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Art &Arohlr90ture LibWashlnBton Un1veralt raryCampus Box 1061 yOne B r o o k l n ~ a Drat L 5 . OU11, MO .3180-488,

First pubLished in the United States of America in 1999by UNIVERSE PUBLISHINGADivision of Rizzoli International Publications. Inc.300 Park Avenue SouthNew York. NY 10010@ 1999 Universe Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this pUblication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system. or transmitted in any form or by anymeans. electronic. mechanical. photocopying. recording. or otherwise. without prior consent of the publishers.99000102/10987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataEisenman. Peter.Diagram diaries / Peter Eisenman; introduction by R.E. Somol.p. cm. ISBN 9-7893-0264-0 (alk. paper) 1. Eisenman. Peter-Contributions in architectural design. I. Title.II. Title: Diagram diaries.

NA787.E33A4 1999720.92-DC21 99-10846

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Peter Eisenman has often remarked that his Ph.D.thesis of 1963, "The Formal Basis ofModernArchitecture;' was a critical response to ChristopherAlexander's earlier Cambridge dissertation, whichwould be published as Notes on the Synthesis ofForm. 1 While the architectural agendas announcedby these projects could not be more dissimilardetermining the "fitness of form" as a problem ofset theory versus releasing the potential for forms tonotate the forces of their emergence-it should notbe overlooked that the techniques of diagrammingare central to each. In fact, Alexander begins the1971 preface to Notes by baldly stating that the mostsignificant contribution of his book is "the idea ofthe diagrams." In some ways, the present collection,Diagram Diaries, advances a related assertion, a postfacto preface to an unpublished dissertation, thoughone that now addresses (and is demonstrated by) acareer-long body of intervening work.

In general, the fundamental technique and procedure ofarchitectural knowledge has seemingly shifted,over the second half of the twentieth century, fromthe drawing to the diagram. This is not to suggestthat a diagram of one form or another was notalways constitutive of architecture at various pointsin its history, but simply that it has only been in thelast thirty years or so that the diagram has becomefully "actualized," that it has become almost completely the matter of architecture. Proceeding withhalting steps through serial obsessions with form,language, and representation-though, as will beseen, equally with program, force, and performance-the diagram has seemingly emerged as thefinal tool, in both its millennial and desperate guises,for architectural production and discourse. Relativelyimpervious to the specific ideology being promoted,the diagram has instigated a range of contemporary

practices. Just as RobertVenturi summarized theeffect of his 1950 M.A. thesis as "one great diagram," Lawrence Halprin published a book of diagrams in 197G--which he referred to as "scores"intended to form the foundation of a reneweddesign discipline. Significantly, even Klaus Herdeg'scritique of the Bauhaus-inspired diagram of pedagogy and design at the Harvard Graduate School ofDesign proceeded simply through an alternativeform of diagrammatic analysis.

It should not be surprising that the discourse ofthe. diagram at this moment has become so confused 'given its near-universal use and abuse, itssimultaneous promotion and denigration. This wasless true with the previous trait of disciplinary identity, the act of drawing (disegno), which, as ReynerBanham writes, "had such a crucial value for architects that being unable to think without drawingbecame the true mark of one fully socialized intothe profession of architecture."2With the increasinginability after the war to link convincingly the formal and functional ambitions ofmodernism, thefirst appearances of the diagram solidify around twopossible axes, which Colin Rowe would later identify as "paradigm" (the embrace of a priori ideals)and "program" (the empirical solicitation of facts).While Rowe significantly notes that both positions"condemn us to no more th,an simple repetition,"he ultimately endorses the side of paradigm (ortype) and suggests, true to his predilection for aRenaissance humanism, that it is precisely the drawing that will overcome the diagrammatic alternativeshe so ably identifies but too quickly dismisses. 3 Inlieu of a return to drawing and modified types,however, an alternative version of repetition (apotentially non-linear mode of repetition) has morerecently been pursued by rethinking and extending


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the logic of the diagram. Thus, the rise of the diagram, a more polemical device than the drawing,accompanies a breakdown of the post-Renaissanceconsensus on the role of the architect, and achievesits apotheosis with the emergence of the "information architects" (or architect-critics) after 1960. Thislatter association begins to suggest that no t all recentuses of the diagram are equally "diagrammatic."

