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As a youngster, in the bedroom I shared with
my sister, I came to know intimately the ceiling of the room where
I was supposed to be napping. I stared upward for hours, making
out forms of imagined countries in the water-stained plaster. Why
was I seeing international borders even before I knew the meaning
of the concept? It was a natural way to pass the time and kept
my restless imagination engaged far beyond the bedroom while my
body got the rest my mother thought it needed.
Maps intrigue us, perhaps none more than those that ignore mapping
conventions. These are maps that find their essence in some other
goal than just taking us from point A to point B. They are a vehicle
for the imagination, fueled up and ready to go. We look at these
maps, and our minds know just what to do: take the information
and extrapolate from it a place where they can leap, play, gambol--without
that distant province of our being, the body, dragging them down.
Of course, part of what fascinates us when looking at a map is
inhabiting the mind of its maker, considering that particular terrain
of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience.
If I had mapped that landscape, we ask ourselves, what would I
have chosen to show, and how would I have shown it? The coded visual
language of maps is one we all know, but in making maps of our
worlds we each have our own dialect.
I map, therefore I am: This could be the motto for the contributors
to this book. You Are Here is my own personal proof of the mapping
instinct: an idiosyncratic collection of maps that transcend
the norm, either because of the mapmaker's personal viewpoint,
or sense of humor, or ingenuity, or all of the above. These are
maps of the imagination, as all maps are, only more so.
--Excerpted from the introduction to You Are Here: Personal
Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, by Katharine
Harmon '82. Copyright Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. Used
with permission. Images from You Are Here: Personal Geographies
and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon (Princeton
Architectural Press, 2004)
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