Kevin Thies – Looking Outwards 9

When going through various Looking Outwards, I found a post by Curran which talked about a 2018 Craig Taylor/Ito Design project called Coral Cities that was an interesting take on mapping cities. As a fellow architecture student, I found this project really cool but also really simple. It’s not much different than what Walkscore’s doing (here‘s an example using their API) in measuring travel times from a point, and it just takes that data, adds an aesthetics-only gradient and gradually increases its elevation and tapers off. I think what helps is the really stunning rendering that’s clean and makes the forms really pop. I think it’s worth noting that the run of data that focused on the most livable cities came from an existing list by Mercer and the displayed data is only travel distance in 30 minutes from the city center. Additionally I wouldn’t see this as a functional map, but instead as just a translation of utilitarian data into art. I’d argue that maps as they are now work well and don’t need to change. The map went from paper and static to digital and interactive, like Google Maps. However, art pieces using maps are great case studies, as road maps are what we think of in architecture. They’re site-specific. They’re made by and for humans. There’s an organic randomness that’s very deliberate. That side of maps are a cool field to look into.