As the dominant device within the hybrid practices of the architect-critics of the neo-avant-garde,this more specific use of the diagram promises toelide Rowe's postwar opposition between physique-form and morale-word. Whereas Rowe would elevatethe former pair over the latter in his attempt toextend the legacy of modernism (in contrast to hisalter ego, Banham, who would elaborate the implications of the second pair), the architects of theneo-avant-garde are drawn to the diagram becauseunlike drawing or text, partis pris or bubble notation-it appears in the first instance to operate precisely between form and word. For the purposes ofthis brief introduction, this attitude toward the diagram has several implications: that it is fundamentallya disciplinary device in that it situates itself on andundoes specific institutional and discursive oppositions (and that it provides a projective discipline fornew work); that it suggests an alternative mode of

repetition (one which deviates from the work of themodernist avant-gardes and envisions repetition asthe production of difference rather than identity);and that it is a performative rather than a representational device (i.e., it is a tool of the virtual ratherthan the real). For an early version of this new disciplinary role inscribed in a project, one can look,for example, to Robert Venturi's National FootballHall of Fame Competition entry (or so-called"Billdingboard," 1967), which consists of a tripartitedivision of the "billboard" entrance facade, a vaultedexhibition shed, and a sloped grandstand in the rear.What one reads in section-from the slightlyinclined seating, through the arc of the shed's roof,to the armature of the upright facade-is the 90degree rotation of a horizontal surface (a table ordrafting board) into a vertical object. As with JohnHejduk's Wall Houses, Venturi's competi tion entrydescribes the transformation of the horizontal spaceof writing into the vertical surface of the visual,Rowe's morale-word becoming physique:flesh, aprocess that diagrams a new professional identification which collapses writing and design.4Venturi'sappropriation of this swinging tabletop-a draftingroom appliance that evinces the documentary statusof the discipline-recalls Corbusier's similar use ofindustrial ready-mades (e.g., the file cabinet, bottle


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rack, ocean liner, briar pipe, etc.) as the basis fornew organizing systems in the Unites and otherprojects.The drafting board itself (and here Venturirefers t


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It is now possible to differentiate the repetition ofthe neo-avant-garde (that of the simulacrum) fromthe larger trajectory of postmodern historicism,which idealizes the work, stabilizes the referent, andbanks on its resemblance. Historicism in thisaccount has little to do with style, but is more amode of operating, since historicist work can equallyinclude the modern, as evident in the projects ofRichard Meier. A particular kind of repetition is atthe heart of modernity, however-that of the misreading of the avant-garde-and it is this form ofpractice that relies on the diagram in its fullest sense.Finally, this distinction between modes of repetitionprovides competing views of "autonomy" as welli.e., there is the disciplinary autonomy that relies ontypology, and the alternative call associated with theneo-avant-garde that understands autonomy as aprocess of self-generation or self-organization, amodel that allows for formal-material emergence ortransformation withQut authorial intervention, wheretime is an active rather than a passive element.

As early as his dissertation, Eisenman had impliedthat the diagrams of Rowe and Alexander (whichare more accurately "paradigms" and "patterns,"respectively) were insufficiently diagrammatic inthat they attempt to represent or identify a statictruth condition (whether formal or operational is

irrelevant). Advancing the potential of registeringsite forces and movement via inflections in genericform, Eisenman's transformational diagrammingtechniques anticipate the need for (and predict thepossibilities of) the later development of 3D modeling and animation software. Even in this nascentdynamic construction of the diagram (and non-linearmodel of repetition), Eisenman imagined that thegrid itself could move from an analytic tool ofdescription-the invisible infrastructure of postwarformalism-to a material to be manipulated itself.This approach, of course, was in direct contrast tothat of Rowe, who filtered out the wild element oftime in favor of timeless resemblance vouchsafed bythe stabilizing substrate of an ideal grid.

