Aristotelis Kaleris

Architect, M.S. AAD, Cornell University, United States of America

Aristotelis Kaleris is a licensed architect from Patras, Greece, holding an integrated B.S. and M.S. degree in Architectural Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (2020) and a M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design with a minor in Theory and Criticism of Architecture from Cornell University (2023). He has been awarded scholarships for graduate studies and research from Fulbright Foundation, Gerondelis Foundation, Cornell University and Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. In 2021, he received the Technical Chamber of Greece Architecture Diploma Thesis Award. Aristotelis has worked as a Teaching Assistant in design studios at Cornell and has collaborated with firms in Greece and abroad, as well as completing projects as a freelance architect. His research focuses on architectural theory and history, the evolving status of the discipline in modernity, the theory of representation, design methodology, and the sociopolitical dimensions embedded in these discourses.

Questioning Mapping as a Substrate of Architectural Truth

Keywords: mapping, representation, apparatus, conventions, truth

Abstract: The paper questions the use of maps in architectural design and their agency as mediators of “truth” about places culminating in an explanatory case study drawn from a design research project on Strefi Hill in Athens, Greece. The theoretical analysis outlines the roots of the institutionalized connection between architecture and mapping, which emerged along with the rise of modern cartographic practices in the 16th and 17th century Western Europe. Since then, mapping has become the dominant system of landscape description and is considered an essential medium that bridges reality and design, ostensibly offering architects an informed, objective, and “true” substrate for their work. The paper builds on critiques of modern cartography of the past decades, which highlighted the biased and selective nature of institutionalized maps, questioning their neutrality and their role in mediating a definitive truth about places. Through an ontological approach, the paper identifies subtle yet significant fallacies in this discourse and its pursuit for more inclusive, comprehensive, and “truer” mapping methodologies. It argues that any effort to achieve a “complete” or “better” mapping is defective, since purposive questioning and perspectivity are necessary conditions of any representation and that applies to all maps equally. Drawing on Karen Barad’s notion of the “apparatus,” the paper posits that every mapping process is guided by an apparatus that defines what is presented as “true” about a place. The concluding case study utilizes a strategy of shifting between mapping apparatuses in order to trigger novel architectural responses for an intervention on Strefi Hill in Athens and illustrates the potential significance for architectural design in challenging conventional mapping and understanding the true nature of maps.