ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the great tradition in architectural discourse involving the mapping of urban totality through the urban plan. In general, these urban maps provided for a balanced conception of the city between physical facts and the more mythical and imaginative dimensions. The urban map containing a certain geography of the imagination has, unfortunately, started to give way to the objectifying tendencies of modern scientific thinking. Even the architectural theories that were based on an abstraction of particular urban characteristics, as became a main feature of Late Modernist, early Postmodern architecture, the depiction of the city that could and even should have offered the basis for the furthering of these theories in architectural production, remained a surprisingly under-developed feature. Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts are brought forward as one of the few examples in architectural discourse in which a proper instrumentalization of the map had been developed by exploring the generative capacity of notations for architectural formation. The chapter closes with an elaboration of the aionological time-dimension of mapping, allowing for forms of laterality and indeterminacy.
