Hyde Lecture - Bill Rankin

The University of Nebraska College of Architecture Hyde Lecture: Bill Rankin presenting "Base Maps and Invisible Landscapes”". Recorded February 14, 2018.

For this lecture, Rankin will explore cartography and challenge today’s designers to approach this age-old-art with a different lens. For most of the last century, cartography has relied on a simple division between a "base map" and its "thematic" overlays. This is a powerful epistemological diagram that governs the boundary between the visible and the invisible, separating "neutral" topography from environmental, demographic and legal landscapes. In this talk Rankin will present Phoenix and New York City as two mapping projects that challenge this dichotomy and blur the boundary between natural and social, permanent and temporary and scientific and political.