Modernist Counter-Mappings: Three Architects Restructure the World

Modernist architecture’s goal to recreate space for human living prompted three US designers to redesign the world map. Bernard Cahill, Richard Edes Harrison, and R. Buckminster Fuller each restructured the globe to capture the interconnectedness of the continents and of Humanity. A review of the use of world maps in the nineteenth century explains the formation of normative world mapping and its internal fractures. The essay then explores each act of modernist counter-mapping; it concludes by briefly considering how normative cartography adapted to the challenges by appropriating the architects’ global restructuring.