Learning from the Nolli Map: Representing
the Landscape through Figure-Ground
César Torres Bustamante
ABSTRACT Cartographic practices associated with
planning and designing cities, landscapes, and buildings
rely on maps for representing three-dimensional envi-
ronments in two-dimensional depictions. The simplest
depiction is figure-ground, a method that allows a clear
and powerful reading of a space through a binary map-
ping of built space (object) and empty ground (field). The
most influential example of figure-ground is Giambattista
Nolli’s 1748 Pianta Grande di Roma; Nolli’s figure-ground
technique was adopted in the 1960s by faculty at the
Cornell University Urban Design program as a primary
tool for formulating their urban design theories. The most
common use of figure-ground focuses on a binary orga-
nization that creates false hierarchies and denotes figure
and ground as exclusionary poles, privileging the figure
and legitimating its position. Elizabeth Meyer argues “for
a definition of landscape architecture as a hybrid activity
that is not easily described using binary pairs as opposing
conditions” (Meyer 1997, 50); this way of thinking limits
our ability to see, listen, and create. Figure-ground renders
© 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
the landscape amorphous or totally dependent on the
Landscape Journal 39:1 ISSN 0277-2426 e-ISSN 1553-2704
building for its shape and structure. This article reviews
the origin of figure-ground and focuses on two perceptual
principles used in Pianta Grande di Roma (proximity and
contour) that could arguably shift figure and ground from
biased and exclusionist poles, into mutualistic and con-
tingent entities. This alternative perception of figure-
ground may allow a better integration of the ground within
the figure and offers the potential to map in-between
conditions, temporalities, and changes in the landscape.
KEYWORDS Figure-ground, mapping, poché, raster, con-
tour, Gestalt
Learning from the Nolli Map: Representing the Landscape through Figure-Ground
INTRODUCTION
Cartographic practices associated with planning and
designing cities, landscapes, and buildings rely on
two-dimensional depictions to represent three-
dimensional environments. The various strategies
that illustrate subsurface, temporal, aqueous, and ter-
restrial conditions form a rich and symbolic language
that describes existing and imagined landscapes.
These strategies use representational techniques capa-
ble of persuasion, description, and projection
(Desimini and Waldheim 2016). The minimal carto-
graphic visualization is figure-ground, a convention
that allows a clear and powerful reading of the space
through a binary method that separates the object
from the field. Figure-ground is the “simplest possi-
ble representation of urban texture” (Ratti and
Richens 2004, 2), and it is built on the perception of
fills as shapes. Traditionally the figure, or built space,
is shaded in black, leaving the ground empty, or
white when delineated on paper.
Figure-ground maps offer a reductionist graphic
depicting the plan-form of buildings that omits most
levels of information typically mapped in built-up
areas, such as topography, highway infrastructure, or
administrative boundaries. These maps are the most
common type of images used in town planning to
represent objects or buildings, and they reveal voids
formed by streets, squares, gardens, parks, and out-
door spaces (Hebbert 2016). The figure-ground
technique was used by Giambattista Nolli in his
1748 Pianta Grande di Roma and was revived by
Colin Rowe in his urban design theories during the
mid-20th century. Rowe’s figure-ground interpreta-
tion was a simplification of Nolli’s technique. A
deeper look into the Nolli map reveals opportunities
to reconceptualize figure-ground relationships using
Gestalt principles of contour and proximity as
39
representation methods. This article reviews the ori-
gins of figure-ground as an 18th-century mapping
technique, its revival during the mid-20th century,
its consequent adoption in planning as a represen-
tational procedure, and its potential in mapping
materials and temporalities in landscape architecture.
Approach to Analysis
The following section places the representation
technique of figure-ground in a chronological car-
tographic framework. It starts with the emergence
of the method as an alternative to iconography and
elaborates on its widespread use during the 18th
century with the seminal example of Nolli’s Pianta
Grande di Roma. The technique fell into abeyance
with modernism and was resurrected by Colin
Rowe and Fred Koetter in their figure-ground
plans. Their drawings reduced the complex form of
the city to a black-and-white plan (poché). How-
ever, this reduction simplified figure and ground to
binary and hierarchical relations and overlooked
two perceptual principles that appear in the Nolli
map: proximity and contour. These principles, dis-
cussed in the subsequent sections, are presented not
from a semiotic perspective but within a Gestalt
psychology framework to understand their graphic
constitution and visual qualities and their potential
in cartography to reconstitute figure and ground. A
section focusing on proximity explores the idea of
perceived spaces in between figures when drawn
with parallel patterns, as presented in specific sec-
tions of the Nolli map. The discussion includes a
literature review that frames this interstitial condi-
tion in architecture and landscape architecture and
ends with an example of its use in depicting land-
scape architecture elements. A subsequent
examination of “contour” investigates the figure’s
ability to represent changes over time based on var-
iations in edge definition. Changes are exemplified
by analyzing detailed representations in Pianta
Grande di Roma that illustrate the current and past
conditions of important buildings. The article con-
cludes by outlining the limitations of a simplified
black-and-white mapping technique and asks for
the incorporation of perceptual principles in urban
study and landscape architecture mapping to po-
tentially capture a more complex figure-ground
relationship.
40 Landscape Journal 39:1
FIGURE-GROUND
The term “figure-ground” evolved in the science of op-
tics and psychology, denoting the processes by which
the eye and brain distinguish objects in a visual field.