Rowe's first published essay is a virtuoso performance in formal architectural criticism; it providesa subtle comparison and differentiation ofCorbusier's Villa Garches and Palladio's VillaMalcontenta, an analysis that remains both strikingand unsettling even now, almost fifty years after itsoriginal appearance. Certainly, one can discern theinfluence on Rowe of RudolfWittkower's geometricanalysis ofPalladio's villas, work which would achieveits definitive statement in Wittkower's ArchitecturalPrinciples in the Age oj Humanism, published two yearsafter Rowe's essay. Still, Rowe's lasting contribution,


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against all previous understandings, was to cross historical periods and locate a mannerist-humanist project at the center of the modern movement, thusestablishing a discursive frame through which archi

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on an ideal of"originals." Perhaps more significantly,he alludes here to a legal grounding, the "adherence to rules," to adjudicate cases of repetition, thefirst of many such invocations of the rule of the law

tectural polemics have been projected ever since-anact that might be described as one of sheer ideological hubris. Moreover, even at this early date, theprimary issue revolved around the propriety orappropriateness of"repetition," as suggested in thefinal two lines of the essay:

The neo-Palladian villa, at its best, became the picturesque object in the English park and Le Corbusierhas become the source of innumerable pastiches andof tediously amusing exhibition techniques; but it isthe magnificently realized quality of the originalswhich one rarely finds in the works of neo-Palladiansand exponents ofule style Corbu." These distinct ionsscarcely require insistence; and no doubt it shouldonly be sententiously suggested that, in the case ofderivative works, it is perhaps an adherence to ruleswhich has lapsed.7

Though Rowe seems to be distinguishingbetween two forms of repetition-since the repetition between Palladio and Corbusier is apparentlyendorsed-the model he defends is still founded

in Rowe's liberal reconstruction of modernism.Also, though critical of the immediate postwar version of Ie s t y l ~ Corbu, twenty-seven years laterRowe would write a brief in support of the NewYork Five's repetition of Le Corbusier, even if it is,as he confesses, "a largely negative introductionan attack upon a potential attack," a prime specimen of a slippery-slope logic issued with the soleintention of getting his clients off: "For, in terms ofa general theory of pluralism, how can any faults inprinciple be imputed?"S And if one equatesPalladio and Le Corbusier, as Rowe's analysis has,then it is logical that he remarks-demonstratingin yet another manner his obsessive attachment toanalogical reasoning-that the Five "place themselves in the role, the secondary role, of Scamozzito Palladio."

In the same year that he issued his somewhatreluctant defense of the New York Five, Rowewrote an addendum to his "Mathematics" essay thatfurther clarifies his position on repetition. Here, hedescribes his mode of criticism as "Wolf1inian inorigin" and says that it "begins with approximate

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configurations and . . . then proceeds to identify differences."9 This approach derives from an understanding of repetition in the first sense described above,the one Deleuze associates with the axiom "only thatwbich is alike differs."This mode of identifying differ-ences relies on an existing langue, or ideal armature,against which seemingly disparate instances likeGarches and Malcontenta can be related and distinguished---such that LeCorbusier's emphasis on dispersion and Palladio's on centrality can be defined asviable and coherent options within a larger paradigm-and by which derivative bad copies can bedismissed as falling too far from the proper model.

Such an extension of this model of repetition as apedagogical project-the intellectual underpinningsofwhich were largely provided by the "ChicagoFrame" and "Transparency" essays-would becomeofficially instituted at the University ofTexas inAustin in 1954 with a memorandum ghost-writtenfor Dean Harwell Hamilton Harris by Rowe andBernard Hoesli.lO And it is from this curricularframework that, initially in the studios ofJohnHejduk, the nine-square problem would emerge asperhaps the most durable and widespread beginningdesign problem in the postwar period. 11 The elegance and ingenuity of this problem lay in the wayit consolidated a series of discourses and demands.

