giovanni corbellini
diagram
“Kazuyo Sejima is a new type of architect… If there is one way that
best describes the spirit of her structures, it would be to say that it
is ‘diagram architecture’”. With this short definition Toyo Ito, in
addition to precisely describing the synthetic quality of the works of
his colleague, introduces a more general question, attributing to
the diagrammatic substance of her architecture a specific role of
newness in the evolution of the discipline. We may agree more or
less with this interpretation, but it is certain that the diagram has
played an increasingly central role in the most advanced
architectural production. In recent years it has become a specific
feature of the neo-avant-gardes. Hyungmin Pai retraces this
development in American architecture, revealing the progressive
obsolescence of systems of representation from the beaux-arts
tradition, focused on the object in itself, as opposed to more
effective graphic instruments. Instruments capable of synthetically
relating strictly compositional aspects to those of function,
symbolism, concept, time and, definitively, to all those elements
that cannot be probed by means of simple projective geometry, yet
represent a major part of contemporary design scenarios.
There is little doubt, in fact, that the present architectural situation
is marked by the progressive, accelerated burst of questions,
information, needs and intentions that are increasingly diversified
and heterogeneous with respect to the specifics of the discipline.
The efficacy of the diagram lies to a great extent precisely in its
interdisciplinary potential, its capacity to act as a mediator between
different, inter-related quantities, helping to explain them and
providing a sort of graphic shortcut for the representation of more
or less complex phenomena (for a collection of diagrams from a
wide range of areas, see Fisuras, July 2002). So it is no surprise
that its appearance in the field of architecture is often linked to
incursions of personalities from other backgrounds, often so
effective that they leave lasting signs. Besides the well-known
example of Bentham’s panopticon, reinterpreted by Foucault and
then Deleuze as a paradigm of social control, we can also site the
“diagram only” indications on the drawings used by Ebenezer
Howard to promote his idea of the garden city. The undeniable
communicative power of these graphics, connected to the
correspondence between concepts and their representation, is
accompanied by the fact that diagrams can take the form of true
“machines for thinking”: the mathematicians Gerard Allwein and
John Barwise reveal the extreme elasticity of these tools, capable
of being simultaneously precise and imprecise, of simplifying and
illustrating complex phenomena, eliminating the superfluous.
Critical attention began to focus on these themes between the end
of the second world war and the 1970s. This involved the spheres
of architectural and urban design, as well as that of historical
interpretation. The bubble diagrams produced at Harvard under the
guidance of Walter Gropius (Herdeg, 1983) were joined by the
research of Christopher Alexander (who considers the diagrams to
be the most significant contribution of his very well-known Notes on
the Synthesis of Form), the essays of Kevin Lynch (from The
Image of the City to The View from the Road – in collaboration with
Appleyard and Myer – developing new graphic tools for the
Ito, Toyo, “Diagram architecture,”
El Croquis, no 77, 1996.
Pai, Hyungmin, The Portfolio and
the Diagram: Architecture,
Discourse, and Modernity in
America, MIT Press, 2002.
Soriano, Federico (ed), Fisuras,
July 2002, Diagramas @.
Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et
punir, Gallimard, 1975, eng. tr.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, Allen Lane,1977.
Deleuze, Gilles, Foucault, Editions
de Minuit, 1986, eng. tr. Athlone,
1988.
Allwein, Gerard and John Barwise
(eds), Logical Reasoning with
Diagrams, Oxford University
Press, 1996.
Herdeg, Klaus, The Decorated
Diagram: Harvard Architecture &
Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy,
MIT Press, 1983.
Alexander, Christopher, Notes on
the Synthesis of Form, Harvard
description, respectively, of perception of urban space and the
interaction between space and speed), the comparative analysis of
the villas of Palladio and Le Corbusier proposed by Colin Rowe
and that of the proportions of Renaissance buildings by Rudolf
Wittkower, as well as the contributions of Lawrence Halprin on
creative processes, of Robert Venturi (who in Learning from Las
Vegas utilizes diagrams both to describe and compare urban
phenomena and to effectively illustrate his theoretical conclusions),
and many others.
The interval of historicist postmodernism, with architecture’s retreat
into its most traditional specificities, temporarily overshadowed
most of this research, especially the more explicitly anti-tectonic
approaches that began to spread in the 1980s, making an early
appearance in the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture (MoMA,
1988, with projects by Gehry, Libeskind, Koolhaas, Eisenman,
Hadid, Coop Himmelblau and the Villette by Tschumi).
The competition for the Parc de la Villette (1982) represents again
a fundamental turning point for the subsequent development of
architecture, also in this specific area of the diagram. Both Tschumi
and, above all, Koolhaas demonstrated on that occasion (and in
many other projects) that the diagram is the tool that allows control
of complex, innovative design processes, progressively freed of
objectives of a formal character, and capable of producing works of
architecture that come to strategic grips with uncertainty and
indeterminacy. From this moment on, the diagram has entered a
new period of research that has only recently begun to generate
critical fallout. In 1998, the Dutch magazine Oase devoted a theme
issue to Diagrams, followed that same year by ANY no 23, whose
contributions defined the main themes of research on the potential
of the diagram as a simultaneously reducing and proliferating,
abstract and open machine. The issue was edited by Ben van
Berkel and Caroline Bos, confirming the interest of the UN Studio
in diagrams, as demonstrated in other forays on this theme, from
Mobile Forces to the chapter “Diagrams” in Move, where they
emphasize the tool’s capacity to deal with complexity.
Nevertheless, the goal of gathering all the infinite varieties of
information involved in design processes makes the reading of
their diagrams equally if not more difficult than the interpretation of
the objects produced, whose relationship with the diagrams
appears to be more evocative than directly explanatory or
generative.
The year 1999 was one of particular critical intensity for the subject
of the diagram. Bart Lootsma presented, in “A+U”, some works by
Ben van Berkel, underlining the iconic quality of the graphic
representations, which were able to sum up innovative processes
for shared use by extended design teams. Thomas Kamps
proposed a systems approach to interpretation of the diagram,
from analysis to project to communication. Peter Eisenman and
Stan Allen, two of the authors of ANY no 23, demonstrated their
belief in the central importance of this tool by also returning to the
subject in their monographs. In Eisenman’s case, the approach is
entirely within architectural composition, seen as an abstract
exercise of three-dimensional configuration of space. The diagram
enters his research as an analytical-cognitive tool, applied first to
the study of the architecture of Terragni, and then evolves into a
design tool capable of describing and implementing the various
University Press, 1964.
Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the
City, MIT Press, 1960.
Appleyard, Donald, Kevin Lynch
and John R. Myer, The View from
the Road, MIT Press, 1964.
Rowe, Colin, “The Mathematics of
the Ideal Villa,” Architectural
Review, 1947.
Wittkower, Rudolf, Architectural
Principles in the Age of
Humanism, Warburg Institute,
University of London, 1949.
Halprin, Lawrence, The RSVP
Cycles: Creative Processes in the
Human Environment, Braziller,
1970.
Venturi, Robert, Denise ScottBrown and Steven Izenour,
Learning from Las Vegas, MIT
Press, 1972.
Johnson, Philip and Mark Wigley
(eds), Deconstructivist
Architecture, MoMA, 1988.
Bijlsma, Like, Wouter Deen, Udo
Garritzman (eds), Oase, no 48,
1998, Diagrams.
Van Berkel, Ben and Caroline Bos
(eds), ANY, no 23, 1998, Diagram
Work.
Van Berkel, Ben, Mobile Forces,
edited by Kristin Feireiss, Ernst &
Sohn, 1994.
Van Berkel, Ben and Caroline Bos,
Move, UN Studio & Goose Press,
1999.
Lootsma, Bart, “Diagram in
costumes,” A+U, no 342, 1999.
Kamps, Thomas, Diagram Design:
A Constructive Theory, Springer,
1999.
Eisenman, Peter, Diagram Diaries,
Thames & Hudson, 1999.
Allen, Stan, Points + Lines:
Diagrams and Projects for the City,
Princeton Architectural Press,
1999.
successions of compositional transformations behind his proposals
(decomposition, grafting, scaling, rotation, inversion, superposition,
drifting, folding...). The “grammatical” efficacy of Eisenman’s
theoretical construct also seems to stimulate Stan Allen, but with a
closer connection to the concrete reality of contemporary contexts.
Instead of abstract morphological operators, his approach is based
on tactics of management of the fluid variability of situations,
putting the accent on potential dynamics instead of rigid rules.
