![]() ![]() Our experience at ground level gives us a three-dimensional understanding of the landscape, but it’s nearly always incomplete. A map is intended to provide information on the landscape when viewed from straight above, without depth. If this photo was taken at twice the height, it would most likely hit the sweet spot of showing the best of both worlds.Īt the end of the day, each of the three perspectives discussed here convey information about a place in different ways. Taller buildings get in the way of shorter ones, much like they do at the surface. What we can do is understand depth and height quite easily. It’s still a bit low to fully understand the layout of the streets and buildings, however. In the above photo, we can start to understand what a map of this area would look like, because we can see above the buildings and how they’re arranged in the cityscape. In a way, Nadar had produced a link between the abstracted map view and the ground-level experience that I described above. This goes to show how revolutionary his photographs were, and how air travel had caught the public’s imagination. These publications weren’t advertising the photos themselves, but rather the person taking the photos, as he flies high above the ground. The magazine-cover-caricature at the top of this post and the portrait shown below illustrate this. The aerial photographs were a hit with the public, and Nadar became something of a celebrity for his aerial exploits. This wasn’t taken from a hilltop or high building, it was taken at a place high in the air that was previously unreachable. It may not look like much, but this was the first time the people of Paris had seen their city from above in this way. Pictured below is his first aerial photograph, taken around 520 meters, or 1,705 feet, above Paris. These photographs meant the aerial perspective was no longer at the whim of an artist’s imagination Nadar had properly documented the experience. They do this much more effectively than a map, because they can still convey the three-dimensionality of a space. He was no doubt obsessed with verticality, and his aerial photographs mark a major turning point in the history of human flight.Ī photograph from the air gives a person a new understanding of their surroundings. He also published a magazine that focused on air travel, and established the world’s first airmail service. He subsequently commissioned balloons to be designed and built, and he would allow passengers to take flights with him. He was fascinated by human flight, and in 1858 he became the first person to successfully take aerial photographs while he was in a balloon. Pictured above is Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, better known by the pseudonym Nadar, who was a French photographer in the nineteenth century, just when aeronautics and air travel were entering popular culture. It was balloon travel that first gave us the ability to rise above the surface and experience a true aerial perspective. Before air travel became commonplace, humans really only had maps and high places to understand their landscape from above. When looking at a map, you can instantly cross mountains and valleys to understand what’s on the other side or what’s around that bend, but when you’re at ground level the landscape reveals itself to you as you travel through it. Maps make an area more legible because they abstract the experience into a flattened aerial view, so changes in topography don’t get in the way. This is most apparent in hilly areas, with lots of varied terrain. I’m always struck by how little the maps actually prepare me for the experience of it, however. Whenever I travel to a new place, I like to study maps of the area beforehand to get my bearings, so I’ll be a bit more familiar with it once I arrive. When humans experience space, we use our binocular vision to perceive depth, which is much more experiential than a map or plan drawing can ever hope to be. These are abstract ways of representing a building, in the same way that a map is an abstraction of a place. As an architect, I’ve been trained to understand space through plan, section and elevation. ![]()
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