Category Archives: Maps

# PALESTINE /// For a more Incarnate Vision of the Occupation: The Israeli settlements in the West Bank through Palestinian eyes

Posted on May 6, 2013 | 2 Comments

Rimmonim - photo by Leopold Lambert (4)Israeli settlement of Rimmonim on the road from Ramallah to Jericho

I am not quite sure to know the reasons that made me take so much time to write this article, three years after my last trip in Palestine; better late than never as one says so here it is: a majority of the photographs (see below) I took when I was there of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It seemed important here that I include only my own photographs in order to reduce the “degree of separation” between the readers and them.

Those photographs are important to me as they give another approach to the multitude of maps that have been traced to ‘cartograph’ the situation in Palestinian territories. The latter are effectively fundamental to understand the legal implications of the occupation but it also tends to desincarnate any discourse one might have about it. It is therefore extremely important to add to them a more subjective approach, not so much for emotion to emerge, but rather to trigger a clear understanding of the physicality of the occupation on the field. Without this understanding, everything remains abstract and in the realms of territories, thus forgetting that these territories are actually physical and host physical bodies on it.

I want to stress the fact that approaching the problem in a more incarnate and subjective way does not mean in any way that we should focus on the ‘news items’ however tragic they may be. What I mean by that is that what requires all our attention is what systematize the colonial organization of space and the bodies, what affects them on a daily basis. That might be less spectacular than the “news items” I was just evoking; however, there lies the real and durable condition of occupation. In this regard, I would like to link this article with another I wrote a bit more than a year ago entitled The Ordinary Violence of the Colonial Apparatuses in the West Bank that was addressing a similar dimension of the occupation through the various devices that control and hurt the Palestinian bodies on a daily basis.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Maps, Militarized Architectures, Palestine, Photography, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# PALESTINE /// Political Geography of the Gaza Strip: A Territory of Experiments for the State of Israel

Posted on November 19, 2012 | 4 Comments

Map of the Gaza Strip (Dec 2011) /// United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs in Occupied Palestinian Territory

I think that many of us are infuriated in front of the unfolding new siege over Gaza by the Israeli army. As horrifying as those images of children and entire families being  struck by the bombs sent by aircraft, battleships, drones or other remote controlled machine guns, it is extremely important to also insist on the daily oppression that the people of the Gaza strip have to face even when they are not being bombed. Since 2006 and the Israeli disengagement of its settlement within the strip, the situation is different from the one in the West Bank -which I have to say, I am more familiar with. When the West Bank has to suffer from multiple colonial apparatuses, Gaza functions pretty much as a gigantic prison from which, it is almost impossible to escape -even the Egyptian border remains close to most people. Most of the needs of its people (water, food, electricity, phone & internet networks etc.) is provided directly by Israel (for most of it, see the last map of this article) who has been, along the years, quite literally experimenting how little it could provide without provoking a severe humanitarian crisis in the eyes of the International Community. The access to the sea itself is heavily restricted – and enforced with real rockets – by the IDF to keep Gaza fishermen’s boats within a limit of three nautical miles. Needless to say, fishing cannot be a strong economy in this context.

The strip is thus a scale 1 experiment for the Israeli state to determine how to sustain the lives of 1.7 millions Palestinians – apparently more for its International reputation than for its philanthropic will as we can currently see – with the minimum of ressources. But, this very small piece of territory – and to some extents, this is also true in the West Bank – is also a terrain of experiments for military training and weapon technology. As some specialists have been detecting, some US military officials have been often spotted during IDF operations in a clear attempt to learn how to lead a siege in the Middle East. After the operation Lead Cast in Dec 2008-Jan 09 that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians of all ages, the Goldstone Report and various other testimonies have shown that white phosphorus bombs and flechette shells which are categorically banned by the International legislation. The various apparatuses of control around the Strip are also an opportunity for the Israeli army to implement new technology in matter of weapons like remote controlled machine gun stations t0 prevent the access of the ‘no-go zone’ (about 500 meters from the green line) and the ‘high risks zone (fron 500 to 1,500 meters from the green line):

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Posted in History, Law, Maps, Militarized Architectures, Palestine, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# MAPS /// War in the Manhattan Strip

Posted on November 16, 2012 | 4 Comments


map of the American military apparatuses on and around Manhattan as well as the strike records of the day / Map by Léopold Lambert

Two funerals, two faces of Manhattan. The first a display of strength and defiance, a jostling mass of thousands of conflict-hardened men, many brandishing weapons, pledging readiness to die for their cause over the bloodied corpse of the Commune resistance’s commander Louisa Davis.

