vittorio aureli, pier - after diagrams

After DiagramsAuthor(s): Pier Vittorio AureliSource: Log, No. 6 (Fall 2005), pp. 5-9Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765051 .

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Pier Vittorio Aureli After

Diagrams

Nothing ever truly disappears. - Carl Andre

Diagrams, as they have been conceived and used in architecture throughout the last century, have the power to simulta-

neously construct, design, and expose an idea, while at the same time simplifying and idealizing facts and events of the world as simple signs. Diagrams are powerful devices but also problematic ones, in the sense that they are constantly updating the representation of a work beyond its effectual truth, and thus reducing it to an ever-changing image. The

diagram, therefore, tends to become an accessible language that easily absorbs and consumes things and events, a con-

sumption of our experience of the world as it exists around us. Because of its evolutionary nature, to ignore or refuse the

diagram puts one in an impossible position. It is not possible to totally refuse it, precisely because diagrams are inevitably also a form of language, but one has to be skeptical and aware of the way this language is constructed, because it is

very similar to the rhetoric of language itself. Language is

continually exposed to the risk of being the mere camouflage of reality, which means that we picture the world, as

Ludwig Wittgenstein said, solely in terms of our "language games." But diagrams are not simple camouflages of reality: they appear today more as a form of value-free nihilism. Nihilism claims that things are nothing; it is the idea that an

entity can be, at any moment, nothing. Therefore, nihilism is the deliberate consumption of the being of things and events.1 If diagrams - as the rhetoric of today seems to claim - are the creation of possibilities of facts that did not exist before, the same possibilities of facts, by means of their spe- cific being, could be condemned to return to nothing again.

One of the origins of diagrammatic representation could be traced back to the awareness of urban space and the forms of governance that this entity demands. The advent of cartog- raphy in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries and of

electromagnetism in the early 19th century could be seen as

examples of the materialization of space through the representation and creation of a web of spatial transaction: net-

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1. Nihilism could be seen as the essence of the history of Western thought from Greek philosophy onward. In the history of the Western world, most great con- flicts, dissents, and disputes developed within this common frame, which arose for the first time with the advent of metaphysics: the world is made of things that are created out of nothing, and thus return to nothing. See Emanuele Severino, Essenza del Nichilismo (Milan: Adelphi, 1982), 155-54-, Of course there is no simple way of applying this criticism within architecture and urbanism, since both are so embedded in the idea of "creation" and "project." However, it is important to keep it in mind, not only in order to think nihilism in a nihilistic way, but also to be constructively (and critically) skeptical of the currently indisputable and value -free faith in the idea of change as phenomena liberated from any being of things and events. This is a faith that, in architecture and urbanism, can be sustained only through the demiurgic iconography of diagrams.



works and flows.2 Urban space, as a representation of an

entity that goes beyond the opacity of the object and beyond the conventional nature of the plan, can only be represented through the diagram, which is by definition a graphic tool that transcends the conventions of scale, plan, and object. It is interesting to note that Le Corbusier, the advocate of the

flan as a fulcrum of architecture and urbanism, clearly stated in his project for the Ville Radieuse that the truth comes from the diagram. Thus, to place theory back in its true frame, as he claimed, a diagram is absolutely indispensable.* This means that the governance of the transformations of the world is unthinkable without the representation of the "new" forces that shape our environment. But in the course of the 20th

century, the evolution of the diagram is no longer restricted to the transition from built form to urban space, to the total-

ity of the environment. The diagram also feeds back into architecture itself, thus becoming one of the most fetishized

iconographie forms within the discipline and its discourse. The so-called bubble diagrams done by graduate stu-

dents at Harvard in the 1950s supposedly modeled ways of

understanding space and ways of moving through space. The bubble diagrams are the ancestors of many diagrams produced today: a sort of semantic mimesis of movement and flows that releases architects from the fear of the unavoid- able fixity of architecture. In this way diagrams are still used in order to postpone the moment of the project, the

