Troels Steenholdt Heiredal: the Aarhus Drawing

size: each rectangle is an A2 piece of paper 594 x 420 mm. The overall drawing (5.46 x 3.56 m) consists of 48 sheets of A2 paper (12m2)                             I walk
anywhere I get to - I walk
     wherever I am - I walk a lot
                            to feel the city
                            the urban landscape
                            allow for it to affect me
                            start a conversation with it
                                                   inside me

I sat at my drafting table in Copenhagen and started to draw a very large plan drawing of Aarhus, the city where I had lived and studied architecture for three years. The drawing was informed by the memory Aarhus had built within me.
It is three years since I did the Aarhus drawing. I wrote then:
I was late, as usual, on my bike heading towards Aarhus Central station. My sister called me, “Where are you? The train leaves in a few minutes, you know that right? Hurry up.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming; I’m biking as fast as I possibly can...”
As I was biking through the streets of Aarhus, a thought hit me – was I even biking the best route to the station? I feel I know my way in the city, I have a relationship with the city, but I have no idea how the city manifests itself within my mind. I have a strong feeling that this is the fastest way to get from the school to the station due to the basic layout of the streets as they appear in my mind, but I could be wrong. Has my mind reshaped the geography of Aarhus to fit with my habits and my conviction of what the city is like?
As we move through the city the city moves through us. We engage with it, we continuously develop our relationship with it. The city is both physical built structure and a mental construct; cities have personality, and within the city the different parts have different personalities. There are parts of the city I like, parts I frequent a lot, there are parts I only go to if I have business there. Some I only pass through to get from one part to another. Some parts I don’t like, and some parts I have to be in. My knowledge of Aarhus is arranged according to these relationships. We build our understanding of the city; our minds rearrange the spaces to build a personal geography within ourselves.
The relationship between the places we visit and the spaces between them, guides the construction of this inner geography we all carry with us. To investigate the relationship I have with the city, I shall draw the city as I remember it.

Three years on, I think more carefully about the role of walking through the city, through the landscape; sensing the environment. As we use inner speech to define ourselves, we have inner geographies – a space where we are able to take in the world, to deal with it, to build our understanding of it. As David Gersten says, we build space, as space builds us; we are interdependent. We move through the cities as the cities move through us; and in that exchange we construct each other.

The hippocampus is responsible for ttransforming short term memory into long term memory; it also converts two-dimensional map information into a physical walk – a path in three dimensions. Memory and space live side by side and interact – inner speech and inner geographies.  Our relationship to the world and the city can’t be objective, it can only be subjective: it’s a relationship. Explaining it will only diminish this relationship: one must accept that you do not understand, but still want to know. Only then will you find ineffable beauty, because you were not looking for an image you already knew. If you are truly engaged, you will come upon things you had no idea existed, things truly new, not something understood. 

My thesis investigated the organic parts of inner Paris where the city seems to spontaneously spring new connections, the rational structured grid of most of Manhattan, and the threshold between the massive and the petit of Moscow.

Does the more clear structure of Manhattan lead to more clear perception of oneself? Does the entangled structure of inner Paris cause you to run into dead ends, or even open ends where you get lost? Or will the mind always find a way to connect the dots, and build new linkages, just as the mind is able to distort the grid and transform the structure put in front of it, by looking at it very closely.

My drawing of Aarhus is so large because if it were any smaller, if I had an overview while drawing the drawing, I would just have drawn the image of Aarhus as I know it from maps. By making the scale the point where I needed to get into the streets in my mind, I drew the feeling of Aarhus; I sensed Aarhus as my inner geography.  

Troels Steenholdt Heiredal, flâneur, walks cities collecting photographs, films, drawings, writings and notes. These ideas and frgments are being re-configured and presented to the audience at www.troelsheiredal.com