On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2025, KoozArch is proud to partner with the fashion brand MSGM and Berlin-based bookshop, do you read me? to host LESS NOISE. Amidst the frenzy, LESS NOISE carves out a space for reflection, focusing on the potency of publishing, through pivotal projects and intersectional conversations with designers, publishers, authors and editors who are redefining the field. Three conversations — under the titles Breaking Ground, The Laws of Attraction and Publish and Be Damned — will also be available as an audio series. In line with KoozArch’s ambition of making inspirational content accessible, we are delighted to share a series of edited excerpts from selected and critical publications.

Drawing from the book transcalar prospects in climate crisis (Lars Müller Publishers, 2024), this extract by Laila Seewang expands on the perpetual interdependencies between the notion of territory and its visual representation.

Does Territory Exist without Its Visualisation?

Part of what separates the design professions from other fields that investigate environmental change is that our profession operates graphically and geometrically: from the first year of study, we are taught to draw more than we are to write. The tools we use to draw, model, and measure are tools that let the invisible, or not yet visible, become available to the eye so that the mind might comprehend. It would be impossible to think of architecture, landscape architecture, or urbanism without them. Both architect and art historian operate from the perspective that the built and unbuilt environments are constructed from ideas that are graphically mediated during design and in their communication with others.

This essay makes two claims. It argues that graphic representation is an integral part of territory. The tools used to represent territory affect what representations are possible. Put another way, we could say that in order to represent territory, to intervene in it, and to change it, tools are first required to help us see it. Would territory, in fact, be possible without its representation? The essay also suggests that the tools that are used to represent are the same tools that are used to draw but put to different intent. Could territory be something different if we insisted on drawing, as an active production of knowledge, instead of representing as the graphic operation that engages with this slippery term?

Rather than try to understand what territory is as an ontological reality, its many translations and interpretations help to elucidate the different projects that the term brings together. Translated into other languages such as German, it becomes clear that territory is a political (Territorium), geographical (Gebiet), and aesthetic (Landschaft) claim over the land. In French, it merges territoire, parcellaire, or fief, and is etymologically related to terre or terroir. Less obviously, though, territory is also designed. Approaching territory as a project helps to clarify it as a man-made construct of mental (and geographical) conquest and articulation. If it is land, if it is unbuilt, it is none the less designed.

Given that it brings together political, economic, geographical, and aesthetic concerns, territory intuitively seems like an appropriate concept through which to make environmental challenges tangible. Using ‘territory’ over those other terms recognises the choices made in shaping our environment. In the face of rapid climate change, depleting resources, and profligate waste, it seems pertinent to investigate the design choices that were once made that led us to where we are today. If we understand the agency with which design values were projected onto the land, it might help designers be responsible with those choices today. Making territory visible as a set of design choices also turns these choices into a public concern. If territory is a design project, it makes sense for design, and design histories, to try to give sense to the methods behind territory.

Territory as a Spatial Problem

In Ancient Rome, territory emerged as a problem: a political entity’s struggle with being out of scale with its ability to manage a vast geography and its population with traditional methods, of being too big for non-representative comprehension. Rome’s political transition from a Republic (Res publica Romana) to an Empire under Emperor Augustus (Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus) is officially dated to 27 BCE. Though he became sole ruler under the Principate in 31 BCE, it was in 27 BCE that he was granted imperium and the title of first Roman Emperor by the Senate. But the geopolitical project of territory was marked by a longer period of expansion and conquest. Historian Claude Nicolet demonstrates how existing systems of governance and geographical comprehension were ‘incapable of adapting to [the] new territorial scale’ of the Roman Empire: ‘The ineluctable necessities of conquest and government are to understand (or to believe that one understands) the physical space that one occupies or that one hopes to dominate, to overcome the obstacle of distance and to establish regular contact with the peoples and their territories (by enumerating the former and by measuring the dimensions, the sur-faces, and the capacities of the latter).’¹ In the Roman Empire, this meant wheat needed to be collected and redistributed, people counted, taxes paid, land divided and allotted.

