Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space is the first publication of Paul Carter's drawing practice — a body of work that has shaped postcolonial approaches to public space design across more than 25 years of architectural and landscape collaborations.
About This Book
Public space is not a neutral ground, and Paul Carter has spent decades developing the theoretical and graphic tools to prove it. This book presents 46 full-page colour plates and 88 black-and-white figures drawn from over a dozen major design collaborations, alongside Carter's essay on public space as a continuous, multi-modal entanglement of trajectories — kinetic, discursive, and mimetic. The concept of choreotopography underpins the work, insisting that what architectural drawings omit — the performative, the phantom, the socially contested — is precisely what design must address. Designed by artist and designer John Warwicker, the book itself enacts its argument: text and image are dispersed through each other, colloid-like, so that drawing turns into writing at the borders of every page.
Key Features
- 200 pages comprising 46 full-page colour plates and 88 in-text black-and-white figures across more than a dozen architectural and landscape design collaborations
- Book design by acclaimed artist and designer John Warwicker
- Draws on projects including Federation Square, Melbourne, and significant Aboriginal co-design engagements
- Published by ACTAR Publishers
What You'll Discover
- Carter's theory of choreotopography — how the choreographic and typographic registers of public space can be drawn rather than merely described
- How sketches function as ideational timelapses, capturing processes of complexification and dispersal that CAD-based architectural drawings structurally exclude
- The relationship between postcolonial spatial history, hyperdiversity, and the design of genuinely shared public ground
- A book design that is itself a worked argument: the dispersion of text through image and vice versa as a model for a new interface between drawing and writing
About the Author
Paul Carter is a theorist and practitioner whose concepts of spatial history, material thinking, and choreotopography have been internationally influential in postcolonial planning and design ecology discourse. His public art and design experience encompasses major urban projects including Federation Square in Melbourne and significant Aboriginal co-design engagements, as well as work connected to the Olympic Games.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 200
- Dimensions: 165 x 235 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781638401605
- Publisher: ACTAR Publishers
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Urban designers, landscape architects, spatial theorists, and practitioners interested in the politics of public space, postcolonial design discourse, and the relationship between drawing and thinking.