Thus, while the technical preconditions that wouldallow modern architecture to refound itself exclusively on the twin bases of structure and space hadexisted for almost a hundred years, the aesthetic,philosophical, and intellectual sources-Le., theunique combination of cubism, liberalism, gestaltpsychology, and the new criticism, with a renewedunderstanding ofmannerist organizing geometrieswould not be consolidated as an articulate assemblage until the 1950s. when it would provide a newdisciplinary foundation for high modern (or mannerist modern) architectural design and pedagogy.As an educational device, the nine-square problememerged from a collapse of two modern diagramsLe Corbusier's domino (structure) with van Doesburg'saxonometrics (space)-filtered through the reductiveplanimetric logic hypostatized by Wittkower asPalladio's "twelfth villa."What this problem lJrovidedwas a discipline for modern architecture, a perverseand clever argument for a rhetorical capacity againstthose who would understand modern architecture assimply the literal addition of constructional systemsand programmatic requirements. Further, it assumeda language of architecture founded on the articulationof a series of dialectics (center and periphery, verticaland horizontal, inside and outside, frontality androtation, solid and void, point and plane, etc.), a logic
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of contradiction and ambiguity. And it is largely tothe lessons issuing from Analytic and SyntheticCubism (and the compositional models of collageemanating from the latter) that Rowe continues toreturn in his pictorial rendering of the language ofmodern architecture, an optical bias present even inhis assessment of the work of the Five:

[I]t might be more reasonable and more modest torecognize that, in the opening years of this century,great revolutions in thought occurred and that thenprofound visual discoveries resulted, that these arestill unexplained. and that rather than assume intrinsicchange to be the prerogative of every generation. itmight be more useful to recognize that certainchanges are so enormous as to impose a directivewhich cannot be resolved in any individual life span.. . . It concerns the plastic and spatial inventions ofCubism and the proposition that, whatever may besaid about these, they possess an eloquence and aflexibility which continues now to be as overwhelming as it was then. 12

This "flexibility" of Cubism and collage providesan institutional and disciplinary basis for architecturebeginning with Rowe, while the diverse series ofideal villas and collage cities that derive from this

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tradition represent a sustained reflection on theform and content of individual and collectivearrangements and an investigation into varied com-positional and associative laws in the relation ofpart-to-whole.

In their dispute with this formalist reconstructionof postwar modernism, the subject ofHejduk's andEisenman's "anxious influence," to borrow HaroldBloom's model, was first and foremost a strong criticrather than a strong poet. In other words, all of theirproductive misreadings of modernist European predecessors can be understood as a "swerve" withinand against the production of Rowe's formalism,and it is this swerve that allows them to developother possibilities suppressed within that tradition.In this way, one can read characters from Hejduk'sVladivostok or Eisenman's typological field studiesfrom the Rebstockpark Competition as perverseextensions of the gestalt diagrams Rowe and Slutzkyused in their second "Transparency" article from1956. While miming Rowe's sources, however, theprojects of Hejduk and Eisenman simultaneouslysubvert the values of transparency, verticality; opticality, and figure-ground definition that the diagrams were initially rostered to support.

Whereas the separation of space and structure inthe nine-square problem enabled one to articulate

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formal-plastic relations, the disengagement of thesign from the box in Venturi's "decorated shed" ultimately suggested that these manipulations wereunnecessary, as all such relations would be consumed by surface noise. While Rowe and companyattempted to replace the neutral, homogenous conception of modernist space with the positive figuration ofform, the neo-avant-garde began to questionthe stability of form through understanding it as afictional construct, a sign. This semiotic critiquewould register that form was not a purely visualoptical phenomenon, not "neutral," but constructedby linguistic and institutional relations. Assumingmultiple directions, this agenda was first broached inVenturi's particular deployment of a collage practicethat was not merely compositional but which wouldinclude both text as well as "low" or base references(specific iconic representations). Subsequently,Eisenman's deviation of form would move not toinformation or the sign (as did Venturi's), but to thetrace, the missing index of formal processes (thusstressing absence and the conceptual). At the sametime, Hejduk would investigate the theatrical construction of form through highly orchestrated relations and instructions, both linguistic and contractual(i.e., the symbolic). Thus, this three-pronged critiquewould variously foreground context (the framing