Gestalt psychology focuses on explaining the stability
and coherence of everyday experiences via perceptual
processes, the most important of which concerns the
distinction between figure and ground. Figure-ground
relies on the visual discernment of regions to recognize
figures and forms instead of lines and curves: to see a
figure, one must be able to group regions within which
figures appear (Dent 1996). Starting in the early 20th
century, Gestalt psychology established theoretical
principles like heterogeneity, contour, surroundedness,
orientation, size, convexity, and familiarity that assist
in the recognition of figures (MacEachren 1995;
Robinson et al. 1995; Tyner 2010).
Colin Rowe was familiar with Gestalt theory and
its application to the visual arts, and as a Renaissance
historian, he knew the Nolli map (Caragonne 1995).
In the mid-1960s, Rowe and Fred Koetter started
teaching at Cornell University (Koetter met Rowe
previously while earning his master’s degree in
architecture from Cornell). Their ideas about con-
textualism denounced the failures of modernist urban
planning and its destructive consequences in the his-
toric city. In Collage City (1978), Rowe and Koetter
interpret the city as the location where, over time, the
cultural and political aspirations of its citizens shaped
its built form—the city was seen as a memory theater,
“a record of a man’s aspirations and failures” (Hurtt
1982, 71). They used two methods of analysis and
drawing in representing their urban design theories:
one was the aerial axonometric (an aerial perspective
that reveals the spatial qualities of a sector in a city),
and the other one was an abstract technique to depict
urban space, referred to as figure-ground. Rowe and
Koetter used the figure-ground technique to simplify a
three-dimensional complexity into a two-dimensional
plan that clarifies the structure and order of urban
spaces. A figure-ground approach to spatial design is
an attempt to manipulate the solid and void relation-
ships by adding, subtracting, or changing the physical
geometry of the pattern (Trancik 1986).
Origins
The cartographic representation of settlements dates
back to circa 6200 BCE wall paintings of Çatal
Hüyük in central Turkey (Elliot 1987). In many
cases, the style of representation was dictated by the
materials used for inscription, such as the ground
plans of Tuba, a suburb of the city of Babylon. These
fragments of clay tablets demonstrate the typical Ba-
bylonian style of incising in straight strokes, where
possible, as the clay was usually too soft to permit
curved lines. Although no town plans survive from
ancient Greece, the symmetrical form of cities sug-
gests that urban surveying was a well-developed
science. The legacy of Roman land surveyors (agri-
mensores) survives in fragments of marble tablets
bearing parts to a larger city plan of Rome. The agri-
mensores’ techniques were lost at the end of the
Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE, and
reemerged in Europe between the 9th and 12th cen-
turies with the copying of the treatises of the
agrimensores. Most plans are unscaled “picture
maps” in which walls and buildings are drawn in
profile in a simplified ground plan.
Realistic depictions of 15th-century European
towns started appearing in painting backgrounds and
manuscript miniatures (Elliot 1987). These realistic
impressions of urban areas were typically drawn
from a bird’s-eye viewpoint, even though aerial
travel was not attainable at that time. During the
Renaissance, the prevalent study of projective
geometries and perspective drawings had a direct ef-
fect on urban cartography. By the 17th century, these
views privileged the city’s architectural splendors
over the street patterns. The bird’s-eye view allowed
a cartographer not only to convey the dimensionality
of the buildings and architectural features but also
to impress the power and grandeur of such work on
the reader.
Elliot (1987) notes that urban cartography
sought an emotional response that reflected the pride,
dignity, and sense of importance the city-dweller felt
for the community. Bird’s-eye views were character-
ized by meticulous illustrations of cities and
buildings, as well as the inclusion of elaborate allego-
ries, metaphors, and symbols. In the history of
cartography, iconographies usually merged symbolic
qualities of an art work, such as biblical scenes, por-
trayal of the influential person who commissioned
the work (a king or pope), or integrated abstract
concepts such as peace and justice. Peace was gener-
ally represented as an angel holding an olive branch
Learning from the Nolli Map: Representing the Landscape through Figure-Ground
or palm and justice as a blindfolded figure holding a
sword and scales. Iconographies were heavily orna-
mented and often contained realistic depictions of
miniature buildings. The precision of a site plan was
sacrificed for a more pictorial cartographic style, and
the illustration served little use for way-finding or ur-
ban management.
An alternative approach to iconographies is
documented in the Imola map of 1502 by Leonardo
da Vinci, an exact survey-based plan that is not icon-
ographic but ichnographic: it represents the ground
plan of buildings instead of their appearance (Harvey
1980). Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI,
asked da Vinci to produce a survey to strengthen
the town’s fortifications. To construct the survey,
military engineers needed a different kind of
representation that depicted the layout of sites, struc-
tures, routes, spaces, and barriers (Hebbert 2016).
In producing an ichnographic survey suitable for
military purposes, da Vinci used new technologies
(e.g., a special odometer and a magnetic compass)
to accurately measure and record proportions and
relationships between land features. The Imola map
introduced a novel technical precision in cartography
with the use of scaled ground plans, which later be-
came common throughout northern Europe during
the first half of the 16th century.
Until Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first true
urban atlas published in 1570, the portrayal of cities
was usually rendered through paintings, manuscripts,
book illustrations, or details on topographic maps.
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum was a systematic collec-
tion of maps of uniform style (Elliot 1987). Further
developments in surveying methods improved urban
cartography through the 18th century. Newer maps
abandoned the decorative bird’s-eye and map-view
forms, and town plans were produced to a higher
standard of accuracy.
