Neglected Dimensions

Sketches for Public Space
Paul Carter

How public space is produced is one of the great enigmas of democratic society. Paul Carter’s innovative concept of spatial history, his theory and practice of material thinking and, more recently, his account of public space design as choreotopography have been internationally influential in promoting new postcolonial planning discourses and design ecologies. Neglected Dimensions is the first publication of the drawing practice that underwrites his analysis of public space dynamics. Carter’s description of public space as a continuous entanglement of trajectories, experienced multi-modally (discursively, kinetically, mimetically) is the fruit of a public art experience that has encompassed Olympic Games commissions, major urban design (Federation Square, Melbourne) and significant Aboriginal co-design engagement. It also reflects Carter’s subject position as a migrant where ‘the ground is not given’: the local improvisation of meeting protocols applies wherever hyperdiversity complicates finding common ground. The graphic DNA articulating this trajectory of unending arrival is a kinopoetics that entwines choreography and typography, represented in Neglected Dimensions by 46 full page colour plates and 88 in-text black-and-white figures, drawn from over a dozen major architectural and landscape design collaborations, spanning over 25 years of thinking and making. The sketches are ideational timelapses, evoking processes of complexification, pressurisation and dispersal that the empty outlines of architectural drawings necessarily neglect. They evoke the performances of a public space that is always phantom.

Public space design is collaborative. This principle is reflected in the design by acclaimed artist and designer, John Warwicker. The pioneer chemist Wilhelm Ostwald described colloids as ‘lying in the World of Neglected Dimensions.’ Our book is a textual colloid. The medium of design finely disperses two graphic registers, typography and hand drawing, through each other. The drawings dimensionalise qualities of public space that designers neglect. They do not represent anything but suggest a way of gluing things together. At the borders, drawing turns into writing. The essay is a drawing out of implications in the sketches, a suspension of related but different thematic molecules, from which on a ‘like to like’ principle, sketches are periodically hatched. Colloidal structures are formed at the interface between media: dispersing text and image through each other, the book’s design discovers a new interface. Each page exhibits an ‘enormous development of surface relative to the amount of matter present’. The magnification of subdivisions (the page) produces new textual distributions intermediate between the solid and the gaseous. The book inhabits its own neglected dimensions. It is a worked example of the view that writing and drawing enact and mobilise what they describe: in a CAD-dominated design culture, this redefinition of representation is timely and liberatory.