The second consisted of a shattered family, incomprehension etched on their faces. A young father clutched the shrouded body of his 11-month-old son, a victim of the violence that is likely to cause more deaths in the days to come.

The thread connecting these two scenes could be found in the vapour trails hanging in the clear skies above Harlem, the black clouds of smoke rising from the ground and the thuds and booms punctuating the unsettling quiet of its usually bustling streets.

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Posted in History, Literature, Maps, NY Commune Project, Palestine, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# GUEST WRITERS ESSAYS 36 /// City, Space, Power: Lahore’s Architecture of In/Security by Sadia Shirazi

Posted on October 22, 2012 | 3 Comments

Shipping containers fortifying the Lahore Press Club in preparation for protests against the anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims madeby convicted felon Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Photographer unknown.

First of all, I would like to apologize for the inconsistency in the guest writers essays’ schedule. After a long period of time without them, they are now flowing in the blog’s editorial choice; soon enough we should be back on a rhythm in which you will be able to read one per week.

The essay City, Space, Power:  Lahore’s Architecture of In/Security, written by Sadia Shirazi is a brilliant mix of personal observations and thorough analyses of the current use of architecture in the city of Lahore (Pakistan) as a securitarian weapon. The notion of security is cleverly played with in Sadia’s title here, as her texts illustrates how Lahore’s inhabitants’ daily lives are subjected to the paradoxical violence of processes of securitization. Far from the evanescent spotlights of the media that cover consistently the terror attacks with no further perspective, the “architecture of in/security” is experienced every day by millions of people who are affected by it. Through a cartographic assignment Sadia also exposes how this same architecture, despite its effect on everyone, is implemented mostly in favor of the higher social classes and, ultimately participate to the literal fragmentation of classes within the city.

City, Space, Power:  Lahore’s Architecture of In/Security
by Sadia Shirazi

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Posted in Essays, Guest Writers Essays, History, Maps, Militarized Architectures, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# PALESTINE /// Village of Al Walajah: A Prison to Be

Posted on July 21, 2012 | Leave a comment


The Palestinian Archipelago: Island of Al Walajah surrounded by reefs /// Metaphorical map by the author

To mark the unfortunate anniversary of the Separation Barrier whose construction has been started ten years ago by the Israeli government, the online magazine +972 published a dossier about various aspects of the Palestinian life as changed by the wall. Let’s remind everybody that the wall is not following the 1949 armistice Green Line which separates Israel from the Palestinian territories, but rather attempts to push its line as far as possible within the West Bank in order to bring as many settlements as possible on the same side than the Israeli territory.
One of this +972 dossier’s chapter is dedicated to the case of the village of Al Walajah near Bethlehem. This village is situated very close from the Israeli settlements of Gilo and Har Gilo and is thus planned to be surrounded by the wall as a form of inclusive exclusion (read the previous article about the book with the same name). The village is already almost enclosed by the wall and only one last part remains to be built. According to Israeli journalist Haggai Matar who wrote the article, “The High Court at first stopped construction of the wall, but in 2011 allowed the state to proceed with construction even though a final ruling on the route has not been given.” Israel promised to build a tunnel for the village to be able to reach Bethlehem, but farmers won’t get an access to their land and the village in general will be surrounded by a wall and thus deprived from its direct environment.