The most influential and detailed ichnography
of that time is Nolli’s Pianta Grande di Roma. The
mid-18th century was the culmination of a period
of considerable urban development after the Re-
naissance and Baroque periods. Pope Clement XII
decreed “a rational reorganization of [Rome’s] social
and juridical administration through a finalized plan”
(Aurigemma 1979, 27). Pianta Grande di Roma was
published in 12 sheets (Figure 1), each measuring
44 cm · 69 cm, and it focused on documenting
41
Figure 1
Plate 5 from Pianta Grande di Roma. The buildings are depicted as a solid color that contrasts with public interiors and spaces.
(Source: The New Plan of Rome by Giambattista Nolli part 5/12 (1748), Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index
.php?curid=4364463.)
modern Rome without use of any preexisting data.
Every building, ruin, apartment block, and alley had
to be measured anew to ensure the greatest precision.
In addition to creating an ichnographic map, Nolli
employed unusual techniques for the time, including
orienting the map with north located at the top of the
map (ending the practice of placing that cardinal di-
rection at left), and distinguishing between true and
magnetic north by including a compass rose that in-
dicated both directions (Maier 2015).
Nolli’s preference for an ichnography generated
a map that epitomizes the authoritative image of a
plan in which everything can be seen at once: “the
plan and section can never actually be experienced,
but through their privileged status as a visible object,
they simultaneously represent and generate the
whole” (Pai 2002, 56). The Nolli map revealed,
in an accurate figure-ground, the relationships of
buildings and spaces in the city: it showed publicly
accessible interiors as extensions of the street realm
42 Landscape Journal 39:1
(see Figure 1). The map abandoned traditional
perspectival views and made a clear and legible dis-
tinction between public and private spaces for the
first time (Warner 2005).
Cartographers and historians have found Pianta
Grande di Roma to be a source of discoveries and
insights, not only for the inclusion of unusual urban
elements (e.g., covered or open drains and water
fountains) but also for the unique articulation be-
tween public and private space. Nolli carefully
delineated the interior plans of nearly 2,000 build-
ings, showing detailed plans of churches, theaters,
courtyards, and porticos of buildings, as well as the
entrances and stairways of major palaces (Verstegen
and Ceen 2013).
Pianta Grande di Roma set a standard for sur-
vey accuracy at the scale of a whole city, which was
emulated by other maps. The ichnographic plan be-
came the most recognizable style to vividly express
the figure-ground basis of urban space during the
18th century. Although the figure-ground approach
was not the only technique used for mapping, the
vast majority of map impressions on steel or copper
plates vividly expressed the figure-ground basis of
urban spaces. By the turn of the 19th century, the
growing skills of surveyors and cartographers shifted
town plans from decorative to utilitarian objects, and
by mid-century, the Industrial Revolution provided
means to mass produce inexpensive, up-to-date street
plans (Elliot 1987). Rapid urban growth also meant
that town plans would quickly become obsolete and
required constant revisions by cartographers to keep
up with the demands of a literate urban population.
The ichnographic plan became a city’s most readily
recognizable urban identifier, and figure-ground dia-
grams were used to illustrate urban principles, such
as Camillo Sitte’s publication City Planning Accord-
ing to Artistic Principles (1889).
The introduction of lithography from the 1820s
onward made map-making easier and less expensive
than laborious and costly engraving on copper. This
new technique was extensively exploited in the Uni-
ted States and Canada, with commercially produced
county and city atlases and a revival of the bird’s-eye
view to depict even the smallest communities. The
fast development of industrial societies shaped mod-
ernism. Town planners started rejecting the street as
the primary public space and the facade as the public
aspect of a building. Thus, modernism had no use for
figure-ground as a mapping technique. Figure-ground
rarely appears in the postwar reconstruction plans of
the 1940s and was absent from later modernism in
the 1950s. Instead, the new urban design movement
favored three-dimensional visual techniques such as
sketching and photography, or conceptual mapping
where “figure-ground played no part” (Hebbert
2016, 712).
Revival of Figure-Ground
The rediscovery of figure-ground in the mid-20th
century is attributed to Rowe and Koetter, who used
it as a primary graphic tool in formulating urban de-
sign theories. The technique became a powerful
pedagogical corrective to the idea that urban renewal
meant tabula rasa as it did not consider historical
context (Hebbert 2016). Figure-ground represented
built spaces with a fill and left as empty (or white)
space what was not building (ground). Rowe and
Learning from the Nolli Map: Representing the Landscape through Figure-Ground
Koetter referred to this binary condition as the
figure-ground phenomenon, Gestalt diagram, or
poché. The term poché was commonly used at the
École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and its earliest re-
corded reference is Gustave Umbdenstock’s Cours
d’architecture (1930). Umbdenstock, a French archi-
tect who taught at the École Polytechnique, defined
poché as a plan that contains all the sections of the
walls about 1 meter from the ground, seen from
below the ceiling. He believed that poché should
depict the protrusions or reliefs of the walls in rela-
tion to the ground, which could be tinted in any
color (he recommends black because of its rigor and
monumentality).
In The Study of Architectural Design (the only
English publication on the Beaux-Arts method, com-
monly used in US architectural schools until the late
1940s), poché is defined as “the walls of a plan
blackened in; the study of a plan with reference to
the walls and piers only” (Harbeson 1927, 310).
This publication highlights the “richness” of poché
for monumental buildings formed by ornaments, ni-
ches, small columns, and so on. It also identifies
hierarchies in the different parts of a building: for ex-
ample, bigger rooms will usually have thicker walls
to support the great spans required for the roof, and
these walls may have pilasters, engaged columns,
panels, or niches intended for the services of the
building. The “richness” of poché “give[s] scale and
character to a plan” (Harbeson 1927, 137).
