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Dummy Text, or The Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture

This document discusses the concept of diagrams in architecture. It makes three main points: 1. Over the 20th century, diagrams replaced drawings as the primary tool for architectural design and discussion, operating between form and words. 2. Architectural diagrams are performative rather than representational, organizing information in a way that envisions repetition producing difference rather than identity. 3. Diagrams relate new forces that architects must channel, like economics and politics, and make these forces visible through their operation of techniques like transformation, decomposition, and folding.

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Sandrinha Pantaleão
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30 views

Dummy Text, or The Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture

This document discusses the concept of diagrams in architecture. It makes three main points: 1. Over the 20th century, diagrams replaced drawings as the primary tool for architectural design and discussion, operating between form and words. 2. Architectural diagrams are performative rather than representational, organizing information in a way that envisions repetition producing difference rather than identity. 3. Diagrams relate new forces that architects must channel, like economics and politics, and make these forces visible through their operation of techniques like transformation, decomposition, and folding.

Uploaded by

Sandrinha Pantaleão
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Dummy Text, or the Diagrammatic

Basis of Contemporary Architecture


R.E. Somol
over the second half of the 20th century, the diagram has taken the place of the drawing as the
fnal tool for architectural production and discourse.
unlike drawing or text, the diagram appears to operate precisely between form and word.
Somols thesis:
a disciplinary device: undoes specifc institutional and discursive (reasoned or argued) oppositions.
Three main characteristics of architectural diagrams:
suggests an alternative mode of repetition, envisioning repetition as the production of difference,
not identity.
performative rather than representational device (a tool of the virtual rather than of the real).
old mode = icons, resemblances, copies of timeless precedents; static being.
new mode = continual differentiation; advancing through modes of becoming.
the architect becomes organizer and channeler of information.
forces no longer limited to the vertical (gravity) but emerge as horizontal and non-specifc (economic,
political, cutural, local, global).
the diagram is what relates and makes visible these new forces.
Result:
End thesis.
What is a diagram?
working diagrammatically [is] not to be confused with simply working with diagrams.
Lawrence Halprin: scores - symbolizations of processes which extend over time.
Robert Venturi: building as billboard
transforms horizontal space (writing
surface) into vertical visual surface.
collapses writing and design into a single
diagram.
Colin Rowe vs. Peter Eisenman:
diagram as mode of repetition.
old mode = icons, resemblances, copies of timeless precedents; static being.
Rowe represents the old mode of repetition, that of a static, universal truth condition.
Eisenman represents the new mode of repetition, that of perpetual revision through a sequence
of operations.
new mode = continual differentiation; advancing through modes of becoming.
Rowe: the ideal villa casts Palladio
and Corb as pursuers of a universal,
mathematical truth.
transformation, decomposition, grafting, scaling, rotation, inversion, superposition, shifting,
folding, etc.
Eisenman: a diagrammatic approach through an exhaustive sequence of operations.
fnal built structures are merely indexical signs that point to a larger process of which they are
only a part.
part of a potentially endless series.
emergence through the process of iteration.
simultaneously exists as experience and as representation.
application of (diagrammatic) sequence of operations to the work of Giuseppe Terragni.
a fold is at once a thing and its process.
it is the operation of folding that
generates the form.
a repetition that produces something
new, an emergent organization.
transformation, decomposition, grafting, scaling, rotation, inversion, superposition, shifting,
folding, etc.
a sequence of operations.
products are merely indexical signs that point to a larger process of which they are only a part.
part of a potentially endless series.
emergence through the process of iteration.
generative diagram to algorithm:

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