It is important to observe that Al Waljah is also separated from Bethlehem by the well-known viaduct of Gilo (see maps and photo below). Most illustrative example of the Israeli colonial infrastructure, it carries a highway for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers and army. Walls, Settlements, and colonial roads constitute the reefs that transformed the “continental” land of Al Walajah into an isolated island of the Palestinian Archipelago. In this regard, this village’s situation is very similar to another one which has been already enclosed by the wall, Bir Nabala, not far from Ramallah that I evoked in a past article about the Israeli West Bank Highway, the route 443.

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Posted in Law, Maps, Militarized Architectures, Palestine, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# PALESTINE /// The Cartography of Road Segregation by Visualizing Palestine

Posted on June 1, 2012 | 8 Comments

Visualizing Palestine is an open collective which attempts to demonstrate graphically the injustice to which the Palestinians are subjected to in the current apartheid -or colonization depending on whether you consider the territory Palestine/Israel as one sovereignty or two. After an historical document on the hunger strike to support Khader Adnan who was doing one to protest against his detention in an Israeli prison without having been charged with anything, they just released a map of Israel/Palestine (see above) illustrating the segregative characteristics of the road system on this territory. The West Bank and East Jerusalem are indeed full of highways that are forbidden to Palestinian cars as they link the Israeli territory to the numerous illegal civil settlements in the occupied territories (see my previous article about the Route 443). In addition to that, the map shows how the totality of roads accessible to Palestinians to link their main cities together are highly restricted as they are punctuated regularly by more or less heavy duty checkpoints which can ultimately cut any form of physical communication between the various towns of the West Bank.

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Posted in Law, Maps, Palestine, Politics, Resistive Operations, Weaponized Architecture

# PALESTINE /// Road Link between Gaza and the West Bank: A Sovereignty contained in a Line

Posted on May 24, 2012 | 1 Comment

Map extracted from the document about the Link by Aix Group (2010)

In 2010 the French NGO Aix Group released a 60 page document which introduces the challenges and propositions that could be made for the construction of a road link between Gaza and the West Bank. This hypothesis is of course based on the credible scenario of what is now called ‘the two states solution’ which would geographically separates the two territories under Palestinian sovereignty, Gaza on one side, the West Bank and East Jerusalem on the other side. In this scenario, this link would indeed be an extremely crucial element for the future of the Palestinian unity since the exercise of a unique sovereignty over two territories always constitute a very delicate practice. At a different scale the 24 year long example of Pakistan (1947-1971) separated between Western and Eastern territories – the latter became Bangladesh in 1971- illustrate such difficulties.

The studies attempts to propose an exhaustive list of options for the link’s materialization (road, train, monorail, surface, tunnel, bridge…see below) as well as a variety of its potential routes (five of them including three studied more specifically…see below as well). In order to function, the link would be under Palestinian authority surrounded by the Israeli territory (as defined by the UN based on the 1967 borders), thus constituting a peculiar geo-political precedent: a sovereignty applied to a line on the map. However, what is proper to a line or rather, a corridor, is the maximization of its surface in contact with the exterior. In this historical conflictual context and if considering the options given by this NGO, the potentialities for Israel to control or block the link – for whichever reason invoked – are plethora and this interesting legal case deserve probably a deeper level of imagination and ‘cleverness’ to actually make it effective and trustworthy for the Palestinians.

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Posted in Law, Maps, Palestine, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# PALESTINE /// The Palestinian Archipelago: A Metaphorical Cartography of the Occupied Territories (on Arquine)

Posted on March 26, 2012 | 2 Comments

The Palestinian Archipelago: Salfit (drawn by the author)

I recently had the chance to write a short article for the Mexican magazine Arquine which was dedicating its last dossier to the topic of displacements. I therefore wrote a text about the metaphorical archipelago created by the fragmentation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in a multitude of islands which makes the Palestinian sovereignty applicable on only a small part of its territory. Some of the funambulist’s readers might find it redundant of what I have been writing in the past, in which case, I would recommend the only reading of the two last paragraphs that brings something slightly more new in my discourse. This new part includes the consideration for internal social issues encountered by the Palestinian people who sees within itself the formation of a new bourgeoisie which ratifies, through its way of life, the occupier’s language.

