Neglected Dimensions: Sketches for Public Space
By (Author) Carter Paul
Designed by Warwicker John
Actar Publishers
Actar Publishers
9th September 2025
United States
General
Non Fiction
Architecture
History of architecture
City and town planning: architectural aspects
Paperback
200
Width 235mm, Height 165mm
Poet, dramaturge and public artist, Paul Carter, writes and draws public space as a movement form, representing the neglected dimensions of the meeting place. His poetics of the trace finds a superb visual metaphor in John Warwicker's book design.
The essay is a drawing out of implications in the sketches, a suspension of related but different thematic molecules, from which on a 'like to like' principle, sketches are periodically hatched. Colloidal structures are formed at the interface between media: dispersing text and image through each other, the book's design discovers a new interface. Each page exhibits an 'enormous development of surface relative to the amount of matter present'. The magnification of subdivisions (the page) produces new textua distributions intermediate between the solid and the gaseous. The book inhabits its own neglected dimensions. It is a worked example of the view that writing and drawing enact and mobilise what they describe: in a CAD-dominated design culture, this redefinition of representation is timely and liberatory.
Paul Carter (born 1951) is a writer and artist resident in Victoria, Australia. Brought up in the UK and educated at Oxford, he migrated from Italy to Melbourne in 1981 since when he has pursued parallel careers in cultural studies and creative arts. He is Professor of Design (Urbanism), School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University, Melbourne.