Representation was a word and concept used in the Roman world to signify a copy of a thing, and representing the space of empire became an integral tool in Rome’s management, governance, and economy as it transitioned from Republic to Empire.² Geographical accuracy and its exact translation into miniaturised, graphic form acquired an unprecedented practical urgency and the tools that facilitated this produced both a shift in representative technique and epistemological frameworks with which to comprehend territory. How to represent space mattered. In the Ionian tradition preceding Augustus’s project of imperial consolidation, one’s place in the world had been represented as a cosmology; a way of locating one’s self in the world or universe spiritually and culturally. Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad is one such example. History has not passed down an image of it, but it is the first known case of ekphrasis in Ancient Greek: the attempt to textually replicate a work of graphic art so that a reading audience could visualise it. Based upon Homer’s description, the map of the world in the Ionian tradition was made of concentric circles, with the Earth, sky, sea, Sun, and Moon in the centre together with the known constellations of stars. Beyond that came, radiating outwards, a ring containing two cities – one of peace and one of war – followed by scenes of agriculture, harvest, vineyards, cattle, sheep, dancing and, finally, on the outer circumference of the shield, the ocean. In keeping with Ionian tradition, more than a century after the Iliad, Anaximander is often credited with the first attempted representation of geographical space, again, however, in a circle, and without a hint of the spatial extension suggested in maps framed by parchment or paper size. Ionian cosmological representation offered a spiritual and cultural centre, but it was not a tool that could assist the everyday practice of governance.³

It was only in Augustus’s reign that the first attempt to depict measured, scaled space engaged with the problem of Roman territory. Architect and statesman Marcus Vispanius Agrippa’s map of the known world, begun around 12 BCE, was installed on the Porticus Vispania in the heart of the Campus Agrippa in Rome. It was completed, and opened to the public by Augustus, in 7 BCE. Scholars generally agree that Agrippa attempted, in his world map, to ‘give a credible version of the geography of the known world’ utilising Greek mathematical and geographical knowledge alongside ‘recent information derived from the Roman itineraries and route-books.’⁴ Agrippa’s map was the first to represent the territory of the Roman Empire for all the public to see, and for the first time in mathematical, not symbolic, space. The fact that it was installed in the heart of Rome also thus signalled that Rome was the political centre of that empire. It located centre and territory in one swoop, easily communicable to Romans. It said: this is the territory, and we here are at its centre. Agrippa’s map was one part of territorial representation. In a less graphic sense, the territory was also represented through the accomplishments of, and governance by, Augustus himself in the Res Gestae (divi Augusti), also installed in Rome on his mausoleum just after his death. As a catalogue of conquests alongside the locations, descriptions, and inhabitants of integrated places, ‘[t]he Res Gestae … can be considered at least in its second half as a genuine geographic survey … The text appears almost as a commentary to a map and to require the guidance of a drawing. That drawing, Agrippa’s map, was not far off: the portico where it was displayed was a few hundred meters from [Augustus’s] Mausoleum’ where the Res Gestae was installed.⁵

A smaller, but no less influential, tool located in the Augustan complex was the golden milestone. It was from here that the territory was measured. If the capital was where a new representation of territory was located, it was the systematisation of centuriation using the Groma as a surveying tool that facilitated its organised expansion. Surveyed and allocated plots were drawn on bronze tablets and sent to Rome to record the division of land, a practice that mediated between peripheral people and products of the empire and the home base in Rome. Under Augustus, the Etruscan methods of surveying were expanded and refined, cadastral survey techniques were standardised, and the profession of surveyor acquired more status. Treatises for how to survey were produced and used as manuals, the most well-known of which is Hyginus Gromaticus’s De Constitutione Limitum (On the Establishment of Boundaries), written around 98–117 CE and later included in a manual on land surveying produced in Late Antiquity, Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum. The manuals provided rules for how to divide land, how to demarcate it, and how to label the boundary stones. As a tool, the Groma was limited to siting straight lines – roads, plots, forts, and rectangular grids like centuries – on the land.⁶ It was the manuals that described how to treat those unruly and irregular shaped pieces of land cut off by streams or bogs, which were often then designated as common lands. The cadastral surveys that divided the lands acquired by the expanding empire were often granted to military officers in lieu of payment and are still visible in the Po Valley today.