The ateliers or studios of the École des Beaux-
Arts made a differentiation between two types of po-
chés: poché pur, a tinting that highlighted structural
elements, and poché dilué, a shading with a diluted
ink for secondary elements such as non-load-bearing
walls (Castellanos Gómez 2012). The Study of Archi-
tectural Design makes a similar recommendation for
drawing the poché:
The poché is in black ink, both the outline drawn
with the ruling pen, and the surface between.
All the other lines of the plan are drawn with a
diluted ink, and should be sufficiently dark so
that they will not be lost in the first washes of the
rendering after being rubbed (to remove pencil
lines and dirt) in preparing the drawing for
rendering—and yet not so dark as to conflict
with the poché. (Harbeson 1927, 138)
43
 In Complexity and Contradiction, Robert
Venturi (1977) used the term poché to discuss the
relationships between the inside and the outside of a
building, such as the spatial impressions and accom-
modations by the mass of a wall. According to
Venturi, an exterior wall should “induce simulta-
neous awareness of what is significant on either side.
An in-between space in this sense provides the com-
mon ground where conflicting polarities can again
become twin phenomena” (1977, 82). The wall is
not just a separation between inside and outside but
a device that mediates these spaces, characterized by
the “richness” of intermediary elements, such as pro-
trusions and depressions.
Venturi’s poché highlighted the struggle between
the interior requirements of a building and those of
its exterior shape. As a technique, it became an ap-
propriate intellectual and representational tool that
urbanists Rowe, Koetter, Leon Krier, and Rob Krier
used against the object-focused architecture of Le
Corbusier and other modernists, in which buildings
were designed only as figural objects, while “space
[was] only a back-ground to those figures”
(Wortham-Galvin 2010, 62). Modernist architecture
constantly deferred to the efficient use of material
and construction practices, producing flat planes and
generally rectangular volumes. In contemporary ar-
chitecture practice, poché has become more a
drawing convention and less a spatial condition.
Poché represents the graphic code used in working
drawings to denote the space between the outer and
inner wall surfaces and to indicate the materials used
(La Marche 2003). The simplification and objectifica-
tion of the technique is epitomized in Mario
Gandelsonas’s definition of the poché plan: “a plan
where city blocks and building-objects have been re-
presented as solids” (1999, 90). The shift in poché as
a representational technique omits Venturi’s building
interior-exterior struggles and highlights the objectifi-
cation of buildings.
The contemporary use of the term poché centers
on a definition as mere representational graphic
code, reducing the word’s ability to convey spatial
richness and its capacity to render exterior or interior
characters. City blocks and building-objects are the
solids, against a mute landscape, an “invisible back-
ground awaiting a building’s design to establish place
and order” (Meyer 1997, 47). According to Eliza-
44 Landscape Journal 39:1
beth Meyer, this binary association blinds us from
seeing complex webs of interrelationships. The ar-
rival of modern architecture and the binary pair
architecture-landscape “have relegated the landscape
to what is not architecture” (Meyer 1997, 47), con-
ceptually and graphically.
This connotation of figure-ground is evident in
architectural historian Sigfried Giedion’s publication
Space, Time and Architecture, in which he character-
izes architecture and nature as binary terms that are
juxtaposed and “directly confronted” (1967, 138). In
Global City Blues, architect and urban designer Daniel
Solomon refers to the figure-ground drawing as a
“black plan,” a method of drawing a plan in which
“buildings are depicted as solid black, and everything
else is the white of the paper” (Solomon 2003, 88–89).
Meyer argues that figure-ground has limited
analytical capabilities in that these maps fail to
represent the spatiality of trees, landforms, and other
“in-between” conditions. She refers specifically to the
notion of a forest or bosque as a solid mass: the spa-
tiality of a grove of trees “is neither solid nor void,
neither figure nor field; it exists in an extraordinary
realm between the two that changes in layering, den-
sities, and transparencies from year to year and from
season to season” (Meyer 1997, 57). Meyer ex-
emplifies efforts to address the spatiality of plants in
the 1950s drawings of James Rose (where line and
tone drawings create transparency and layering) and
in Garret Eckbo’s Landscape for Living bird’s-eye
perspectives. Eckbo not only focused on the organi-
zation of space in plants (a three-dimensional
silhouette of complex and variable enclosure) and
their kinetic character (“a living, growing struc-
ture”), he also communicated the spatial, structural,
and temporal character of plants as design material
using transparency and detailed texture in his per-
spectives (Eckbo 1950, 94).
The prevalent use of poché as a graphic style in
urban planning has been contested with some experi-
mental visualization techniques that build on the
relational “in-between” condition of figure and
ground. In the work of architect Mario Gandelsonas
and landscape architect Nadia Amoroso, drawings
use poché techniques to represent nonbuilding enti-
ties. In his analytical drawings of the US city,
Gandelsonas criticizes the traditional role of draw-
ings as static representations of the city and develops

Figure 2
Greenbelt in Ottawa, Canada. Students were instructed to create
a vegetative figure-ground for a 2 km2 area, then followed by a
zoom-in 500 m2 to create figure-ground of street block network
and figure-ground of built form. (Image used with permission
and courtesy of Daniel Rozanski and Hillary Eppel, from Nadia
Amoroso’s Landscape Architecture Design Studio course at the
University of Guelph.)
poché graphics that concentrate on articulating chan-
ges between architecture and city. As shown in
Figure 2, Amoroso asked her design studio students
to use poché to understand cities’ fabric and connec-
tions. Figure-ground graphics of built form, street
blocks, and vegetative elements reveal the fabric,
shape, patterning, and connective tissue of the city
(Amoroso 2017). This representation assigns new
subjects to the blackening of poché, rendering legible
figures that are not buildings. Although the approach
is not innovative, the reading of a city based on the
patterns created by vegetative elements subverts the
conventional definition of the figure-ground map. It
shifts figure from mapping only buildings into also
Learning from the Nolli Map: Representing the Landscape through Figure-Ground
mapping trees, offering an alternate understanding of
the city and questioning its configuration not only by
its solids but also by its public spaces.