Here is the list of texts in Arquine 59‘s dossier (both in English and Spanish in the printed version):

· La hospitalidad comienza en casa (Deborah Gans)
- El archipiélago palestino: una cartografía metafórica de los territorios ocupados (Léopold Lambert)
- El recuerdo es una construcción que se desplaza (Ana Valdés y Alicia Migdal)
- Albergue para migrantes: un espacio humanitario de (Thomas Weiss)

THE PALESTINIAN ARCHIPELAGO: A Metaphorical Cartography of the Occupied Territories.
By Léopold Lambert

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Posted in Architectural Theories, Essays, Law, Maps, Militarized Architectures, Palestine, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# MAPS /// The Architectural Plan as a Map. Drawings by Enric Miralles

Posted on August 7, 2011 | 5 Comments

As architects, we unconsciously tend not to associate necessarily the plans we draw with the notion of map. However, both of those two objects register in the same process of cartographic creation and, in this regard, use a two dimensional language in order to create space. The architect that creates the most expressive ambiguity between the architectural plan and the map seems to be Enric Miralles (1955-2000). In this regard, I recommend the very good article written by Carl Douglas for his Diffusive Architectures that explores the non-hierarchical aspect of those plans as much as their operative characteristics.

What strikes in Miralles’ plans is the importance of the line. That might seem a peculiar thing to say as lines are what characterize primarily architectural plans, but few architects actually express, via their plans, the power contained in those same lines. The name of this blog, the Funambulist is an homage to this power as I explain in the sidebar; nevertheless, it mainly insists on the process of unfolding of this power once the line becomes a wall. Here Miralles, not only manifests this concretization of the line but also celebrates its  pictorial power and his plans thus become an architecture in itself. One might even argue that his built architecture is paradoxically serving the plan rather than the usual opposite. One hint that could backup this intuition lays in the observation of architectural elements embodying the line such as the numerous pipes of the Parc Diagonal Mar in Barcelona or the Pavilion in Toyama (Japan) as much as the brises soleil on the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Following this intuition, this would probably be what makes Miralles’ (along with his successive partners, Carme Pinós then Benedetta Tagliabue) architecture so unique: his buildings are the retroactive representation of the plan when every other buildings are the represented object of their plans.

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Posted in Architectural Theories, Classic Architectures, Essays, Maps

# MAPS /// A Walk Through H.: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist by Peter Greenaway

Posted on August 6, 2011 | 1 Comment

I got the chance last week, to curate a small  cine-club session organized by Danielle Willems (see her essay for the Funambulist) who was kind enough to ask me so. I chose two movies that I was not necessarily associating but whose connection will have to be made in an upcoming article about what Deleuze calls the Power of the False (La puissance du Faux). Those two films were Punishment Park (1971) by Peter Watkins (see the previous articles about it) and  A Walk Through H. (1978) by Peter Greenaway about which I already wrote but I would like to reiterate in order to open a new category in the archives  that I will elaborate about in the coming weeks. This category concerns Maps, their subjectivity and their power. I already archived in it previous articles that are related to this topic and more will come.

I still need to research more information in order to write something about the subjectivity of maps as a mean of representation of space, but of course that is the main topic of A Walk Through H. whose narrator is so obsessed with maps that he ends up seeing them on every piece of paper that gets in his way and the film is registered in a slow process of abstractization of those maps that create new spaces rather than representing them.
The following text is what Peter Greenaway says about this film, immediately followed by thirteen of the ninety two maps painted by P.Greenaway himself that constitutes the movie. I don’t know if there has ever been an exhibition about them but I would be amazed to see one being organized :

Like most people, I suspect, I am interested in maps, cartography, plans and diagrams. The map is an extraordinary palimpsest to tell you where you have been, where you are at this present moment, and where you could be, and even in subjective tenses, where you might have been, where you could have been. It’s a total consideration in the sense of temporality as well as spatiality. I have this fascination that I often utilize for making many paintings which had maps and cartography as their basis.

