Cambridge, January 8, 2013
As it turns out, our great encyclopédiste cartographer
Jacques-Nicolas Bellin also made a map of Buenos Aires. Is there a city of which Bellin didn't
make a map of?! Who knows, maybe
he's a character out of a story by Calvino or Borges that drew a map of every
city.
In any case, Bellin's is a rather unusual map of Buenos
Aires. Although one can certainly
recognize the grid, here the geometry is not taken as an underlying principle, let's say as
an abstract construct, but just as a fact on the ground: where the grid is
materialized it appears in the drawing, otherwise it's simply not there. We get a much more irregular image of
the city. Yet, when it comes to
"La Grande Place" Bellin can't seem to help himself. We know that the plaza was, still is, a
rectangle made up of two square blocks.
And we've seen it drawn in all sort of dimensions, two and even three
blocks wide. But Bellin makes it a tad smaller than two blocks wide (he ingeniously disguises the irregularity at the corner of the cathedral) so it turns into a perfect square... as any
good Frenchman would know a proper "Grand Place" should be.
Most interestingly, the map is oriented with the river at
the top. That mean that east is
up. I've seen maps of Buenos Aires
oriented with east down (the earlier ones) and with north up. But this is the only map of Buenos
Aires I know of oriented that way. Why would he do that? I don't know, but I
suspect there is a whole history of the orientation of maps.
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