The experimentation with poché techniques be-
yond the traditional architecture-landscape binary set
opens up possibilities for spatial representation.
More than just a drafting convention, poché can be
used to explore better integration between figure and
ground. This integration takes place at a perceptual
level: Gestalt principles of perception explain the
processes that assist in the visual discernment of fig-
ures. “Proximity” and “contour” are two of these
principles, and they were used as graphic techniques
for the construction of Pianta Grande di Roma. Both
principles show a potential to expand the perception
of the (solid) figure, which may be constructed using
transparency and layering effects.
PROXIMITY
The Gestalt law of proximity states that elements
that are close to one another appear to form groups,
and create the illusion of shapes or planes even if
these items are not touching. In the Nolli map, build-
ings appear to be poché or a solid fill (Figure 3,
right). However, a close inspection will show the ma-
jority of these figures are created using parallel fields
of lines: a “raster” pattern, as seen in Figure 3, left.
Raster is a term borrowed from Latin rāstrum, a
“hoe with two to six tines” (Merriam-Webster n.d.);
raster alludes to the parallel pattern left by this tool.
Raster scan was a method used for image storage
and transmission in early computers and televisions,
based on a systematic line-by-line scanning process to
create an image. A parallel concept of the raster is
seen as a painting technique by De Stijl artists at the
beginning of the 20th century. Flatness was then seen
as a universal quality. De Stijl proponents advocated
that pure abstraction will not have a perspective of
depth: the difference between the form and its sur-
roundings (or between figure and ground) needed to
be eliminated in a painting. Vilmos Huszár and Piet
Mondrian dissolved the visual illusion of depth and
achieved an ideal flat composition in their paintings
by interweaving forms in a raster pattern (Blotkamp
1986; van Campen 1997).
In Pianta Grande di Roma (see Figure 4), build-
ings are perceived as a poché (a solid fill, almost
black), but on close inspection, one can discern a
45
Figure 3
Detail of plate 5 showing the raster figural pattern. The image on the left has been magnified 200% of its original size to enhance
the horizontal hatching; the image on the right shows a detail of plate 5 at its actual scale. (Source: The New Plan of Rome
by Giambattista Nolli, part 5/12 (1748). Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4364463.)

Figure 4
Detail of Pianta Grande di Roma disegnata colla situazione di tutti I monumenti antichi (plate 2, volume 1) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
(1756). The image on the left is a detail printed at the actual scale; the image on the right has been reduced 25%. Piranesi depicted
the plan of Rome and the location of antique monuments as fragments of a map. These fragments are placed on a flat surface
rendered gray using a horizontal hatch. The shadows projected by the map, the monuments and the artwork title (“ROME”) are
achieved through another pattern superimposed on the original hatch. Nevertheless, the additional superimposition does not result in
a completely solid black figure. (Source: Public domain, courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery, https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections
/objects/214783.)

46 Landscape Journal 39:1

Figure 5
Detail of plate 5 showing the double raster pattern. The image on the right (shown at actual scale) displays a portion of the Pantheon (top
center), a letter R that stands for rione or district (middle center), and the circular wall of the Baths of Agrippa rotunda (bottom center).
The image on the left is printed at a 200% enlargement, showing the superimposition of a double raster pattern. (Source: The New Plan
of Rome by Giambattista Nolli, part 5/12 (1748). Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4364463.)

detailed horizontal linear parallel pattern. This tech-
nique was not exclusive to Nolli’s work but was a
convention that engravers used to represent
shaded areas.
Figure 4 uses a closely spaced diagonal hatching
to depict a gray background for an illustration that
maps fragments of ancient Rome by Giovanni Bat-
tista Piranesi. The space between the lines permits a
superimposition of additional information or layers:
the figure can include other figures onto itself by us-
ing the white spaces left by the pattern. In Piranesi’s
illustration, the additional pattern is seen as a sha-
dow projected on the background by the fragmented
pieces: this shadow is darker than the gray back-
ground, but it is not a completely solid black figure.
This overlapping technique allowed 18th-century
cartographers to superimpose layers and include ad-
ditional figures within figures. Nolli added the
number and name of Rome’s districts, which appear
as darker shapes on figural fields or a double raster
pattern, as seen in Figure 5. The overlapping of fig-
ures on figures shows that the technique not only
was driven by the technical requirements used in the
engraving process at that time but was also a con-
scious decision to include more information that
otherwise would have been lost in a completely
blacked-out figure, thus subverting the exclusionist
condition of figure. The number of layers that one can
add to this figural construction is limited by the avail-
ability of interstitial figural spaces: figural raster is
formed by meaningful white space contained within it.
It is important to find the right balance between
including additional layers and their discernibility as
figures. Figural raster is perceived as a solid if the
composition lines are close to each other. The incor-
poration of ground in figural interstices allows for
more figures to be included. Nevertheless, if the sepa-
ration between lines is too great, the eye may have
difficulty perceiving it as a whole. This condition of a
figure embedded in a ground is used by Peter Eisen-
man to analyze the spatial conditions of his United
Nations project in Geneva, in which “the ground no
longer frames the object, but becomes part of the ob-
ject itself, thus transgressing both the conditions of
container and contained and the figure/ground
dialectic” (Eisenman 1998, 34). Eisenman calls this
subversive character of binary figure-ground the
interstitial.

