EISENMAN, Peter (1999): Diagram diaries (parcial)
EISENMAN, P. (1999). Diagram
Diaries. London: Thames & Hudson.
EISENMAN, P. (1999). Diagram
Diaries. London: Thames & Hudson.
27
Diagram:
An original scene of writing. Peter Eisenman
As in all
periods of supposed change, new icons are thrust forward as beacons of
illumination. So it is with the idea of the diagram. While it can be argued
that the diagram is as old as architecture itself, many see its initial
emergence in Rudolf Wittkower´s use of the nine-square grid in the late 1940’s
to describe Palladian villas. The diagram’s pedigree continued to develop in
the form of the nine-square problem as practiced in the American architectural
academy of the late 1950’s and early 60’s, when it was seen as antidote to the
bubble diagramming of the Bauhaus functionalism (…) and to the parti of
the French academy (…) As a classic architectural diagram, the parti was
embodied with a set of preexistent values such as symmetry, the marche,
and poché, which constituted the bases of its organizing strategy. The
bubble diagram attempted to erase all vestiges of an embodied academicism in
the parti. In doing so, it also erased the abstract geometric content of
the nine-square.
In architecture the diagram is historically
understood in two ways: as an explanatory or analytical device and as a
generative device. Although it is often argued that the diagram is a
postrepresentational form, in instances of explanation and analysis the diagram
is a form of representation (…) unlike traditional forms of representation, the
diagram as a generator is a mediation between a palpable object, a real
building, and what can be called architecture’s interiority (…) we must ask what the difference
between a diagram and a geometric scheme. In other words, when do nine squares
become a diagram and thus more than geometry?
Wittkower’s
nine square diagram drawings of Palladio’s projects are diagrams in that they
help to explain Palladio’s work, but they do not show how Palladio
worked.
28
(…)
The diagram is not only an explanation, as
something that comes after, but it also acts as an intermediary in the process
of generation of real space and time. As a generator there is not necessarily a
one-to-one correspondence between the diagram and the resultant form.
(…) There
are many examples of diagrams where a variety of shapes can be arrived at
through a geometry of that is exfoliated into different shapes (…) in the
chateau architecture of the Loire Valley in the 16th century there
are irregular forms that could only have been produced through some sort of
manipulation of diagrammatic geometry into three dimensional process called
“stereotomy”. Stones were cut from templates generated by these kinds of
diagrams.
29
Reacting
against an understanding of the diagram that characterized it is an apparently
essentialist tool, a new generation, fueled by new computer techniques (…) is
today proposing a new theory of the diagram based partly on Gilles Deleuze’s
interpretation of Foucault’s recasting of the diagram as “a series of machinic
forces”, and partly on their own cybernetic hallucinations. In their polemic,
the diagram has become a keyword in the interpretation of the new. This
question challenges both the traditional geometric bases of the diagram and the
sedimented history of architecture, and in so doing they question any relation
of the diagram to architecture’s anteriority or interiority.
The second
point Deleuze makes is that the diagram is different from structure. The
classical architecture idea of a diagram exhibits a belief in structure as
something that is hierarchical, static, and has a point of origin. Deleuze says
that a diagram is a supple set of relationships between forces. It forms
unstable physical systems that are in a perpetual disequilibrium. Deleuze says
that diagrams that deal with distribution, serialization, and formalization are
all structural mechanisms in that they lead to structure and a belief in
structuring as an underlying principle of organization. If a structure is seen
as a vertical or hierarchical ordering of their constituent parts, the diagram
29-30
The
distinction between Deleuze’s idea of superimposition and my use of the term
superposition is critical in this context. Superimposition refers to a vertical
layering differentiating between ground and figure. Superposition refers to a
coextensive horizontal layering where there is no stable ground or origin,
where ground and figure fluctuate between one another.
30
Thus
diagrams for Deleuze must have a non-structuring or informational dimension. It
is “a functioning abstracted from any obstacle or friction, detached from any specific
use”. This is an important movement away from the classical idea of an
architectural diagram. Deleuze says that “a diagram is no longer an auditory or
visual archive, but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole
social field. It is an abstract machine”. This abstract machine is defined by
its functioning in unformed matter, as a series of processes that are neither
mechanical not organic. The diagram then is both form and matter, the visible
and the articulable. Diagrams for Deleuze do not attempt to bridge the gap
between these pairs, but rather attempt to widen it, to open the gap to other
unformed matters and functions which will become formed.
Diagrams,
then, form visible matter and formalize articulable functions.
R. E.
Sommol follows Deleuze in situating this ideas of the diagram in architecture.
For Sommol, diagrams are any kind of explanatory abstraction: “cartoons,
formulas, diagrams, machines, both abstract and concrete. Sometimes they are
simply found and other times they are manipulated.”
A partial
list of what Somol labels as “previous” diagrams includes the nine-square, the
Panopticon, the Dom-ino, the Skyscraper, the duck under the decorated shed, the
fold and the bachelor machines. Somol says that he is searching for an
alternative way of dealing with architecture’s history, “one not founded on
resemblance and return to origins but on modes of becoming an emergence of
difference”.
The problem
with this idea of the diagram as matter, as flows and forces, is that it is
indifferent to the relationship between the diagram and architecture's interiority,
and in particular to three conditions unique to architecture: (1)
architecture’s compliance with the metaphysics of presence; (2) the already motivated
condition of the sign in architecture, and (3) the necessary relationship of
architecture to a desiring subject.
31
Somol’s diagrammatic
process, as a machinic environment, is already given as a social project. That
Is, lt is not abstract or autonomous, but rather presumes that architecture
already contains in its being (i.e., its interiority) the condition of the
social.
(…) diagrams
can be used to open up such an autonomy to understand its nature. If this
autonomy can be defined as singular because of the relationship in architecture
between sign and signified, and if singularity is also a repetition of
difference, then there must be some existing condition of architecture in order
for it to be repeated differently.
This
existing condition can be called are architecture’s interiority.
(…)
If
architecture's interiority can be said to exist as a singular rather than
dialectical manifestation of sign that contains its own signified, the motivation
of the sign is already internalized and thus autonomous.
The notion
of the diagram being proposed here attempts to overcome the historicization of
the autonomy of architecture, that is, the already motivated nature of
architecture’s sign.
In this
context, the relationship between the diagram and architecture's interiority is
crucial. Foucault's understanding of an archive as the historical record of a
culture, and of an archaeology as the scientific study of archival material,
can be translated as architecture's anteriority and interiority.
(…)
A diagram
of instability, of matter and flows, must find a way to accommodate these concerns
specific to architecture. In this context, another idea of the diagram can be
proposed, one which begins from Jacques Derrida’s idea of writing as an opening
of pure presence.
31-32
For
Derrida, writing is initially a condition of repressed memory. The repression
of writing is also the repression of that which threatens presence, and since
architecture is the sine qua non of the metaphysics of presence,
anything that threatens presence would be presumed to be repressed in architecture’s
interiority. In this sense, architecture's anteriority and interiority can be
seen as a sum of repressions.
36
Diagrams of
Anteriority
37
Architecture
is traditionally concerned with external phenomena: politics, social
conditions, cultural values, and the like. Rarely has it theoretically examined
its own discourse, its interiority. My work on the diagram is one such
examination. It concerns the possibility that architecture can manifest itself,
manifest its own interiority in a realized building. The diagram is part of a
process that intends to open architecture to its own discourse, to its own
rhetoric and thus to potential tropes which are latent within it. These tropes
are not absolute. They are always relative to and contingent upon the historical
conditions of any time.
In other
words, while the zeitgeist, i.e., the spirit of any age, causes changes in
architecture, architecture in order to act critically must transgress and
displace that very same spirit. While it is possible that architecture can
manifest the political, social, aesthetic, and cultural conditions of any time,
it will be argued here that through the agency of the diagram, which is a
manifestation of architecture's interiority, architecture has the possibility
of not merely representing but transforming and being critical of these
socio-political conditions.
In the interiority
of architecture there is also an a priori history, the accumulated knowledge of
all previous architecture. This history can be called architecture’ anteriority.
It is the accumulation of the tropes and rhetoric used at different periods of
time to give meaning to architecture's discourse.
(…) yet if
these anterior conditions of architecture are not part of any process of
design, there can be no criticality, since there can be no commentary on the
existing rhetoric. Criticality evolves out of the possibility of both
repetition, to know what has gone before, and difference, to be able to change that
history.
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