“… measures of rule are those that delineate and coordinate particular sequences of events.”
The marks of sequence, schedule, and timing are read in the landscape in the form of how people inhabit and measure place. The deviations, typically out of necessity, from the ordering system stimulate invention and a deployment of new rules and marks.
“Measure… is as much a conceptual apparatus as it is a mode of representation, facilitating events while constructing a particular world.”
When people began migrating across America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the vastness of the landscape created the need for surveys, inventories, and maps to be prepared. Zoning and property allotments became the fundamental guidelines for a draped mesh over the land.
“Survey lines, roads, hedgerows, fences, farms, canals, levees, dams, bridges, buildings, and towns have been laid out as a means of optimizing human settlement and opportunity.”
The physical boundaries and definitions serve to organize the environment and communicate the uniquely American values of democracy, freedom, etc. The imposition of man’s will on the environment is also met with resistance in the form of a never-ending weathering.
“… for what we actually find is only an illusion of human order, a screen behind which lies the unceasing cry of the world.”