Learning from the Nolli Map: Representing the Landscape through Figure-Ground 47
Interstitial Figures
The interstitial presents a condition of figure-ground
that is neither all solid nor all void but something
that contains both. Eisenman questions the binary
condition of solid and void as depicted in Piranesi’s
1762 Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma engraving.
Piranesi was an Italian artist interested in mapping
who also helped in the publication of the Nolli map
(Dixon 2002). In Campo Marzio, Piranesi “inserted
even in the smallest voids between the figure’s addi-
tional figures, which can be called interstitial figures”
(Eisenman 1997, 243). These interstitial figures are,
ideologically and graphically, a condition of space
and spacing: instead of a solid poché, they are “a
presence within an absence” (243), setting up two
conditions of figure. The figure is no longer inert or
static but a presence that is articulated. The rear-
ticulation of the figure adds another layer to the
map: a relationship that avoids binaries and proposes
a new way of seeing that focuses on the “spaces in
between.” The ambiguous figure operates similar to
Meyer’s rediscovery of space between binaries, “the
space of hybrids, relationships and tensions.” She
uses the phrase “articulated space” to define a “spa-
tiality between the built object and the figural void,”
a “layered space” that relies on transparencies and
densities (Meyer 1997, 58).
Nolli created interstitial figures in his (mono-
chromatic) maps by superimposing figural patterns.
The differentiation between figures can be also be
done through tints (including poché pur and poché
dilué) or through encoded coloring. Designers and
cartographers have used color techniques to create
additional layers capable of articulating gradations
and nuance. The diversity of figure-ground through
color and shades is useful when a more detailed
character of the built fabric is needed, such as the
distinctions between public-private, land-water,
softscape-hardscape, vertical-horizontal, and
surficial-subterranean. Although the information is
rich, the masses and voids, along with other layers,
are not as immediately legible as they would be in a
classic figure-ground. Color allows for adding layers
but there is a trade-off between wealth of informa-
tion and clarity of intention. The drawing can be a
composite of so many figure-ground layers that it
may “exceed the categorization” of a classic figure-
ground drawing (Desimini and Waldheim 2016, 138)
48 Landscape Journal 39:1
and is therefore separate from the binary techniques
analyzed in this article.
The interstitial character of the figure, which al-
lows layering of additional figures, is a condition that
painter and art theorist Gyorgy Kepes referred to as
transparency. In Language of Vision, Kepes writes
about an optical quality in which “figures are able to
interpenetrate without an optical destruction of each
other. Transparency however implies more than an
optional characteristic, it implies a broader spatial
order” (1951, 7). Consequently, through transpar-
ency, a figure can superimpose and overlap on other
figures without losing its perceptual properties. This
condition is achieved by inserting interstitial figures,
which can be used to represent different materials and
spatial conditions in the landscape, such as the various
overlapping types of vegetation and their variations in
height and densities in tree canopies or forests.
Figure 6 shows a figure-ground map of Canberra
Parliamentary Triangle, drawn with a thin hatch to
map all permeable surfaces. The technique assigns
figural values to gardens with low vegetation, grassed
parkland, and paths, and leaves a large central sec-
tion of the map blank, denoting Lake Burley Griffin.
In the map, a thicker superimposed figural pattern
represents the crown of deciduous trees. These two
figural layers map vegetation and distinguish be-
tween grasses and trees. The conscious differentiation
assigns programmatic values to the ground, which is
consequently read as parking lots, roads, buildings,
and so on. The superimposition of figures not only
operates graphically but also reveals a spatial condi-
tion of surfaces; for example, none of the trees are
planted in tree pits—they are all planted on grassed
areas or along vegetated strips.
The construction of a figure pattern with poten-
tial for additional figural layering reveals more
possible levels of information communicated for a
single condition. This can be a useful mapping tech-
nique to translate temporal or enhanced conditions,
where figure and ground are no longer defined as op-
posing concepts but become “complementary aspects
of the same medium” (Hoesli 1997, 95). The layering
of figures can address dynamics of the same agent or
condition, such as variations on vegetation types
(vine, ground cover, root, herbaceous, shrub, under-
story, and overstory layers) or seasonal changes in
canopy density and growth for deciduous trees.

Figure 6
Top image depicts Canberra Parliamentary Triangle with
parklands and Lake Burley Griffin (center), Kings Park (bottom
left), Commonwealth Park (bottom right); the lighter figures
depict grassed parkland and low vegetation with deciduous trees
as a superimposed raster layer (darker figures). Bottom image
shows parkland (lighter figure) with deciduous trees (darker
figure), illustrating the two layers of figural patterns. (Bottom
image is a 1800% enlargement of the rectangle at the left side of
top image).
CONTOUR
The Gestalt principle of contour, or “the place
where the perceived figure appears to end” (Dent
1996, 86), is also seen in the figural aspects of 18th-
century ichnographies. Nolli drew sharp borders to
limit the nearly 2,000 buildings and interiors in the
inhabited center of Rome. The impenetrability of the
figure is well conveyed through this visual strategy,
delineated by parallel filling to communicate the pri-
vate character of such spaces. Pianta Grande di
Roma uses this customary contour to define figures,
emphasizing the perception and legibility between
areas. Figures that lack contour generate a fuzzy
edge and weak experience of figure as they fade into
the background (MacEachren 1995). Although in
Learning from the Nolli Map: Representing the Landscape through Figure-Ground
some sections of the Nolli map the contour may ap-
pear as a thicker line than the hatching pattern it
encloses, the contour disappears perceptually when
the map is seen from afar—as does the pattern. The
contour is only visible up close. From a distant view,
the principle of proximity visually merges the con-
tour with the figure.