Both volumes contain essays by Robert E. Somol, who also
contributed a fundamental article to ANY no 23, and represents the
expert of reference on this issue. “Urbanism without Architecture”
lets Somol extend the discussion from the work of Allen to
comparison with the neo-avant-gardes of the 1990s, while “Dummy
Text, or the Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture”, in
its approach to the complex theoretical and design construction of
Peter Eisenman, covers historical precedents, parallels with other
arts, critical analysis and interdisciplinary references (from film
editing to the linguistics of Chomsky, the Cubism revisited by Rowe
and Slutzky to the nouveaux philosophes...), and puts the accent,
in the end, on the progressive function of diagrammatic design, as
opposed to the strategy of designing with diagrams. A strong
connection between products and the methods of their ideation
that Anthony Vidler, in “Diagrams of Utopia”, also recognizes in the
most radical examples of research aimed at testing the limits of
architectural action.
POST SCRIPTUM
A concise review of ANY no 23 is in:
Corbellini, Giovanni, “Attraverso qualcosa di scritto,” Parametro, no 252-253,
2004, ANY 1993-2000: Una antologia.
An analysis of the debate around diagrams at the end of the century:
Lootsma, Bart, The Diagram Debate or the Schizoid Architect, in Marie-Ange
Brayer and Béatrice Simonot (eds), Archilab’s Futurehouses: Radical Experiments
in Living Space, Thames & Hudson, 2002. mobile
On drawing as a thinking tool:
Laseau, Paul, Graphic Thinking for Architects and Designers, Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1980.
And specifically about diagrams:
Albarn, Keith and Jenny Miall Smith, Diagram: The instrument of thought, Thames
& Hudson, 1977.
Glasgow, Janice, Hari Narayanan and Bolakrishnan Chandrasekaran (eds),
Diagrammatic Reasoning: Cognitive and Computational Perspectives, AAAI
Press, 1995.
A collection of graphic solutions:
Abe, Kazuo and Fumihiko Nishioka (eds), Diagram graphics: The best in graphs,
charts, maps and technical illustration, Pie Books, 1992.
A reference author for visual communication:
Tufte, Edward R., Visual explanations: Images and quantities, evidence and
narrative, Graphics Press, 1997.
Tufte, Edward R., The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press,
1983.
Some other contribution by Gilles Deleuze about diagrams:
Deleuze Gilles, Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, Editions de Minuit, 1988, eng. tr. The
Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Athlone Press, 1993.
Deleuze, Gilles, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, La Différence, 1981,
eng. tr. Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2003.
Eisenman, Peter, Giuseppe
Terragni: Transformations,
Decompositions, Critiques,
Monacelli Press, 2003.
Rowe, Colin and Robert Slutzky,
“Transparency. Literal and
Phenomenal, Part I,” Perspecta,
no 8, 1963.
Rowe, Colin and Robert Slutzky,
“Transparency. Literal and
Phenomenal, Part II,” Perspecta,
no 13-14, 1971.
Vidler, Anthony, Diagrams of
Utopia, in Catherine De Zegher
and Mark Wigley (eds), The
Activist Drawing: Retracing
Situationist Architectures from
Constant’s New Babylon to
Beyond, MIT Press, 1999.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, tome 2, Mille
Plateaux, Editions de Minuit, 1980, eng. tr. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles, Différence et répétition, Presses universitaires de France, 1968,
eng. tr. Difference and repetition, Athlone Press, 1994.
An interesting teaching experience:
Angélil, Marc, Inchoate: An Experiment in Architectural Education, Eth/Actar,
2003.
On diagrammatic automatism by MVRDV and the production of “datascapes”:
MVRDV, Farmax: Excursions on Density, 010 Publishers, 1998.
The diagrammatic abstraction is the core of Soriano’s book:
Soriano, Fedrico, Sin_tesis, Gustavo Gili, 2004.
Design machines, devices and other tools:
Corbellini, Giovanni (ed), Parametro, no 260, 2005, Progetti automatici.
A polemic position against diagrams:
Aureli, Pier Vittorio, Gabriele Mastrigli, “Architecture after the Diagram,” Lotus, no
127, 2006.
And my “users’ guide”:
Corbellini, Giovanni, “Diagrams: Instruction for Use,” Lotus, no 127, 2006.