To understand, make a map
“Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary,” an exhibit of new and old mapmaking at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), is meant to inspire a rising generation of designers to draw, with precision, what they see. The show, on view at Gund Hall through Dec. 19, is also meant to give students a sense of the aesthetics that have been vividly present in cartography for centuries, but that may be muted in an age of 3-D representations of space. Curator Jill Desimini stood between a 13th-century map of the British Isles, on which settlements were marked with castles, and a flickering video made last month that stacked layers of geographic data. In defense of the modern age, she said, “It’s much more challenging to make something that has to work at so many different scales.” Desimini, an assistant professor of landscape architecture, teaches “representation,” or how to render a design in...