Nolli used a variety of contours to convey
more information about Rome’s built environment,
such as the city’s condition at that time and its past
configuration. Surviving ancient buildings are
emphasized with a double raster pattern, so it is per-
ceived as a solid black to contrast with the hatched
gray of later constructions. An example of the dou-
ble raster pattern can be seen in the Pantheon, the
Baths of Agrippa, and the detail for the letter R for
rione or district in Figure 7. For partially ruined
structures, he distinguished existing architectural
members from those he had reconstructed by depict-
ing the latter in outline only. Nolli included
buildings that no longer stood, as long as there was
reliable record of them, by using stippling to “show
the conjectural nature of his representation” (Maier
2015, 216). These techniques illustrated the passage
of time, which is absent from other maps at that
time. The raster figure not only documented the cur-
rent condition of Rome, it also gave a glimpse of the
past by including certain scenarios that left a trace in
the urban fabric.
Some of these mapping techniques are com-
monly used in current graphic conventions to
represent spatial and temporal conditions and there-
fore may not seem innovative. For example, in
technical drawings, a continuous line style is used to
depict edges directly visible, and short-dashed lines
are used to represent edges that are not directly visi-
ble. The dashed line reveals a spatial condition that is
no longer there (Nolli’s map) or that may be behind
other objects and thus not visible (technical draw-
ing). Similarly, the depiction of topographic contour
lines using continuous and dashed lines implies tem-
poralities. The use of dashed and continuous lines for
existing and proposed contour lines shows the poten-
tial change in the terrain. Although this convention is
inverse to Nolli’s representation, these uses of line
style imply a temporal condition: a building that is
no longer there (Nolli’s map) or a topographic con-
figuration that is yet to be (proposed contour).
49
Figure 7
Detail of plate 5 showing Teatro dei Satiri; the existing ruins are shaded in a darker raster pattern, while the footprint of the original
theatre is completed in an outline (image on the left is magnified 200%; image on the right printed at original scale). (Source: The
New Plan of Rome by Giambattista Nolli, part 5/12 (1748). Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=
4364463.)
Perception
The reading of figure-ground as poché depends on
the distance at which Pianta Grande di Roma is
read: parallel hatchings blend into gray from an aver-
age viewing distance (Verstegen and Ceen 2013). Its
perception operates similarly to modern cartographic
interfaces such as Google Earth and its zooming
function, a feature that was inspired by Charles and
Ray Eames’s 1968 film Powers of Ten. The features
of the map transform and give the viewer access to
multiple distinct registers of information and the abil-
ity to see or read things that might not otherwise be
legible (Gretchen 2010). These perceptual qualities
are also exemplified by the uncanny nature of aerial
photographs as they reveal aspects of the land that
would otherwise remain hidden or unseen. The
viewer must apprehend the aerial photographs in a
slow and contemplative manner. At first glance, the
images appear to be grasped immediately but then
demand “to be read more as a map of a visual text
that must be decoded” (Corner and MacLean 1996,
xvi). The initial perceptual intention of poché is
achieved when the Nolli map is viewed from afar,
but when closely seen, one starts to find ambiguity
50 Landscape Journal 39:1
on the originally perceived black plan. The raster
pattern of figural variations such as letters over fig-
ures, lines over figures, and figures over figures only
appears with close scrutiny.
The amalgamation of contour in Nolli’s work
creates a perceptual figure, which varies from the
way Rowe, Koetter, and Wayne Copper used figure-
ground to describe urban morphologies. At the Cor-
nell University Urban Design studio, Rowe and
Koetter used figure-ground to evaluate classical and
modernist cities, and Copper identified reversibility
between buildings and spaces (Copper 1983; Rowe
and Koetter 1984). Figure-ground maps are essential
in urban investigations because they juxtapose
clearly articulated information to compare a city’s
change and growth across different periods of time
or with different cities. These figure-ground patterns
focused on depicting a binary built void through a
poché that no longer references the relationship be-
tween figure and ground. Subsequently, these binary
depictions become a “simplified poché,” stripped
from the perceptual differentiation between poché
pur and poché dilué, and from the general awareness
between inside and outside.
 When referring to Venturi’s use of poché, Rowe
and Koetter recognized that the term was either
forgotten or relegated to a catalog of obsolete
categories, particularly when used at the urban scale
as a mediator between two opposed conditions
(Rowe and Koetter 1984). By the 1990s, poché was a
well-established and effective tool to map the urban
fabric. Michael Hebbert argues that the changes en-
abled by the computer, and the ability to deconstruct
digital maps into layers, enhanced the value of the
technique and made figure-ground “plentiful and ac-
cessible as never before” (2016, 719). Hebbert also
points out that this accessibility increased with the
spread of figure-ground through the internet, not
only in cartography and planning but also as a popu-
lar graphic for branding T-shirts, lampshades and
placemats. As evidenced by a course that University
College London offers to students seeking a career
in the built environment, the technique is a skill that
can be learned online. In a free two-hour course,
the viewer can learn how to create a figure-ground
diagram, “one of the simplest and most common
diagrams used by planners and urban designers,
showing which land is covered by buildings and
which is not” (UCL 2019).