Unlike examples of contemporaneous Greek survey systems of dividing urban land, for example Miletus, or land immediately around new colonial towns, for example in Olynthus, the Roman cadastral system expanded onto the land beyond towns, potentially limitless in its extension, just like the geometrical understanding of space upon which it was premised.⁷ It made the territory comprehensible through measurement. Surveying enumerated. Not only were geographical areas delimited, but also the things that the land supported: people and agricultural products. A transformed census revolutionised how the authorities in Rome could manage the Empire from a distance: data now travelled from the periphery to the centre instead of people, administrative buildings the golden milestone of the biopolitical sphere. These changes reinforced one attribute of territory that is often left implicit: the territory has a centre of power, even if today that recognition has faded into the background. The territory’s representation as contiguous space in maps was a mathematical transformation in spatial understanding. The Republic had not been contiguous. But the Empire was made so through cartography.

Territory Naturalised

In combining the astronomical sciences, which would form the basis of geography, with the detailed empirical knowledge afforded by itineraries and military surveys, which would inform the practice of cartography, Ptolemy’s Geography was the unchallenged basis for geographical knowledge for over a millennium. We know Ptolemy synthesised the work of geographers Marinus of Tyre and Strabo, who had, in turn, based part of their geographical theses upon Agrippa’s map and its probable, but now lost, commentaries. As such, the tools, surveys, and maps of the Roman Empire furnished true geographical knowledge. Ptolemy synthesised this knowledge to produce not only a world map that would influence travel, management, and science for a millennium, but also the methods for representing geographical space in general.⁸ Cartography had become both the representative and epistemological basis of this geography: it provided the tools to represent territory as well as the tools by which territory could even be known and measured.

Centuries of global expansion and exploration continued to contribute data to the well-established geographical methods; Chinese cartographic treatises improved upon Greek methods, and geographers of what is often termed the Islamic Golden Age benefitted immensely from imperial expansion and the geographic data it supplied. But in medieval Europe, the meaning of representation began to change. It is in medieval Europe that feu-dal governance established smaller-scale territories whereby the sovereign or lord was both a physical person but also the political–legal figure of territorial authority. As Kantorowicz elucidates, the ‘publicness of representation’ was granted only to the lord, or persona repraesentata. While other private persons had only one body, the lord had the ability to re-present his first body, as an individual human, in a second immortal body, as divinely ordained ruler. The dual nature of his personhood was what made his re-presentation ‘public’; ‘public’ being synonymous with ‘lord’ in this situation. It was medieval Europe that invested re-presentation with the meaning of ‘replacement’ and no longer ‘copy,’ without suggesting that the stand-in (for a divine being in the medieval period) is identical to the being themself.⁹ Representations started to detach from their originals to become things in themselves even though their meanings were conferred by reference to an original or abstract.

The eighteenth century opened with precise observational navigation made possible thanks to Galileo’s controversial heliocentrism and experimentation of the previous century. It closed with the centuries-long struggle to fix longitude being solved by the invention of the marine chronometer. This device allowed for the time at a fixed place on Earth’s surface to be measured accurately without direct reference to other celestial bodies. The invention quickly superseded Galileo’s method of fixing latitude to the human eye’s observation of Jupiter’s satellite moons. The marine chronometer also contributed practically to the age of empire: Captain James Cook took one on his second and third voyages, having relied upon lunar distances on his first. As the age of European exploration and imperial expansion wound down, multiple prime meridians for establishing longitude finally gave way in 1884 to the Prime Meridian in Greenwich. In comparison to Rome 1,800 years previously, the world’s largest empire now furnished not only its own peripheral territories, but those of the entire globe, with an objective centre for global measurement.

