The Transformation of Space By Event

Richard's comments below (see last post) about a police chase through the eccentric corridors of Frank Gehry's Business School building at Case Western University suggests a rich stream of relationships between space and (spectacular) event. Any number of scenarios come to mind: the route taken by Princess Diana's Mercedes as it raced through Paris, the endless recreations of bullet trajectories across Dealey Plaza and the imagined flight paths of air disasters.

This inscribing of narratives onto geography is played out in the newspaper diagrams that describe such disasters. In attempting to construct a plausible version of events of what happened where and when, such drawings combine speculation with factual description. They are a kind of spatial autopsy, superficially factual maps of horrific events, the kind of thing satirised by J G Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition. Most recently - following the publication of the enquiry into Bloody Sunday - The Guardian posted this interactive diagram of the routes taken by police and marchers through the streets of Derry.