Poché as a representational method remains
widespread in current urban design practices and is
mostly used to represent the present, past, and future
of towns and cities. As a technique, it is used to ana-
lyze existing urban tissue, generate master plan
parameters for street alignment and dimensions, set
frontage lines, and determine the footprint appropri-
ate for new construction. Poché construction does
not require exceptional representational ability and,
although tedious and time-consuming, is a “pure tool
for urban design” (Hebbert 2016, 724).
CONCLUSION
This article identified techniques in Nolli’s Pianta
Grande di Roma that create inclusive relationships
between figure and ground. The figural raster em-
braces a latent ground in which the figure is visually
solid (poché) and allows for engaging visualization
and interpretation, depending on the distance at
which the map is viewed.
The Cornell University Urban Design studio re-
vived the figure-ground in their urban design theories
as a critique to modernism’s object-focused architec-
Learning from the Nolli Map: Representing the Landscape through Figure-Ground
ture. As a representational tool, figure-ground offered
control, constancy, and permanency to urban plan-
ners, but with limitations. Hebbert acknowledges
that the figure-ground technique is parsimonious and
that the simplification of the city to a pattern of sol-
ids and voids omits all the variables of interest to
social science, as well as aesthetics, visual culture,
and ecology (Hebbert 2016). In The Genealogy of
Cities, David Grahame Shane also recognizes that the
technique “severely [restricts] the information these
drawings could convey [and] urban designers [limit]
themselves to the plan in an effort to compress all the
information into a single surface” (Shane 2009, vii).
The use of poché to depict only buildings is com-
monly found in contemporary urban maps. It creates
a binary model with false hierarchies and amorphous
space, something Meyer (1997) referred to as the un-
differentiated space surrounding a building.
Nolli’s Pianta Grande di Roma constructs intri-
cate figures by layering linear patterns to convey the
past and present complexities in city form. Using Ge-
stalt principles of proximity and contour, the linear
patterned (rasterized) figures on the Nolli map may
be perceived as solid or inert and could articulate dy-
namic processes, densities, and variations, such as
seasonal changes between evergreen and deciduous
plants. The perception of figures can also incorporate
representations of landscape phenomena, such as
spatiality, temporality, and materiality, which, ac-
cording to James Corner, are “unique to the medium
of landscape” (Corner 2002, 146). Corner has also
asked for propositions that do not necessarily have
to be new and radical but rather “derive . . . from a
subtle realignment of codes and conventions of some
convention or technique” (Corner 1999, 164).
Reconstructing figures with proximity and con-
tour principles is an approach built on Corner’s idea.
With realignment of the figure-ground convention,
a solid fill is dissolved to allow the figure to embody
representational features analogous to the spatial and
material conditions being mapped. For example,
Amoroso’s figure-ground maps of trees reveal unex-
pected urban patterns. Through hatched patterns and
contour definition, more layers of mapping infor-
mation could be added, such as tree species, health
conditions, the trace of extinct species, or even the
visualization of an urban tree canopy over time. The
shift from a uniform line that limits figures into a
51
figural raster allows for mapping dynamic edge con-
ditions. Figural raster as a mapping tool can
document activity, exchange, hybridization, and in-
terreliance, not just between ecotones in natural
systems but also in cities and other built ecosystems.
In the postindustrial era, city edges are not “an ab-
stract line or vector . . . they exhibit physical width
in the real world” (Karl 2011, 70). They are the
by-product of a plethora of cultural processes and
needs, including active, redundant, or dormant ease-
ments; political boundaries; waterfronts; and rivers.
A figural raster can map these interstitial edge spaces,
transitional and reinforced edges, and other
boundary-forming conditions.
The reconstitution of figure-ground through ras-
ter is derived from subtle realignment of the mapping
method used by Nolli in Pianta Grande di Roma; a
close reading of the Nolli map shows how this tech-
nique achieves better integration between figure and
ground. The figural raster is visually perceived as so-
lid, but its layering reveals and addresses dynamic
figure-ground relationships. An approach to recognize
figural raster through perceptual principles of proxim-
ity and contour expands the dimensions for realizing
interstitial spaces and dynamic edge conditions
around figures. Similar to Eisenman’s understanding
of solid/void and figure/ground as “conditions [that]
are possibly embedded within one another” (Eisen-
man 2007, 53), rasterized figure and perceived
contours allow ground to be embedded in the figure.
This mode of representing and thinking creates an ac-
tive reciprocity between figure and ground: in design
fields, it offers alternatives for graphic representation
that articulate fluctuating and temporal conditions.
As the landscape is a living biome with unfolding
flows of before and after, it “cannot be spatially
reduced to a single point of view” (Corner 2002,
147–148). Its constant flux and change cannot be
captured in a single moment in time. This review of
the raster technique with perceptual principles pres-
ents a mapping approach that creates a dynamic
figure, which may be better able to communicate the
fluid conditions and patterns in the landscape.
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AUTHOR CONTRIBUTION The author is solely
responsible for developing and presenting all aspects of
this article.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS None.
AUTHOR César Torres Bustamante is an associate
professor of landscape architecture at California
Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, whose
research interests include landscape representation,
mapping, diagramming, and visualizing temporal
phenomena. He earned a B.Arch. from Universidad de
las Américas in Puebla, Mexico, and his MLA and PhD
from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in
Melbourne, Australia. He teaches design studios,
visualization, and 3D courses, in which he experiments
with conventional and innovative representation
techniques and media.
PEER REVIEW STATEMENT This article was subjected
to a blind review by at least two external peer
reviewers.
53
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