It is also within the eighteenth century that projects of nationhood began to parallel the geographies of empire, and when the Treaty of Vienna (re)established country boundaries in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the national cartographic project exploded across Europe. National surveys made it possible to comprehend a territory ‘of one’s own’ in its entirety: to imagine one could ‘see’ a bounded entity in relation to other national entities where the eyes could not. As German Emperor Wilhelm I toured the first Berlin Industrial Exhibition of 1879, for example, he encountered, possibly for the first time, a globe that showed Prussia in its entirety (at the time extending from Russia to the Rhine) thanks to the new cartographic projects. ‘Now it is possible to follow the journey of my grandson,’ he exclaimed in front of journalists. Exhibitions represented territory in a new way. Displays projected new ideas about nations (for example, industrial might), as well as the tools for their measurement (surveys) and representation (globes), and the products harnessed thanks to global trade networks. Here it is possible to see representation’s new independence: the exhibition was a stand-in for the nation-state, independent from the nation, but a reflection of it. Nonetheless, the connotation of representation-as-copy was still driving the surveys that were increasingly assumed to be precise replicas of that nation-state.

Territory was, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, no longer a problem, but a project to naturalise the nation state. When effected within a now fixed boundary, it stands in stark contrast to the Roman Empire’s notion of territory that held the theoretical possibility of unlimited expansion.¹⁰ At least two broad representational strategies were involved in the project. First, infrastructure networks began to tie the territory together. It is not surprising that, in the 1830s, economic theorist Friedrich List drew up a national rail network for a Germany that did not yet exist in order to promote and make efficient internal economic trade.¹¹ Infrastructure relied upon geographical surveys: siting roads and rails to connect disparate and previously unrelated geographies required knowing the land from a distance. Usually, this view occurred first in the office of the General Staff of the Army. Mapping was the intellectual forerunner to enacting the nation’s unification through rail and financial infrastructures. The economic efficiencies made possible by better connections across Prussia had already been made visible while the Prussian national survey was under way between 1816 and 1847, resulting in not just the Preußische Generalstabskarte, but also in a renewed clarity regarding national bureaucracy and administration.

The term ‘Erschliessungsfieber’ has been used to describe the impact of rapid infrastructural development on both the built and unbuilt areas of Switzerland during the nineteenth century.¹² Networked infrastructure of the industrial period channelled material flows – water, trains, goods, tourists, money, gold, electricity, and a host of other materials. Knowing the territory, and internally connecting it, was linked to defending its new boundaries, a fact highlighted by the fact that surveys were often a military engineering project. Switzerland’s first federal constitution was signed in 1848 as Europe grappled with a year of civil unrest. The first plates of the first Swiss-wide survey organised by Chief of the General Staff, Guillaume Henri Dufour, had just been printed, but the undertaking had already begun in 1832. In 1848, the old confederacy of cantons gave way to the Federal State and now-internal boundaries between cantons gave way to increased attention on the national boundary, firmly established by the survey. Defining the boundaries of the nation defined, in a very practical way, the extent of sovereignty as exercised from a centre of power, now situated in Bern. Michel Foucault defined territory as that region within which governance occurred: ‘sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory.’¹³ He further highlighted the role played by the capital city as a centre of power for an enlarged territorial space. This spatial delimitation became a necessary requirement for the notion of territory in the period, as did its effective governance by a monarch, police force, or other state apparatus.¹⁴

Beyond management of national space, though, the Dufour map also made the landscape itself, in particular its topography, a character in national culture, as was immediately recognised by contemporaries: ‘Dufour judged with great reason that, while observing mathematical accuracy down to the smallest details, one could make a map a work of art and give it the appearance of a painting which would truly represent the relief of the terrain and highlight making reading the map accessible to everyone.’¹⁵ The landscape as a figure in the popular cultural imagination was made possible through its mathematically precise duplication. Places that had previously not held popular attention, such as the highest peak of the Alps, became topological monuments that schoolboys learned about as they studied the map during military training.¹⁶

Ways of living in that national space adopted a second form of territorial representation, undergirding the national territorial project by bringing disparate populations on board with national unification. Cultural narratives and images became the means by which aesthetic ideas of life in, and on, the land were fused with its political–economic management and the Alps became a stand-in for that unity. Written and graphic pictures represented common life inside of the national boundary where, previously, multiple different language groups and cultures had been separated. Johanna Spyri’s Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre from 1879 found immediate success in characterising a Swiss landscape and culture just as industrial development and train networks were eradicating local differences. Across the country, from valley to peak, regions that had previously existed in isolation were connected into a unified whole through rail, and stories flattened their differences, homogenising the inhabit-ants of the territory as much as political structures did. The mountains, the ways of life, the fairy tales, and clothing became stand-ins for the naturalised nation, an abstract yet collective re-presentation of the body national.

