While visitng Peter Van Dijck's personal site I noticed a site map with humans interacting with it. I was enchanted and excited... what a wonderful way to connect personas with architecture (potentially) and thus humanize one's work. I'm only sorry the big version didn't have these people in it.

It also caused me to fantasize about a map this big, painted by a muralist. At CIQ, we're working on a project that will result in a map at least this big, but more because of site size rather than map size... (shudder).

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

- by Jorge Luis Borges
taken from In The Maker, 1960.

close italics. that's better.

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