inevitability of architecture, and thus the inevitability of decision, of conjecture, of the hazardous, and ultimately, of form. It is interesting that this escape from architectural form by means of analysis of the forces that model its fixity became, at a certain point, an architectural form itself. For example, Alison and Peter Smithson's entry to the 1958 Hauptstadt Berlin competition could be seen as a formalization of diagrammatic forces that transcend the individuality of the finite architectural form by being the physical struc- ture of the city. Here architecture almost mimetically represents the forces that are governing the city. Architecture

begins to be the frozen expression of the forces: the concept of megastructure itself is nothing less than a frozen vector of the diagram. If the diagram is a vector of forces, then it is no longer possible to describe these forces in one finite urban artifact. Therefore, the urban artifact itself should mimeti-

cally resemble the form of the diagram. In this way, as the vector of forces becomes infrastructure, the city is imagined as a "plug-in system," and itself becomes diagrammatic.

This idea transcends different styles and different

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2. Renato Barilli, "Tre Ipotesi sul post- moderno," in Fucine Mute 5 0998). http:// www.fucine.com 3. "Truth from Diagrams" is the title of one chapter of La Ville Radieuse , in which the diagrammatic and "exact" representation of human life is for Le Corbusier a condition "to place a 'theory' back in its true frame."



languages and goes beyond the type of megastructure itself. The same concept would be applied by very different architects, from Archigram (Plug-in City, 1964), to Louis Kahn (Richards Medical Research Building, 1957-60), to Cedric Price (Fun Palace, 1960-61). In these cases, architectural form begins to respond to the challenge of the forces that are

shaping the urban environment. One of these forces is clearly infrastructure and mobility. From this architectural idea, articulated since 1956 by Yona Friedman and others, Kenzo

Tange was able to reconsider the actual form of the metrop- olis with his project for the Bay of Tokyo (I960), a formal

configuration based on the diagram of the plug-in system, which Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurokawa would later apply within their idea of a "capsular" architecture (City in the Air, 1961; Nakagin Capsule Tower, 1970-72).4

The power of the diagram is its ability to evoke the

reshaping of an entire situation with one simple gesture. Thus, the most problematic aspect of the diagram is its

capacity to immediately subsume something that is absolutely irreducible to any representation. This is even more evident in the recent use of diagrams, where the iconographie per- suasion, or better, its graphic decor, becomes the main essence of its content. So there is a paradox in our discipline: On the one hand, architectural form is less and less important; on the other, architectural thinking - the kind of autonomous, creative, and nihilistic architectural thinking that reduces things to always changing icons and signs, to

nothing - is able to reconstruct a representation of the "world," updating it beyond its immanent possibilities. This

ubiquitous iconographie power of diagrams as the representation and updating of everything beyond the being of things is ultimately summarized by Rem Koolhaas, who claims that architecture liberated from the obligation to construct can be become, in fact, the diagram of everything, Ï

In this regard, diagrams could be seen as nihilistic instruments by means of which every "new" theory can cre- ate and delete its own representation of the world. This condition, far from being perceived in its necessary dimension, is only exploited as simplistic dodging in order to continu-

ously start again ; this is a problem of the diagram. It both

acknowledges the irreducibility, complexity, and contradic- tion of the urban environment, and at the same time reduces these complexities and contradictions to an idealization that

always changes and starts again by virtue of its own logic. Moreover, its interpretation is also open to any kind of

change and conclusion, a change and a conclusion that are

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4. It is interesting to note that the philosopher Lieven de Cauter had developed a genealogy of what he had defined as "capsular civilization," a representation of the world based on the exclusive and pervasive nature of contemporary networks, by starting from the metabolist conception of urbanism, in which the diagram of the plug-in becomes the iconic formalization of the cybernetic world. See Lieven De Cauter, The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004). On the genealogy of the network as the diagrammatic representation of the world, see Mark Wigley, "Network Fever," in Inside Density, ed. Hilde Hey- nen and David Vanderburgh (Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 200$), 155-85. 5. "Liberated from the obligation to construct, [architecture] can become a way of thinking about anything - a discipline that represents relationships, propor- tions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything." Rem Koolhaas, Fore- word, in Content , ed. Rem Koolhaas and Brendan McGetrick (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 20.



finally liberated from the being of the city itself as a construct made up of things and events. If diagrams can liberate architecture and the city from their own being, this means that the change becomes change ex nihilo, for its own sake.

