In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. –Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 (On Exactitude in Science . . . Jorge Luis Borges)
City as Postcard / City as Polis / City as Poem: Alexandra Midal
“I think if we single out the city as a constellation of lives and people, then we go far beyond the idea of rationalism or aesthetics to reach the poetry that lies in what a city is,” says design theorist and filmmaker Alexandra Midal. Here Midal speaks with Michelle Millar Fisher about the city as an eternal trope for the design imagination.