Territory as Design

Reproducing national land in maps, paintings, and stories had the effect of merging the economic realities of agricultural production with aesthetic views of that land. This happened as agriculture gradually ceased to be an economic driver in Europe, replaced by trade and manufacturing. Land was shifting from a way of life to an aesthetic view mediated by art, often for urban audiences. And this conflation of territory and aesthetics was further cemented with the ability to reshape land. It has been argued that it was precisely the ability to drain marshes and reclaim land from the sea to establish new settlements in Zeeland and Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that conflated a tradition of territorial management with landscape painting. Aided by geological, and no longer merely geographical, surveys, pushing back the sea with polders and dams to create new land was a national economic project in agricultural stability. The life imagined and enacted by this project was perceptible in painting just as Protestantism fostered new art forms liberated from the representation of religious figures.¹⁷ This conflation is handed down to us through landscape painting traditions that communicate both ways of life on the land and ways in which that land becomes an aesthetic message viewed from afar. Reshaping the land, through major infrastructural projects such as canals, in other words, was therefore directly connected to representing the land; specifically, to being able to show the changes in the land – changes wrought for a host of political and economic reasons, even if it is less the reasons than the results that are apparent in the paintings themselves. The view of territory as a process rather than an object extends beyond the coastline of Holland but can be particularly applied to border regions. There, territorialising becomes apparent as a ‘double exposure’ when, as André Corboz put it, ‘the same geographical area is claimed by two incompatible groups, working on two contradictory projects, like the Romans and the Germans confronting each other on the Rhenish limes.’¹⁸

Indeed, as a concept today, territory fits most neatly within the landscape architecture discipline in terms of design operations. In design schools, it refers more intuitively to the unbuilt than it does to the built, but still brings with it the operative practice of intervening in the territory. Landscape draws upon this aesthetic project of territory, difficult to apprehend without graphic representation. Might a claim be made for territory that by considering it as an aesthetic gaze, inextricable from visual modes of perception, we might operationalise it for epistemological purposes? Might we learn from this active process of territorialising?

Framing territory as landscape is significant in that it helps us imagine territory as a design project. If territory could be claimed from the sea and communicated in the aesthetic realm, then one could very well imagine deploying design methods to contribute to the political, economic, and infrastructural collaboration of territory. By using territory as a concept to interrogate how we project values onto our environment, we also see the impact that prior design choices have had. A map of all the major rail lines of the African continent, built by individual companies and European colonial powers in the nineteenth century, was never drawn, never needed, at the time. But investigated as a territorial project today, combining all those rail projects communicates a clear message: almost all of them run from the interior to the nineteenth-century coastal ports. They are proof that rail lines were designed to extract raw materials from Central Africa for export to Europe via seaports. That map would show us that trying to ‘reconnect’ various cities in many African countries today according to any other logic than that which established these networks in the first place is a difficult task. A colonial territorial logic imposed in the nineteenth century dictates, to this day, long after colonial power was officially removed, how the territory can operate, and will continue to do so. Making this collective history graphically visible also makes it ethically visible and places it in the public domain for discussion.

Framing territory as landscape also allows us to expand and examine how we present it: graphic tools do not merely record a territory; they are also no longer a stand-in for territory. The entire process of translation becomes an active tool. And if we think of that tool as drawing – as thinking and engaging and critiquing while we translate – then both ‘territory’ and ‘representation’ are concepts that can offer us ways of understanding our relationship with the designed environments we create.

Bio

Laila Seewang is an architectural historian whose research uses infrastructural networks as lenses through which to study how society translates cultural values onto material supply chains through design. She is the co-editor of a special double issue of Architectural Theory Review, ‘Timber Constructed: Towards an Alternative Material History’ (2021), and has also written about German architectural historiography, public toilets in Berlin, infrastructure as design, brick manufacturing in Brandenburg, timber histories of the Pacific Northwest USA, and rapid sand filters in central Massachusetts. She has a Doctor of Science degree in architectural history and theory from ETH Zurich and sits on the Board of Directors of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. She is currently a visiting professor with the ALICE laboratory and an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Portland State University.