Aware of the leftover gaps and lingering oppositions, we came to view any further promises of the diagram’s superior conceptual and graphic powers with suspicion. It is precisely its multi-functional, mediating abilities that came under attack as critics such as Pier Vittorio Aureli and Anthony Vidler exposed a number of inconsistencies with regards to direct links with the city, support for the processes of spatial production, and leaps from social to spatial orders. Further, two important, yet very different, strategies were collapsed together – ‘infrastructural urbanism’, which aligns the project with larger urban infrastructures (heralded by Stan Allen) was conflated with ‘infrastructuralism’, an indexical relation between flows and form (advocated by Reiser + Umemoto).Īll this led to a brutal awakening, characterised by a growing distrust and the subsequent deflation of the uber-tool. First, ‘network fever’ and ‘systems re-turn’ never fully acknowledged relationships with the preceding late-modern chapters and their struggles with formal expression, as seen in the work of Constantinos Doxiadis, Team X and Cedric Price. This could be attributed to a number of oversights. All the flows, fields and ecologies turned into forms, plans and graphic patterns fairly quickly. The fast track from analysis to proposition through the diagram oversimplified the idea of ‘context’, and short-circuited its influence on design. Inter-Action Centre in Kentish Town, London In certain practices, especially Dutch firms such as OMA, MVRDV and UN Studio, it became a part of a magic design formula: deep analysis, mapping and statistical simulation of the site occupations and deficiencies abstraction and approximation of systems and flows cross-matching between dysfunctional elements and the programme model and, ultimately, its rapid conversion into form. While such influxes were invigorating, they left us vulnerable to the unforeseen consequences of the uses and abuses of the diagram.Īs an analytical tool, the diagram promised to fuel our projects with key underlying forces, relations and the logic of the city. There was also an unprecedented interdisciplinary invasion of discourse on ‘abstract machines’ and patterns of organisation that originated in philosophy and the sciences of complexity (as in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari or Henri Bergson). Influential texts – such as those by Dominic Boyer, Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre and Manuel DeLanda – placed an emphasis on dynamic systems, complex infrastructures and non-linear processes, and were crucial triggers to the expanding use of the diagram. ![]() This kind of city was evasive and near invisible to the conventional modes of representation, and so we turned to maps, charts, graphs, and mostly diagrams as a way out of the perceived crisis.Įxploded axonometric of the Parc de la Villette in Paris, Bernard Tschumi, 1982-1998 In the literature, the city was described through agents in non-linear interaction, underpinned by systems and flows, defined by points of attraction and lines of connection. ![]() The rise of the diagram in the 1990s was linked to a widespread infrastructural turn in architecture, with a focus on systems and processes in place of conventional structures, forms and geometries. But how well do we really understand diagrams today – what they can and cannot do, how and when should we use them? Its long disciplinary history spans from Piranesi to Eisenman, Le Corbusier to Koolhaas, and persists in BIG’s site reductions and cartoons, the serial prototyping of MVRDV and animated scenarios by OMA and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. ![]() In the era that endowed it with design super-powers and used it as an ideological weapon, the diagram was so broadly defined as to take on a set of near-impossible inclusive traits – as an analytical and projective tool, an abstract and concrete means of visual representation, both liberating and controlling the design process.Īttitudes should be less extreme, given how resilient the diagram has proved as a design tool in the profession. To raise the spectre of the diagram leads to uncomfortable associations, akin to resurrecting a dangerous monster or flogging a dead horse – hardly surprising, given the rampant ‘diagrammania’ of the late 1990s-2000s. The diagram, once endowed with design super-powers, is still a powerful communicator and synergiser of complex systems
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