mechanisms outside form); process (the active procedures within formation); and usage (form's relation to a subject). With the neo-avant-garde, then,form would be precisely subjected to the functionsof its linguistic descendants: informing, traniforming,and performing.For his part, Eisenman develops one of his earliest and most extensive analyses of form by rewriting two structures by the Italian architect GiuseppeTerragni-the Cas a del Fascio and the Cas aGiuliani-Frigerio-having first encountered thiswork in the summer of 1961 when he traveled toComo with Rowe. Previous to Eisenman's writingson Terragni, in the late 1950s and early 1960s,Rowe had already developed the terms for a highformalist interpretation of modern architecture, primarily through his elaborate readings ofLe Corbusier.Eisenman's contribution to that discourse would beto suspend formal analysis on a structuralist base, aseemingly slight shift in emphasis that would ultimately undermine the way American formalismhad institutionalized modernism in the postwarcontext. In other words, Eisenman was able totransform the discourse from within by appropriating the term "formalism" and deploying it to register the more polemical idea of"work on language"in the Russian formalist sense. This move began to


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displace the aestheticization of the unique art workthat accompanied the Anglo-American version offormalism present in the work of the New Critics,Clement Greenberg, and even Rowe. More generally, Eisenman's project has always entailed a returnto the critical aspects of the historical avant-garde,aspects that had been repressed in theory and practice precisely through the formalist reconstructionof modernism after the war. As Eisenman wrote inone of his early essays on Terragni-indicating hisintent to use these strategies as prescriptive designtools-"while formal analysis is a valuable art-historical method, in itself it can become merely descriptive-an exercise in intellectual gymnastics."13Not only was the history of form rewritten, butEisenman would subject "form" itself to perpetualrevision through an exhaustive sequence of operations: transformation, decomposition, grafting, scaling,rotation, inversion, superposition, shifting, folding,etc. And it is the catalogue of these procedures thatbecomes the subject matter of architecture, a disciplinary precondition to a diagrammatic approach.Through an extreme logic, Eisenman engaged in acritique both through and cif calculation (or mathematics) in the alternate senses of both Rowe's idealgeometries and Chris topher Alexander's "goodness

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By 1970 Eisenman would distinguish the practices of Corbusier and Terragni (and, indirectly,Rowe's formalism from his own) by incorporatingterminology from the structural linguistics ofNoamChomsky. While Corbusier's architecture remainscommitted to creating new meaning throughiconography, through the semantics of the object,Eisenman claims that Terragni's work is concernedwith revealing a syntactics of the architectural language. This shift represents a move away from a concern with the perceptual-aesthetic qualities of theobject toward an attempt to mark the conceptual relationships that underlie and make possible any (andevery) particular formal arrangement. Thus,Terragni's work is said to mark the relationshipbetween "surface stru'cture" and "deep structure"through transformational methods that Eisenmanattempts to disclose via a series ofaxonometric diagrams and projections. It should be noted here thatthe axonometric technique (or parallel projection)was one of the historical avant-garde devices recuperated by this generation, especially Eisenman andHejduk.14 In contrast to the other dominant modeof three-dimensional drawing, the central projectionor perspective ofRenaissance humanism, theaxonometric favors the autonomy of the object by

of fit." conveying measurable or objective information over

Frankfurt Rebstockpark
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the distortion created by a vanishing point orientedto the viewing subject.Where Rowe's analyses wereundertaken separately in plan and elevation, theaxonometric simultaneously renders plan, section,and elevation, thus again collapsing the vertical andhorizontal-an act that has been noted earlier, forexample, as one aspiration ofVenturi's Billdingboard.Moreover, unlike Corbusier's "regulating l ines"geometric descriptions appended to their objectsafter construction-the three-dimensional device ofthe axonometric enables analysis and object tobecome congruent.

Through hisaxonometric diagrams, Eisenmanargues that Terragni develops a conceptual ambiguityby superimposing two conceptions of space-additive/layered and subtractive/volumetric-neither ofwhich ts dominant, but each ofwhich oscillates withthe other indefinitely.The effect of this dual readingis not primarily aesthetic, but operates as an index ofa deep structure: that is, it investigates and makesapparent the possibilities and limitations of the architecturallanguage itself. Eisenman's attention to form,then, can be seen as a means to advance this transformational method as both an analytic and syntheticdesign tool. It is an attempt to fulfill the historicalavant-garde program of a temporal and spatial movement or dislocation that precludes any static con

templation of the high-art object. In this way,Eisenman's "drawing on modernism," the diagrammatic supplements of his American graffiti, placesthe architectural objec t under erasure and initiatesthe process of its disappearance.

Contemporaneously with the critical-historicalwork on Terragni, Eisenman was beginning a seriesof architectural projects that would develop many ofthe transformational strategies he was "finding" in hisanalysis of the modern canon.The serially numberedtransformational diagrams for Houses I and II, likethe retrospective diagrams created for Terragni'swork, suggest that the "final" built structures aremerely indexical signs that point to a larger processofwhich they are only a part. Not only is movementgenerated across the series of individual frames-forthe whole process most resembles a cinematic operation with its montage of stills-but, given the natureofaxonometric projection (exaggerated here bybeing rendered transparently or as a wire frame),there is also constant oscillation and reversible movement within each diagram: the observer is nowinside, now outside; now under, now over. Recallingthe new hybrid role of the architect-critic, this effectsuggests the coincidence and complicity between"ihternal" formal condit ion and "external" construction of subjectivity. In addition to the transforma


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tional process effacing the object, this process alsobegins to displace the subject (as both designer andclient) since the remaining architectural index is nolonger dependent on the iconography or functionsof man. This relates to Eisenman's argument thatmodern architecture was never sufficiently modernistdue to its functionalism, that it amounted to nothingmore than "a late phase ofhumanism."15 Shiftingarchitecture from a formal to a structuralist base, orfrom an iconic or semantic to an indexical or syntacticone, would enable architecture to finally register theinsights of the modernist avant-gardes, an accountwhich suspends classical-humanism's centrality of thesubject and proposes architecture as "the abstractmediation between pre-existent sign systems:,16 or,as he would write later of Corbusier's domino, as a"self-referential sign."

In displacing the author-subject (and, ultimately,the static object), Eisenman's early "cardboard" or"conceptual" architecture was designed "to shiftprimary focus from the sensual aspects of obje


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projects, however, Eisenman works within the strictures of the high modern diagram only to undo itsfundamental principles and values, subverting theclassical-humanist logic of the nine-square. In otherwords, Rowe's mannerist-modern conception ofform as the relation of space and structure is nowunderstood as the more provisional outcome of timeand movement. In House VI specifically, the facadesare no longer the primary vertical data for the reading of phenomenal transparencies, but are pushed tothe interior such that the periphery now crosses at

-18 the center of the structure. Floating above theground with no visible entry, it is a house which forall practical purposes could be upside down andinside out. Here, the v a ~ u e of frontality that had, .accompanied the fiat, pictorial associations of planand elevation in the writings and analyses ofRoweand Slutzky is undermined by the temporal andcinematic displacements provided by the axonometric. With Eisenman, the nine-square is no longerthought through the logic of painting, but throughftlrn,and it is this conception that enables it to existas simultaneously experience and-representation.

House VI . . . e.xists as both an object and a kind ofcinematic manifestation of the transformationalprocess, with frames from the idea of a film being

independently perceptible within the house. Thus theobject not only became the end result of its owngenerative history but retained this history, serving asa complete record of it, process and product beginning to become interchangeable. is

Described through serially arranged axonometricdiagrams, Eisenman's houses are conceived as part ofa cinematic movement, arbitrary stills translated intothree dimensions from a potentially endless series.

Whether understood as a move from ambiguity toundecidability or from binary oppositions to micromultiplicities, Eisenman's more recent work insistsupon a surface reading that questions the possibilityof the embodiment ofmeaning, and seems to operate only as an endless chain of conjunctions-and,and, and . . . one thing after the other. There is here aliteral repetition Oike that eschewed in Rowe's dismissal of the Bauhaus or in Michael Fried's rejectionofminimalism} that wagers on the chance for another condition to emerge through the machinic (ina broadly bio-mechanical sense) process of iteration.In fact, the projects that have been evolving since theWexner Center cannot really be discussed as "works"or "objects" or "forms" or even "structures"-allthese terms being too aesthetic or technical, too welldemarcated and defined. Rather, they really seem to


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be just "things;' with all the formless and transformative possibilities of the monstrous and grotesque thatthe term implies. These recent rh izome-worm"things" seem to frustrate and defeat formal analysisand indicate a transition from the clear structuralismof the early Roland Barthes to the base materialismof Georges Bataille, theorist of the excess. In his dictionary-like entry on the termJormless, Bataillewrites that "what it designates has no rights and getsitself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.,,19 In the post-vermiform projects since theColumbus Convention Center, the theoretical investigation of form has increasingly moved to anembrace of the iriforme, or a condition that Eisenmanand his colleagues have referred to as "weak form."

For Eisenman, architecture-unlike writing-muststruggle against its literal presence, which has traditionally been reinforced by the icons of"strongform." To articulate this non-dialectical conditionbetween presence and absence, Eisenman posits theterm "presentness" as one possibility for a "weak"practice, the hazard of architecture as event. Whileboth he and Michael Fried are opposed to literalpresence, Eisenman's use of the term must be distinguished from Fried's usage of the concept. For Fried,presentness implies a bounded object of depth andplenitude, the quality ofwhich is instantaneously

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self-evident such that it induces immediate faith andconviction. In this way, Eisenman's use has more incommon with the perpetual reframing and temporallimitlessness ofminimalist work that Fried was arguing against. In fact, minimalism operates precisely ina diagrammatic manner in that it solicits and undermines a key opposition of formalist modernismnamely, that between painting and sculpture-as itcan be seen as emerging in response to developmentsin either medium (which, of course, would beimpossible from the high modernist dicta of mediumspecificity and boundary maintenance). Finally,whereas Fried's "presentness" relies on a condition oftimelessness, Eisenman's is involved with the state of"singularity"-i.e., a specific moment in a phasetransition where diverse forces acting on m{ltter' 'induce the emergence of unforeseeable traits.

An early form of this singularity can be glirripsedin a project like the Rebstockpark proposal for thedevelopment of 200,000 square meters of officesand housing in Frankfurt (1991), an urban analog tothe cinematic chronography ofAlain Resnais andRobbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad. Here, the .between-condition of presentness requires a consideration of the arbitrary, the accidental. Rather than


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event-folds inhabit "peaks of present," where there isa coexistence of a present of the future, a present ofthe present, and a present of the past. In describingthe time-image found in the work of RobbeGrillet, Gilles Deleuze writes:

An accident is about to happen, it happens, it has happened; but equally it is at the same time that it will takeplace, has already taken place and is in the process oftaking place; so that, before taking place, it has not takenplace, and, taking place, will no t take place . . . etc.20In the undecidability of whether the Rebstock site

has contracted to absorb a neutral exterior net or is inthe process of expanding to unfold its information.across .4 larger area, the project offers an urban versionof peeks at presentness, similar to the literary and cinematic visions ofRobbe-Gri llet and the mathematicalmodels of Rene Thorn. In both large- and small-scaleepisodes there is a multiplication of tenses: alreadyfolded, folding,. not yet folded. Beginning withRebstock--:-and continuing through the Church fortheYear 2000, Bibliotheque de L'IHUEI, the VirtualHouse, and the lIT Campus Center--the "movementimage" of the earlier projects (where the diagram waslimited to a linear unfolding of time, the recuperationof a genealogy for the work, such that time existed as a

Muybridge-like dependent-variable of movement) hasbeen displaced by a "time-image:' Curiously, as intensified field conditions rather than distorted generics orideals, these projects resemble more Rowe's denigrateddiagram, "program without plan:' than they do "planwithout program:'In distinguishing "the event" from a narrativesequence organized by plot, John Rajchman maintains that it is "a moment of erosion, collapse, questioning, or problematization of the very assumptionsof the setting within which a drama may take place,occasioning the chance or possibility of another, different setting."21 Events are not in themselves accidental so much as the fact that their occurrenceengenders the realization that what has been taken tobe the necessary and natural is accidental. TheRebstock project directs an architectural "event," amanifestation of"weak time," to the extent that itelicits an active refrarning of typology, context, function, and archaeology. Neither historicist nor progressive-and therefore other than the category ofthe possible-this kind of time can be thought of as"virtual," that which is merely an historical impossibility, not a logical or necessary one. As an investigation of the virtual, the Rebstock proposal performsan experimentation rather than an interpretation.And it is through this experimental quality