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Posted in Cinema, Heterotopias in Cinema, Maps

# POLITICS /// Baarle-Hertog an Archipelago of Belgium Territory within a Dutch Town

Posted on July 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

image from BLDG BLOG

I recently ran into a three years old article that Geoff Manaugh wrote for his BLDG BLOG about the peculiar legal status of the town of Baarle-Hertog. In fact, this city embedded into Dutch territory is fragmented into several pieces of land that belong to respectively Belgium or Netherlands. Because those territories are situated in the center of the Schengen space, this fragmented legal status does not imply the same violent consequences that what can be observed in the West Bank between Palestinian towns and Israeli settlements; however, it is peculiar enough to note that some houses are split between the two countries and in that case, new born’s nationality have to be decided depending on the room their mother have been delivering in (that might be a myth but the Financial Times affirms it !).

About a year ago, coming back from Palestine, I drew a map that I entitled The Palestinian Archipelago (it turned out that a few people had a similar idea earlier !) in order to represent the fragmentation of the Palestinian territory that was triggered by the 1993 Oslo Accords. This map of Baarle-Hertog introduces something similar (although, once again the spatial consequences are much lighter) and one could talk about the Belgium archipelago within this Dutch territory with the interesting observation that even on the Belgium “islands”, one can notice Dutch “lakes” that complexify even more the spatial condition.

Geoff Manaugh fairly recently relinked his article in an interview he did of China Miéville and that was tackling the spatial question of his book The City & The City (that I am currently finishing). This novel, that introduce two cities situated in the same geographical location but invisible to each other, was also evoked in an article that Ed Keller was kind enough to send me also comparing this book with the Israel/Palestine conflict (I am not agreeing with everything written in this article but it’s definitely worth reading).

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Posted in Maps, Palestine, Politics

# PALESTINE /// The Route 443, a symptomatic example of the apartheid apparatus in the West Bank

Posted on June 12, 2011 | 2 Comments

map extracted from the OCHA map: the green line is the 1949 armistice line separating Israel from the legal Palestinian territory, purple stains are settlements, orange stains are Palestinian villages, the thick red line is the separation barrier, circles are checkpoints, blue lines are Israeli roads and yellow lines are Palestinian roads. It goes without saying that every Israeli construction beyond the green line (here, pretty much the totality of this map) constitute a violation of the International Law.

In my research about the Israeli apartheid apparatuses against Palestinians of the West Bank, I encountered the Route 443 as a particularly symptomatic piece of infrastructure that illustrates well the territorial segregation implemented in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. This road is indeed a high speed axis for Israeli settlers and army to maximize their movement within the West Bank. This segregation allows for the Israelis, a total denial of the Palestinians’ existence. Route 443 is also symptomatic of such a denial by the presence of two high lateral walls (see photographs below), that hide from the cars the existing Palestinian villages around.
This highway crosses a corridor of Israeli illegal settlements in order to link them both with other settlements in East Jerusalem (East) and some other in the West part of the West Bank. Palestinians also have a road in order to reach this little piece of land imprisoned by the barrier. This road is narrow, framed by tall walls and barbel wires and goes under the settlements thus materializing the several layers of circulation the West Bank is characterized by. Of course, this road could not be easier to close by the I.D.F. that can then control the Palestinian circulation as they have learned to do in the frame of a strategical apartheid policy.

The following photographs and film have been taken by Israel based director of photography Amir Terkel who was kind enough to authorize me to use those documents.

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Posted in Law, Maps, Militarized Architectures, Palestine, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# FINE ARTS /// The art of Mapping as a subjective vision of the city. Stephen Walter & Sohei Nishino

Posted on April 21, 2011 | 3 Comments

pictures: Stephen Walter (above) and Sohei Nishino’s (below) maps of London

Maps, in our imaginary, carry much more objectivity than they actually do in reality. We can probably explain that by the reliability that we put in them in order to locate ourselves in a city or in a country. However, just like the architect plan (another kind of map), maps are actually a form of representation that is characterized by just as much subjectivity than any other forms. They only shows what make sense in their system of logic, they use a more or less complex aesthetic vocabulary and they often emphasize the importance of some of their included elements.
The work of art that expresses the best this subjective beauty in my opinion remains the medium length 1978 movie by Peter Greenaway, A Walk Through H. (see previous article) in which an ornithologist recounts his journey in 92 maps that one by one leads more and more toward abstraction. Very luckily you can watch this movie by following this link.

