stratigraphy | HowDoYouLandscape?

Sometimes a blog should be daily news, like today, January 11, 2012. On my first Google search quest in today’s researching I stumbled on this beauty of a typographical landscape (Google). The (letter) types beautifully cut open the strata that compose the architecture of a landscape.

Michiel Pouderoijen dug up (googled?) that this layered 3d graphic honors the anniversary of Danish anatomist and geologist Nicolas Steno (1638 – 1686) aka Niels Stensen in his Danish language. Steno did not only study anatomy in a time when this was almost a crime still in Italy, but also became known as the “… father of stratigraphy.” … “Steno’s ‘law of superposition,’ — simply put — says that the oldest rock layers are sequentially deposited on the bottom unless otherwise disturbed.” (Cavna) . He also connected fossils with this idea of time being inscribed into the landscape. In his time, long before Darwin, even introducing history into nature was almost a crime. But (just like Darwin) Steno was also blessed with good faith in God and somehow he became blessed by the catholic church in the 20^th century anyways (Wikipedia).

For us, 21^st century landscape architects and urbanists the daily applying of various layer models is almost as common as the use of Google for anybody. We tend to forget that both ways of intellectual digging – googling and layering – are methods made possible only by great achievements of science.