The traditional monument is understood by its symbolic imagery, by what it represents. It is not understood in time, but in an instant in space; it is seen and understood simultaneously. Even in traditional architectures such as labyrinths and mazes, there is a space-time continuum between experience and knowing; one has a goal to work one’s way in or out.

I have been discussing a lot about quality of life in the last month in very different situations, and it made me thinking this is a key and imperative issue now.
I presented a paper in Changing the change conference in Turin. The conference was about design research for sustainability and was a very outstanding place for exchanging ideas and meet interesting people. I spoke with Chris Ryan

Complex Faces, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

TWDC – Designing connected places Summer School –
Thank you all, it was amazing.

Matthew Frederick in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (The MIT Press, 2007) after saying how to draw a line, also says that there are three levels of knowing:
-simplicity, is the world view of the child or uninformed adult, fully engaged in his own experience and happily unaware of what lies beneath the surface of immediate reality.
-complexity, characterizes the ordinary adult world view. It is characterized by an awareness of complex system in nature and society but an inability to discern clarifyng patterns and connection.
-informed simplicity, is an enlightened view of reality. It is founded upon an ability to dicern or create clarifying patterns within complex mixtures.

The Hospital system map “From client to patient” introduced by… more

Fab, originally uploaded by densitydesign.
[img: Fab/ Summer 2005 /Leonora Sartori+Francesco Meneghini]

As Peter Turchi says (in Maps of the Imagination: the writer as cartographer): “To ask for a map is to say: Tell me a story”.

A selected story, surrounded by blank spaces, sometimes more significant than the story itself, a story from the skew mental map of ourselves

election day, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Density Design (GS+DR) is returning officer and secretary in one of the polling station during the italian election day 2008.
The compulsive obsession for graphs and diagrams led us to draw this…

Mapping Me / Mapping You A roundtable meeting about cartography… more

I was just hanging around in a library close to my office and I bought George Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. While my friend was driving us back home I started to read it out, and that book became our map of a different city, a bright inspiration for the debate about space and urban planning. Try the experiment: