February 20, 2004

Map Quest

By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

Iris Miller is an architect turned accidental historian, a professor and city planner whose workaday need to know what belonged where in Washington grew into a fascination with maps of the city. That fascination, in turn, led her to assemble an unusual cartographic history, Washington in Maps: 1606-2000, that has made her a go-to person for all kinds of questions about the layout of the capital. Wondering what inspired the city's 18th-century planners? Curious about the history of a square or