Approaching the archive through
architecture, cartography,
and data visualization.

Scope & Content Note

To work in the archive as an architect is to treat information as a material, one to be explored, understood and shaped through representation. By thinking of the library as a site of production, not just preservation, I approach archival research as a studio practice: borrowing methods from architecture, cartography, and data visualization, my scholarship is continuously being made and remade with each new site, map, and source.

The map holds the research.
Drawing organizes the argument.

Cartography

Eliza Harris, 1840s. From enslavement in Northern Kentucky to liberation in Canada. →

Edward Moxley, 1837. Thirteen people left Kentucky together on a Saturday night in May. →

William Wells Brown, 1834. From enslavement in New Orleans to liberation in Cleveland.

The Siebert Map. Wilbur Siebert's network of Underground Railroad routes, reexamined.

Oregon Trail, 2022. 2,000-mile overland route, 1836–1869.

Astronomical Observation. Munsell Color and the Observatory.

Exhibitions

Newberry Library, Chicago — Underground Railroad cartography. 2022.

Thompson Library, Ohio State — Archival mapping work.

Columbus Metropolitan Library — Public exhibition of cartographic research. 2025.

Biographical Note

Karen Lewis is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Knowlton School, Ohio State University. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and Harvard GSD, and has taught at Ohio State since 2009.

Her work is driven by a particular cast of mind: an exceptional memory for dates, details, and primary sources; a gift for uncovering relationships between elements that do not ordinarily connect; and an ability to enter a complex body of information and find her way through it — to see, beneath the accumulation, how it is organized. She is drawn to systems: to astronomy and three-dimensional abstraction, to typography as both meaning and grace, to cartography as a method for making the unseen visible.

This is the sensibility she brings to the archive. Approaching primary sources as an architect approaches a site — spatially, materially, with attention to structure — she uses the tools of architecture, cartography, and data visualization to generate new historical and geographic knowledge. She teaches her students to do the same: to have ideas, grounded in facts and held together by technique.

Her work has been exhibited at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Thompson Library at Ohio State, and the Columbus Metropolitan Library. She is the author of Graphic Design for Architects (Routledge, second edition 2026). She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard

Commonplace Book

CP.01

The Newberry Library, Chicago

An independent research library that is elegant, serious, and absolutely unpretentious. Do you want to see the entire set of Topographic Engineering Surveys? They will wheel you a library cart with the complete fifteen-volume set. Kindness, quiet, beautiful green lamps, big spaces that smell of old books, an elegant marble stairwell that winds down to Walton Street and the park across the street. Nested in the Gold Coast. Meet up with the Map Guys for lunch at Il Tempio and talk about cartography over a Hollywood Salad. Best archive with the best people ever.

CP.02

Anni Albers, Weavings, 1920s–70s

Color built from structure, not applied to it. Every thread a decision — material, tonal, spatial — and the weaving the record of all of them at once. I have been looking at these for decades and they are not finished with me.

CP.03

Lauretta Vinciarelli, Watercolors, 1980s–2000s

Light as structural argument. She was trained as an architect and it shows — these are not atmospheric washes, they are spatial propositions. The watercolor medium is doing the opposite of what watercolor usually does: instead of loosening form, it is making it precise. I keep returning to them because they prove something I believe about drawing: that restraint is not absence. The empty room is full.

Approaching the archive througharchitecture, cartography,and data visualization.

Graphic Design for Architects

Approaching the archive through
architecture, cartography,
and data visualization.