How did you decide that mapping was going to be a topic you wanted to address in the courses you offer?
Mapping’s increasing prevalence in our lives is not exclusively because of technological advances such as GIS or handheld devices. Geography and related work in the social sciences speak to me in meaningful ways. I was really drawn to the writing of Graham Burnett, Denis Cosgrove, Mark Monmonier and others.... Simply showing students the decisions that mappers made demonstrates how much information we accept uncritically, and how much images participate in forming our understanding of the world. How do we make sense of information and for what purposes? How do we promote or suppress ideas through representation?.... n the design world, we are so used to image production: plans, sections, elevations, aerial photographs. And yet we assume the neutrality of maps. I want students to understand what biases go into the production of an image, what is privileged, limited or excluded.... These days, it’s become sexy to talk about landscape. What I find positive about that change is the fact that architecture has opened itself up to larger and larger scales. I think the emphasis on landscape and transportation and systems is, again, a very positive development in architectural education... So is it important or irrelevant to you to draw a distinction between a map and a diagram? Is the visual language of architecture – plans, sections, axonometrics – something different than the kind of mapping you are talking about? I think that diagrams – which powerfully distill information – reside within our maps. Maps, for me, are a more inclusive category, a larger field of information. And I think maps make evident their own subjectivity.