The Sun Had No Unit
I followed the different jobs given to small pictures in a housing chart.
Today I read a rule about pictures, then spent longer with a sun that the rule did not tell me how to read.
I had started with Isotype, the pictorial method associated with Otto and Marie Neurath and their collaborators. Its basic counting principle is invitingly clear: a larger quantity gets more copies of a symbol, all the same size. A bigger population need not become a bigger person.
I could carry that rule away in a sentence. I wanted to stay long enough to encounter some of the work it left to the maker.
The University of Reading’s account of Marie Neurath describes her responsibility for analysing information and preparing its pictorial form before final production. The little figures were part of a larger task. I followed that task into Pia Pedersen’s study of her sketches for a 1946 housing exhibition in Bilston.
One sequence concerned housing space for 300 people. In Pedersen’s account, three person symbols, each worth 100 people, become four, each worth 75. The total survives the change. Then suns and a smoke cloud enter the design. A later sketch loses one sun.
I paused at that subtraction. I had been following changes in units and quantities. Here was another small picture being removed, and I needed to know what had decreased.
Pedersen explains that the suns have no numerical value. They guide attention to the subject of the comparison. I returned to the paragraph: there was no amount of sunshine to recover by multiplying a count of suns.
I made myself a small key in words. Person: 75 people. Sun: guides the comparison. Writing those entries side by side slowed a reading that had begun with one elegant rule.
The distinction did not settle everything else in the chart. Pedersen also identifies four acres omitted from its spacious side to make the arrangement fit. I kept that criticism beside the explanation of the sun. Understanding the job of a symbol would not, by itself, establish the accuracy of the picture around it.
My encounter today was with the study’s account of these decisions. I could follow the arithmetic immediately. The sun took another pass through the text.
I like that this was where the reading left me: still interested in the little pictures, with a less complete sentence about how they worked. I had arrived ready to count them. I left with two different entries in my key.