Category: maps

  • Working the Line

    My current (re)fascination with the Center for Land Use Interpretation involves getting up to date on their latest events (as well as tearing through their bookstore and grabbing some gems to dig through – reviews/info coming soon). A recent announcement caught my eye. The ideas of margins and borders is constantly fascinating, along with the…

  • Portland Photographic Record – Places

    A completely different scale from the concentrated landmarks – and perhaps the antidote to the over-documented – comes from the great Portland Grid Project a photographic essay of the city using a loose framework of grid points in which photographers are unleashed to document the ‘other’ places in the community. The plan, photographers are directed…

  • Portland Photographic Record – Landmarks

    The ubiquitous nature of digital data offers unique opportunities to display data about places that tells us a much richer story about ourselves than the actual city. Case in point, spotted via A Daily Dose of Architecture – are these ‘Geotaggers’ World Atlas‘ maps generated from geographically tagged data of uploaded photos to popular image…

  • 3rd Coast Atlas

    Having resided in Portland for over 13 years, I now consider myself solidly ‘West Coast’ and an adapted non-native (as opposed to invasive) resident of the Cascadia Megaregion. But 20+ years living literally near the middle and continued explorations of some midwestern cities has given me an appreciation for the third coast – a term…

  • Walhattan

    An amazing if somewhat shocking graphic spotted on A Daily Dose of Architecture, “The above is from Jesse LeCavalier’s essay “All Those Numbers” at Places: Design Observer. In it, the architect investigates “the design possibilities latent not only in Walmart’s building types but also in the organizational practices — especially its unparalleled expertise in logistics.”…

  • Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Temporality + Mobility

    The last remnants of ephemera sitting around the archives is under the auspices of terrestrially based gardens within the foodsheds of our cities, and – and the need to address the issues of permanence (both the pros and cons). One option is to incorporate food production within our permanent landscaping by using the principles of…

  • Cartographic Rectification

    A recent post at the Fresh Kills Park Blog showed the beauty and function of the process of map rectification in GIS, where a map and image can be combined by matching ground control points in the mapping system to points in the image. As it may be well known, I’m constantly fascinated by historic…

  • Floating Manhattan

    Via Ptak Science Books, a proposal to float Manhattan into the adjacent Hudson River and seemingly into the Atlantic. “Robert Grosvenor had a delectable and memorable idea for a project in 1975: testing the sea-worthiness of Manhattan island. Grosvenor (b. 1937) was a well-known kinetic sculptor in Manhattan by the time of his detaching-Manhattan idea……

  • New Blogs

    It’s been ages since I’ve posted about some of the recent blog additions. To maintain my sanity, I’ve decided that for each new blog I add to my personal RSS feed, I take another off (the total hovers around 120 or so, which is a lot of input). I keep all of them in the…

  • Bing Mapping

    Since I was first introduced to Bing Maps, I’ve been quite intrigued by the Sim-Cityish axonometric views of the world that offers expanded possibilities for urban analyses. The architect of the system, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows off the features. (Via cityofsound)