Custom Cartography for Frank Lloyd Wright Sites for UNESCO World Heritage Nomination
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Brewer, C.A.; 2Limpisathian, B.P.; 3Perkins, S.
1PENN STATE Email: cbrewer@psu.edu
2PENN STATE Email: pongpichaya@gmail.com
3FALLINGWATER Email: sperkins@paconserve.org
Abstract
During 2014, the Gould Center at Penn State prepared a series of maps to support application for a set of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings across the United States as an UNESCO World Heritage Site through the U.S. National Park Service. Other UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) sites in the United States include the Grand Canyon and Statue of Liberty. Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect and interior designer who lived from 1867 to 1959 and was recognized in 1991 as the “greatest American architect of all time” by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The sites of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that we mapped for the UNESCO nomination are Unity Temple (Oak Park, Illinois), Frederick C. Robie House (Chicago, Illinois), Taliesin (Spring Green, Wisconsin), Hollyhock House (Los Angeles, California), Fallingwater (Mill Run, Pennsylvania), Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House (Madison, Wisconsin), Taliesin West (Scottsdale, Arizona), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, New York), Price Tower (Bartlesville, Oklahoma), and Marin County Civic Center (San Rafael, California). The project was challenging because sites were geographically dispersed and varied in size. Base data required for large scale mapping varied widely in availability and detail among the sites. Buildings in dense urban areas had parcel data available and others did not. For sites in rural areas, general zoning data served the role of parcels. Open source and hand-compiled data were used to support missing or incomplete content. For example, building footprints were sometimes available for the full area, were hand drawn by us from imagery for other areas, and were added to sparse sets for some locations. National Map data were used for smaller scale mapping, when the Park Service requested contours for three rural areas. We merged data from numerous sources that varied in compilation scale and completeness to produce coherence across the map series. Since the maps fit into a longer report, “Key Works of Modern American Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright—World Heritage Nomination,” a color palette and design guidelines were provided by the client’s book designer. We worked to follow this guide while maintaining contrast and color relationships through scale among inset maps and among elements such as roads, boundaries, open spaces, building categories, and water features. Using GIS for map design was important since personnel at many sites worked through deciding the extent of buffers around the historic locations as they saw the draft maps. Over the months, some sites had as many as ten iterations of these surrounding zones that wind through parcel boundaries (some for which we did not have parcel data). Emergency map production arose in the last days to clarify zoning around sites at intermediate scales. As changes were made, we repeatedly revised latitude/longitude annotations and recalculated property and buffer areas. These maps were completed amongst the press of coursework for the student cartographer, meeting rapid-edit requests and communicating clearly with client groups at the regional non-profit level—Fallingwater, a program of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy—and the national level, with the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and the National Park Service.
Keywords
map design; architecture; conservation