Images And Landscapes Hidden In Maps

Abstract

In the process of construction on the topographic cartography, we find different stages: office/pre-field work, field work, office/post-field work. In all the stages, the surveyor can create different landscape types even if all of them refer to the same space. In the first of these stages the surveyor begins to mentally visualize a landscape (called “imagined topographic landscape”) from the observation of cartographic materials collected before venturing into the field. In the second stage, already in the field, the surveyor actives his visual acuity to rebuild and reshape the previously imagined landscape, completing it with empirical data (then, as a result, his creation would be a “measured topographic landscape”). In the last stage, post-field, the surveyor begins to draw - in mapping language - the landscape that he had imagined, saw and measured (producing a “drawn topographical landscape”). In this work, we try to establish the first guidelines for considering what the topographic landscapes are, the variety of register that it is involved, the languages that are assembled and what the process that helps its construction is like.