Big Town Little Town
“I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t love a good map” Roman Mars
To be upfront, I am an artist working primarily in three dimensions. I adore objects: I love making them, seeing how they are made, and thinking about their stories and journeys. A painter friend and I used to joke about whether God like sculptors or painters better. Her argument was that he was pro-painters as their studios were usually on the top floor of an art school and were therefor closer to God. I argued he liked sculptors better because we had the basements which were cooler on hot days (this in was Pittsburgh’s hot and humid summers), and we could also move our work in and out of buildings easier.
While there are real burdens and obstacles to storing and moving physical objects, they exist in the same space as humans (and our bodies) and can bring up specific emotions, and different physical interactions than the imagined space inherent to representational paintings, drawings, and even maps.
When I listened to the 99% Invisible podcast Model City, as a sculptor and teacher of sculpture, it reminded me of all the potentials within tangible objects, and in exploring tangible maps. It reminded me that as humans living in 3D space, we learn from movement and placements of ourselves and of objects, in Gardener's terms, kinesthetic learning. Of course this led me to thinking about ways to use the idea of tangible maps in the classroom.
To my way of thinking, knowing an object does not mean copying it---it means acting upon it.
-Jean Piaget, Genetic Epistemology
The podcast (best understood by listening to it, link below) explores a model map made of San Francisco in the late 1930s, sponsored by the WPA.
“During the depths of the Depression in the late 1930s, 300 craftspeople came together for two years to build an enormous scale model of the City of San Francisco. This Works Progress Administration (WPA) project was conceived as a way of putting artists to work while also creating a planning tool for the city to imagine its future.”
(from 99% Invisible website linked below)
It was made by a crew of wood workers, with a 1” = 100’ scale. The detail included each building being painted the color it was at the time of the making, a detail which reminds me think of the imagined worlds of Steven Millhauser, worlds with layered meanings and stories.
The model map of San Francisco was in storage for years, and finally came into the collection of SF MOMA. When Rotterdam based art duo Bik Van Der Pol heard of the model, they worked with the museum to use the model as a locus, a way to connect people throughout the city, and to gather their stories.
Many of the stories are recounted in the podcast, with even more recorded by the Kitchen Sisters which are available online. As you might imagine the stories are moving and diverse; they are individual magnifications and histories of the large city.
The range of stories reminds me why we find maps such a potent teaching tool. They speak to a wide range of subject matter, as well as how those subjects connect and affect each other. They aren’t just about the finite, but about a web of connections. Proximity reveals more than individual stories.
The stories explore a breadth of subjects:
Immigration and migration
relationships between different groups of people (divided by ethnicities, age, careers, class and more) in time
Gentrification
War
Worker’s rights
Internment camps
City planning and how it affected the people
Grass roots movements
Architectural concepts
Red-lining (what is that red line going down the middle?)…again not about policies but stories.
Geography
Industrial waste
Health and aging
The connection of the past to the future
The Place of Boundaries
What was rarely, if ever, part of the stories was boundaries.
The first maps I remember seeing as a child were school maps with pastel pinks, blues, yellows, and greens. In these maps (reflected in the pedagogy of the times), boundaries are a focal point. Someone wanted children to be clear on where one plot of land began, and another ended. There were boundaries to be on the right or wrong side of. As a child I imagined that everywhere you looked in the US was pink (including trees, houses, cars), but magically turned yellow in Canada. It sets up a narrative of “us vs. them”. Very fitting during the end of the Cold War.
With the dimensional model, everyday people begin to access their collective and individual memories and imaginations. The viewers imagine themselves in these small evocative buildings, and then speak to their own lives, memories, and realities. The model imitates the physicality of the city, and is not about boundaries but people’s lives. Boundaries as depicted on maps are rarely how we physically experience a place; they are abstract and a tool for other purposes. Purposes which are also important to examine.
Of course, the context of being in a public art project in a public space is relevant, but while it sets up the conversation, it doesn’t dictate it.
This is an important idea for our teaching: Who is the author? Why not you?
Your vantage point as a viewer above the city allows you to see more of the city at once. Proximities that are often hidden by scale are revealed. You can make connections, see the relationship of resources, follow your daily paths in from beginning to end, notice the interactions of landscape and the build city, the percentages of space used by roads, housing, public space, etc. In short, you see proximities and connections, but not the invisible borders that appear on traditional maps.
Questions for the classroom:
What are the ways a map can control what you see?
If image making is intentional, what are the intentions behind a “school” map? Behind the wood model city map?
Do the materials matter?
Can we tell who is authoring a map by what we see in the map?
PLAY
There are many things that happen in the world of three dimensions. One is that the object’s relationship to the body, especially the scale, can affect how we interact with the objects. The model is a flat symbol of a place, it is a place. One can relate to the model of San Francisco as an abstraction, but also as physical entity that relates to your body. The model rests on the floor in some pictures, so the viewer is looking from on high. You are a giant, Godzilla, a bird, in a plane, or an omniscient being on high! And you can begin to remember your interactions, and movements, and stories that happened in the places you observe. The city is yours, and your stories of your city are free to flow.
Of course, miniature worlds have toy-like implications of dollhouses, model trains and their landscapes, action figures and dolls, racetracks and Hot Wheels. It appeals to our sense of play. You want to touch it. One of the interviewed people was a cleaner on the project, and recounts how lucky she felt to be cleaning an amusement park. She recounted running the Q-Tips down the slides of one of the attractions. Work became play. Our hands are meant to be in them, and they become a symbol of the architectural and infrastructural worlds that surround us. In 1837 Friedrich Fröebel developed a set of small blocks and objects - Fröebel Gifts- to help children in the first kindergarten to learn by doing:
“All human education is bound up in the quiet and conscientious nurture of this instinct of activity; and in the ability of the child, true to this instinct, to be active." (FF)
Many links have been drawn between Fröebel’s Gifts and the architecture made by the former children who played with them (Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller among others). The objects led to a sparking of the imagination, that made their way to the constructed buildings and cities. The blocks and models becomes a map for one’s imagination, as well as potentialities. Not only can we tell our stories, we can reimagine and potentially remake the worlds around it. We become authors in and of the world around us.
SO how does this tie into map? Change sequence?
Boundaries vs. Play
When I think of maps that emphasize man-made boundaries I think of them telling us what the rules are. “This is the way it is, it’s a given, it’s unmovable and unquestionable”. When I see images of the model of San Francisco, it feels more like an invitation: Come out and play! Do you know this place? What do you remember about your neighborhood? Tell me more.
As we have heard again and again, and reminded of recently, “winners write history”. But do they? To be sure often write the dominant narrative of it (in desperate attempts to maintain what they “won”), but it’s never the only version. Learning about history entails both learning and unlearning, going from the authoritarian high school texts, to alternate stories, to first-hand stories in all its forms, from people who lived the decisions of others.
Having various views of history is like anything else: many views makes a more complete picture. It helps you contextualize and compare.
Like standing about the model city of San Francisco, proximity can help you notice what you haven’t noticed before, what you have overlooked. It can help you remember what you have forgotten, and you can add this to work towards a more complete history of a place.
Classroom questions
What materials can add meaning and context to a map?
What is the role of the hand in the workings of the imagination? Of making the imagined become realized?
How does the depiction of a symbolic map, relate to how our body experiences a place? And how can we challenge that in order to open up the idea of a map?
Links
99% Invisible #66 Model City
San Francisco MOMA exhibition Public Knowledge by Bik Van Der Pol
Bik Van Der Pol website
SF MOMA Raw Material Podcast (which houses many of the stories)
Froebel’s Gifts
San Francisco Library Davis Rumsey Map Collection
Alison’s Social Design and Education Blog: When is the Hand a Better Teacher?
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