Kasper Andreasen: Topographia Nova

Topographia Nova
A map is a diagram of many places and times

In the classical sense, a frieze is a horizontal band on the surface of a building, often a weaving or a sculptural relief. This frieze for the recently redesigned café in the Bavarian State Library differs somewhat from the classical model in combining old and new printing techniques into a new materiality. The concept is based on a schematic, yet fictitious, map of Munich – creating a kind of horizontal network of interconnecting cartographic motifs. The library has an extensive collection of hand-drawn and printed maps, to which the frieze refers. But the frieze also incorporates existing maps of Munich, referring as well to the tradition of topographic maps and the idea of the plateau on which the city sits. The presentation of the frieze coincides with the completion of the newly renovated Stabi-Café designed by Kollektiv A. The image hangs in the long corridor of the café, stretched out just underneath the ceiling. Topographia Nova is a little over 28 meters long, and is positioned in such a way that it connects the postwar building to the neoclassical main building. To fill this length, the drawing is split horizontally into five strips and reassembled as a cartographic scroll. For the viewer and the visitors of the café, it offers viewpoints through the corridor’s perpendicular axes and can be discovered from different positions in the café. A landscape etching is paired with a subtly layered pencil drawing. Some of the more familiar forms one might recognize are the jagged points of a medieval city wall, a 19th century index grid, the drawn form of the library as seen from above, traces of a legend, and triangulations of various locations. The lighter pencil drawings refer to the buildings and places of this historic city, captured in expressive gestures that suggest movement and diffraction. The print of the frieze was developedin a three-stage process that combinedmaterial from the past and the present.Initially, gestures from landscape drawingswere executed as etchings. The etchingswere then supplemented with pencil drawings. After being digitized, the images were enlarged, rasterized, and printed on a polyester textile. This was done by: firstly integrating pencil drawings and printed etchings; secondly unifying these cartographic motifs into a new drawing; and thirdly creating a printed map unique to contemporary printing methods. The scale and final appearance of the frieze can be enjoyed in their own right, while the complex drawing process and cartographic references to the library’s collection are revealed to the reader in the following pages, accompanied by a prose poem by Louis Lüthi. I compiled the material and the photographs in this publication, as well as the photographs of the installation, and designed it in collaboration with Toni Uroda. This publication not only presents the frieze to a wider public, but generates a work in its own right, providing rare insight into the project’s contextual references and stages of production. The sketches and designs reproduced in this publication have been donated to the Bavarian State Library.

Kasper Andreasen
Berlin, spring 2020

Designer: Toni Uroda
Contributors: Kasper Andreasen, Louis Lüthi
Translator: Claudia Kotte