The Lakes Ignite 2018 open call asked for projects that would celebrate the Lake District as a Cultural Landscape.

MUTT’s project was interested in how humans have interacted with the landscape in various ways, both physically and culturally.

The studio became interested in the iconic Ordnance Survey maps, something that is at once prosaic and functional, whilst also being absorbed culturally.

Lakes Ignite was a temporary program that celebrated the designation of UK’s Lakes District as a World Heritage site.

Apart from MUTT’s, Lakes Ignite also presented contemporary artworks by Michael Shaw, Brian and George Fell, Charlie Whinney, Di Mainstone and Philip Stanier.

Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain, operating since the 18th century.

Studio MUTT, along with the development of buildings and interiors, has designed other temporary installations as the Survi-ville in London (2015) or the Inn Bloom in México City (2018).

Ordnance Survey map had an extraordinary history. Beginning with military roots where, in the wake of the Jacobite Revolution in 1745, maps were commissioned to help track down dissenters north of the wall.

The Jacobite rising of 1745, also known as the Forty-five Rebellion, was an attempt by Charles Edward Stuart to regain the British throne for his father, James Francis Edward Stuart.

The project is focused around one specific period of time: the retriangulation of Great Britain between 1935-1962. The entire landscape of Britain was remapped manually, and mostly by men in tweed.

The installation synthesises elements from this narrative of retriangulation through a collage of scenes and characters that form a peculiar pavilion, dedicated to the Ordnance Survey.

Each element references a specific element in the story of the OS map, whether this be a 3D expression of the maps’ iconic graphics, or the apparatus used by the intrepid surveyors to create it.

MUTT’s idea was to not only create an assemblage of OS references but to also create an intriguing and characterful structure which sat boldly in the landscape, with the presence similar to a small isolated chapel.

MUTT likes to imagine it as part of a network of the lone structures dotted through the landscape.

Elements from the map are scaled up as monumental forms, while the colours are projected from the map into an architectural scale. Two inhabitable spaces within the piece act as single-person art galleries, one displaying the measured and the other exploring the act of measuring.

The seemingly utilitarian cartography of the maps has become a graphic icon in its own right.