Stephen Walter and Sohei Nishino are two artists who are exploring the subjectivity of the map. S. Walter has draw two gigantic maps of London and Liverpool in a sort of report of Situationist drifts (derives) experiencing the psychogeographies of those two cities. His maps are mostly constituted by doodles and words that places various neighborhoods and its characteristics but also his autobiographical feeling about those places when he went there. Space’s representation and narratives are then completely colliding in one documents and makes S.Walter’s maps absolutely fascinating.
Sohei Nishino is using photographs to compose his maps which oscillate between aerial views and maps using a technique that became famous by David Hockney which consists in assembling pictures together despite their different vanishing points. S.Nishino chose some very generic photographs from main monuments of each city to make the map more recognizable but one could imagine his work with an approach more similar to Stephen Walter’s that would assemble pieces of life brought together with pictures that would eventually constitutes the city.
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Posted in Fine Arts, Maps, Photography

# POLITICS /// Geopolitical Borders. A Competition by Think Space with Teddy Cruz

Posted on April 7, 2011 | 1 Comment

Zagreb Society of Architects, Think Space, after organizing a brilliant competition entitled Urban Borders (see the winners in a previous article), now launches another competition called Geopolitical Borders.

This is a good opportunity for architects to question the notion of map and to explore the subjectivity of what we usually forget as being a creative way of representing the real.
The jury is composed by the well known Teddy Cruz who is interviewed on Think Space’s website and who wrote the following text:

This competition calls for critical observations of border regions as laboratories from which to imagine new paradigms of urbanization and democratization. These critical thresholds amplify the politics of migration and citizenship, labor and surveillance, the tensions between sprawl and density, formal and informal urbanisms, wealth and poverty and the collisions between natural systems and political jurisdiction, exposing conflict as operational tool to re-think artistic practices.

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Posted in Maps, Politics

# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// Diagrams of Utopia by Anthony Vidler

Posted on April 3, 2011 | 4 Comments

picture: La Maison Baroque, from Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (1993)

Diagram: from Old French diagramme, from Greek, dia across/through, gramma something written, letter of the alphabet, that which is marked out by lines, a geometrical figure, written list, register, the gamut of scale in music. (Geom.) A figure composed of lines, serving to illustrate a definition or statement, or to aid in the proof of a proposition. An illustrative figure, which, without representing the exact appearance of an object, gives an outline or general scheme of it, so as to exhibit the shape and relations of its various parts. A set of lines, marks, or tracings which represent symbolically the course or results of any action or process, or the variations which characterize it. A delineation used to symbolize related abstract propositions or mental processes.
Oxford English Dictionary as quoted by Anthony Vidler, Diagrams of Utopia in The Activist Drawing, Cambridge. MIT Press, 1999.

Diagrams are part of a whole family of architectural schools and practices (especially in the United States) nowadays since Peter Eisenman has been introducing them as a primary generator of architecture. I will not even evoke, here, the incredible confusion that makes most of architects to call a drawing, a diagram when it is not one. On the contrary, I would like to evoke the very interesting article Diagrams of Utopia written by Anthony Vidler (current dean of Cooper Union) in the fantastic book The Activist Drawing edited at the MIT Press by Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley (current dean of Columbia GSAPP) about the New Babylon by Constant.

