Architecture’s Cartographic Turn

Over the past thirty years something of a ‘cartographic turn’ has taken place in key areas of architectural theory and practice. What I mean by this is that there has been an increasing use of mapping as a generative – that is as a formal, formative, and not simply analytical – process within architectural projects. While this has been commented upon, there has been little attempt to analyse the historical or ideological basis of this phenomenon. It is evident – and this is one of the main points of interest – that cartographic strategies have been used to orientate the architectural project in contrasting ways: as well as supplying procedures supporting avowedly ‘post-humanist’, ‘weak’, or ‘abject’ architectures, such approaches are also deeply implicated in the closest thing we have to a contemporary ‘visionary’ architecture, one whose discourse is saturated with references to spirit, faith and hope. Both call upon the resources of the map in the context of a rhetoric of ends: of man, humanism, architecture and its possibilities. But equally, an important aspect of the ‘cartographic turn’ is the emergence, more recently, of a new ‘productivist’ ethos informed, in particular, by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The emphasis here falls upon what the architectural strategy/representation does rather than what it means: what is valued is the maximisation of effects rather than any single determination. This valorisation is cognate with a politico-aesthetics of mobility deployed in the face of processes of ‘subjectification’ (the carcereal spectre that haunts the thought not only of Deleuze and Guattari, but also of Foucault and Derrida) and it is one of the peculiarities of the situation that the map, historically so complicit with those very processes, is drawn upon in the refusal of them. Or rather it is, more frequently, the diagram: but map and diagram are closely related for Deleuze and Guattari and not easily separated and, as this paper will show, the characteristics which lead to the new productivist valorisation of the diagram are already present in the two tendencies mentioned above.