440 BC and is considered to be the founding work of history in Western literature. Through his expeditions and reports, Kapuscinski celebrates story-telling, the transmission of oral knowledge as the very origin of history and, as did Herodotus thousands of years ago, insists on the importance of recording it in order not to lose memory of our past. Roger Paez Operative Mapping: Maps as Design Tools, New York: Actar, 2019The book’s fundamental aim is to offer a methodological contribution to the design disciplines, both in conceptual and instrumental terms. When added to the resources of contemporary design, operative mapping overcomes the analytical and strictly instrumental approaches of maps, opening up the possibility of working both pragmatically and critically by acknowledging the need for an effective transformation of the milieu based on an understanding of pre-existing conditions. The book joins together a review of the theoretical body of work on mapping from the social sciences with case studies from the past 30 years in architecture, planning, and landscape design in the interest of linking past practices with future ones.


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