Quoting Charles Sanders Peirce, Vidler affirms that “a diagram is mainly an Icon, and an icon of intelligible relations in the constitution of its Object.” (The Collected Papers). It confuses “the real and the copy” and therefore makes it as an “instrument of suspended reality”. This “pure dream” can thus be associated with the notion of utopia that constitutes itself by schematic lines of organization.
Building architecture with diagrams becomes therefore as problematic as building societies with Utopias. Somehow, both require this same tool but it does not go without dangers as the diagram’s lines does not wear the thickness of human uncertainty. Moreover, a diagram tends to draw lines based on the experience of the real, but those lines when materialized, impose a transcendental influence on the real.
In the following excerpt, Vidler bases his thoughts on Gilles Deleuze’s study of the work of Michel Foucault who was probably the most accurate archeologist of diagrams. He also evoke briefly what he calls the anti-panopticon, the House of Lubricity as thought by the Marquis de Sade:
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Posted in Architectural Theories, Foucault, Maps, Philosophy

# POLITICS /// Form follows Tax on Deconcrete

Posted on December 23, 2010 | Leave a comment
Daniel Fernandez Pascual recently published on Deconcrete an article as short as interesting about New Orleans’ “shotguns houses”. In fact, those houses have been shaped by the fact that tax applied on the frontage; by adopting the narrowest form as possible, those houses’ owners were paying less taxes.
The second reason for such a name “shotgun” is explained by Candy Chang as a house typology that would allow to shoot a shotgun straight through from the porch to the backyard !
Both D.F. Pascual and C. Chang then evoked a similarity with the land ownership along the Mississippi (see the beautiful map below) reduced to its minimum as frontage, just wide enough to be able to load ships.

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Posted in Law, Maps, Politics

# PALESTINE /// The Palestinian Archipelago

Posted on December 23, 2010 | 2 Comments

What I call Palestinian Archipelago is the group of “islands” within the West Bank in which since the Oslo Accords (1993) Palestinian have security and civil control (Zone A) and security control joint with the Israelis (Zone B). The rest of the area in the West Bank (Zone C) is completely under Israeli control and composes the “Mare Magnum” all around those islands. I thus worked on a map that would expresses this maritime vision of Palestine.
Feel free to click on it, the resolution is pretty high.

PS: Thanks to a reader’s comment, I now know that somebody (Julien Bousac) already got this ready and made a clearer map out of it.

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Posted in Maps, Palestine, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# PALESTINE /// OCHA oPt. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in occupied Palestinian territories

Posted on December 23, 2010 | Leave a comment
OCHA oPt. (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in occupied Palestinian territories) is a good proof that despite a total lack of measures taken by its head, the UN is actually doing some very good work of information in Palestine. In fact OCHA oPt’s website hosts a very precious series of maps that documents the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza (borders, jewish settlements, walls, checkpoints etc.) Those maps are available for free at he OCHA office in Jerusalem (the office is actually almost on the 1949 Green Line) or downloadable online in pdf format.

It is a very useful tool for anybody working on this topic or travelling in Palestine.

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Posted in Maps, Palestine, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# (UN)WALL /// Just a line on a map…

Posted on December 23, 2010 | Leave a comment
In september and october 2006 was voted the Secure Fence Act by the US Congrete and Senate which “allows for over 700 miles of double-reinforced fence to be built across cities and deserts alike between California and Texas in areas that have been prone to illegal drug trafficking and illegal immigration. It authorizes the installation of more lighting, vehicle barriers, and border checkpoints, while putting in place more advanced equipment like sensors, cameras, satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles in an attempt to watch and control illegal immigration into the United States. Officials say that it will help cut down on the number of illegal vehicles that go back and forth across the border bringing illegal drugs.” (White House communication)
How crazy it is to observe that a wall is just a line on a map but what is resulting from this line are the most consequential political decisions acting on life of thousand of people. I could have put some more pictures of Berlin Wall, Cisjordan Wall or the Indian-Kashmir Wall, but I think that this “line effect” can be also observed on smaller scales, and architects have to be deeply aware of it.

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Posted in (un)Wall, Maps, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# Anomalies cartographiées / MapOfStrange

Posted on December 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

On passe du microscopique aux photos aériennes ! Le territoire mondial est de plus en plus cartographié et google earth en est l’exemple le plus fascinant et le plus effrayant. Comme tout système celui-ci est néanmoins détournable et faillible.
Ainsi, le site MapOfStrange.com propose des localisations illustrant des erreurs de google, des censures gouvernementales, des appropriations opportunistes ou encore des exemples insolites de sites plus ou moins naturels.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Maps