The Little Street or ‘Het Straatje’ is a painting by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). This oil painting depicts a view of a typical Delft street, with a brick house facade occupying a large part of the composition.
Paul Laffoley’s Cosmological Cartography
Paul Laffoley was an artist known for his colorful paintings mixing science and knowledge systems. His complex compositions explore different concepts and multiply questions about the universe, its origin and its functioning.
Cretto di Burri, the Buried Town
The Cretto di Burri is a white concrete sculpture located on the ancient small town of Gibellina in Sicily. Alberto Burri built this monumental landscape artwork on the ruins of the town, destroyed by an earthquake.
Pancho Guedes, Fluid Forms beyond the Utopia
Amancio Guedes, known as Pancho Guedes was a portuguese architect living in Mozambique. He distinguished himself by an architecture mixing his personal influences and his artist’s work on curves and angles.
The Hotel Haegumgang, a floating hotel in North Korea
The Haegumgang Hotel is the world’s first floating hotel. After a 14,000 km journey through Singapore, Australia and Vietnam, it is currently docked on the east coast of North Korea.
The Shabono, Yanomami Community
The Yanomami are one of the most numerous indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest. Gathered in small communities, they live in a unique structure named Shabono, a large circular dwelling that perpetuate their communal way of life.
The International Fair of Dakar, Postcolonial Architecture and Identity
North of the city of Dakar, not far from the airport, a set of pyramidal volumes form the International Fair of Dakar complex. This building demonstrates the growth of Senegal and more broadly the growing influence of modernism in West Africa. But more than that, it is above all the expression of an architectural identity of its own, the asymmetrical parallelism, which reflects the postcolonial ambition of the country.
Emma Willard, Chronographer and American history
Emma Willard was an American educator who created an innovative system of historical representation: the chronographer. This system of graphic representation made it possible to represent historical information in a geographical and chronological context, and more broadly, to map time.
Tōkyo Shisei Zuhyo, a Statistical Atlas using Isotype
In 1935, Kyodo Print Co. Ltd. published a statistical atlas of the city of Tokyo. The collection of illustrated documents exploring Tokyo City was a forerunner in its use of Isotype. This new visual language was used to convey complicated information to the reader by translating it graphically.
The French Departments, the History of the Grid Map of France
Following the French Revolution, a new administrative division of France was put in place. Several departmental division plans were proposed, including a grid map of France, with each square representing a department.