Weller, Martin, & Ashe – Cartographies ▶

Mappings have a unique power to be at once analytical and synthetic: in drawing a context, they tend to draw from a context. Layers of information are assembled in maps, and reading across them, through them, and between them is a powerful way to imagine and situate a project: “to draw is to select, to select is to interpret, and to interpret is to propose” (Manuel de Solà-Morales, “the Culture of Description). A project that is initially ‘read’ through maps eventually contributes back in the form of their ‘rewriting.’We assemble in this Thinking Room a cast of mappers: Richard Weller, with his Atlas for the End of the World, is provoking ecological, climatic, and political agendas at the largest scale – setting up modes of climate refuge across global latitudes. Katherine Ashe, of Vittino Ashe, is working from the ground up: conceptualising projects as discrete as single houses through a keen study of the broad and fluid systems that belie them. Operating in between these scales is Daniel Jan Martin, who is assembling rich visual texts at the scale of a city-region to incorporate deep structures from the physical to the intangible.