Being cannot sustain a constant coming from and

returning to nothing except in the realm of metaphysics. But the way research, information, and communication are produced today is unconsciously metaphysical. It does not establish an intersubjective knowledge through experience, but rather tries to construct icons of reality in order to sustain rhetoric and consensus. This rhetoric is then synthesized through an imagery, which can only be addressed, as Friedrich Engels said of ideology, through a false conscious- ness. In this sense, the diagram is not only increasing and

creating possibilities for our imagination of reality, but in the end is putting reality into an alienating s traitjacket in which our desire for the world is reduced to an endless

iconographie nightmare. This, I believe, is the problematic nature of the hegemony of diagrammatic representation. This representation is constantly promising the production of a world yet to come by implicitly claiming the value -free nature of becoming, but because such a world has yet to come out of nothing, it is also ready to go back to nothing again.

A question therefore arises: On what basis are we repre- senting the hypotheses that so-called research today is sup- posed not only to illustrate but also to produced

The evolution of the diagram from dispositif to one of the most powerful iconographie forms of architectural

thinking - an iconography accepted everywhere and as an

indisputable new kind of "truth" - is not only the logic and

necessary evolution of the diagram itself, but also the sign of a drift into an unconscious acceptance of the values and crite- ria of nihilism as value-free becoming. There is no going back to a prediagrammatic knowledge of the world. What must change is the discourse concerning diagrams. Diagrams must always be thought through their primary conventional nature, and not simply as creation ex novoy that is, ex nihilo, of something optimistically "yet to come" or a "new kind of reality" always ready to change into something else or to

disappear. If there is a need to go on with diagrams, they must be invested with rigorous, semi-autonomous constructed entities that, while attempting to picture immanent

aspects of things and events and their relationships, are also

self-proclaimed representations of an idea, or better, of an

ideology. In the realm of the diagram, as in the realm of the

project itself, there is no escape from representation, and

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6. Nicolò Machiavelli, Il Principe , in Tutte le Opere (Firenze: Sansoni, 1990» 280. On this concept see Louis Althusser, Machiavelli e noi (Roma: Manifesto Libri, 1999), 20.

Pier Vittorio Aureli is an archi- tect. He currently coordinates THE SECOND-YEAR RESEARCH PRO- GRAM at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, where he is a unit professor. He is also a guest professor at the Accademia di Archi- tettura in Mendrisio and at Technische Universiteit Delft.

despite the connotations of intelligence, performance, and immanence, the affectivity of diagrams lies in their iconic

appeal. This is how diagrams are conceived, produced, instrumentalized, and consumed today. But a challenge for an after-diagram era must go beyond diagrammatic representation. It must see if after our posthumanist sophistica- tion we can establish the teaching and consideration of architecture as an experience informed by a deliberately determined syntax of matter that takes place in intelligible form-objects. Plans and sections will be the only necessary writing for a conjecture about the syntax of matter. Instead of the futile and decorative cannibalism of diagrams, we can reestablish a critical discourse starting with an affection for the thing itself in our imagination of the world. Thing here is not intended as a self-referential entity, free from any con- text, but in its original meaning, as the actual fact that by means of itself determines our social, cultural, political, and

ideological concerns.

Diagrams will continue to exist, but a skeptical approach informed by the irreducible absoluteness of architecture will

always mean to counter, as Nicolò Machiavelli would argue,6 the imagination of things by means of their effectual truth, their irreducible singularity, their concrete experience, and their inexorable being something with the generic idealization (and consumption) of everything.

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vittorio aureli, pier - after diagrams

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