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Thus, the importance of the lesson of panopticism is no t simply to appropriate that figure as thenew organizational system, but generally to understand (and configure) society as a plastic entity,susceptible to multiple (virtual) diagrams and possibilities for arrangement.

Having identified this connotative shift in the wayin which the diagram has become instrumentalized inarchitecture over the last few decades, however, oneshould not mistake this transition for some essentialopposition. Despite the posturing by several critics andarchitects alike, Koolhaas and Eisenman, for example,have much more in common with each other thaneither the former has with Jon Jerde or the latter haswith Frank Gehry. Working diagrammatically-not tobe confused with simply working with diagramsimplies a particular orientation, one which displays atonce both a social and a disciplinary project. And itenacts this possibility not by representing a particularcondition, but by subverting dominant oppositions andhierarchies currently constitutive of the discourse.Diagrammatic work, then (and this includes the projects ofEisenman and Koolhaas), cannot be accountedfor by reapplyling the conventional categoriesof formal or functional, critical or complicit. It operates as analternative to earlier attempts to put "architecture" inquotation marks (the compensatoryor affirmative sign

Dummy Texor the Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architectur

of postrnodernism) or append a "kick me" sign to itsback (the apparently critical gesture of early dec onstructivism now institutionalized in a few Ph.D. programs throughout the country). Diagrammatic work isprojective in that it opens new (or, more accurately,"virtual") territories for practice, in much the way thatDeleuze describes the diagrammatic painting of FrancisBacon as overcoming the optical bias ofabstract art aswell as the manual gesturality of action painting:

A Sahara, a rhinoceros skin, this is the diagram suddenly stretched out. It is like a catastrophe happening unexpectedly to the canvas, inside figurative or probabilistic data. It is like the emergence of another world. , . .The diagram is the possibility of fact-it is not the fact itself.24

This "emergence of another world" is preciselywhat the diagram diagrams. This begins to explainwhy, almost alone among those of their respectivegenerations, both Eisenman and Koolhaas-teachersand critics as well as designers-persistently and cu.riously eschew design (and, along with it, that postRenaissance trajectory of architecture obsessed withdrawing, representation, and composition). This diagrammatic alternative can be seen initially inEisenman's process automism and, more recently, in

Staten Island Institute
http:///reader/full/itself.24http:///reader/full/itself.24http:///reader/full/itself.24


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Koolhaas's statistical research: complementary attemptsto supplant design with the diagram, to deliver formwithout beauty and function without efficiency.

A diagrammatic practice (flowing around obstaclesyet resisting nothing)-as opposed to the tectonicvision of architecture as the legible sign of construction (which is intended to resist its potential status aseither commodity or cultural speculation)-multipliessignifying processes (technological as well as linguistic)within a plenum of matter, recognizing signs as complicit in the construction of specific social machines.The role of the architect in this model is dissipated, ashe or she becomes an organizer and channeler ofinformation, since rather than being limited to thedecidedly vertical-the control and resistance ofgravity, a calculation of statics and load-"forces"emerge as horizontal and nonspecific (economic,political, cultural, local, and global). And it is bymeans of the diagram that these new matters andactivities-along with their diverse ecologies andmultiplicities-can be made visible and related.Against some of the more currently naive extensionsto the legacies of Eisenman and Koolhaas, it is thusimportant to avoid confining a diagrammaticapproach to architecture as the expression of eitherpresumed bio-mathematical imperatives or soCioeconomic inevitabilities, and understand architecture

rather as a discursive-material field of cultural-political plasticity. To do otherwise would be to return tothe inadequately diagrammatic options first outlinedby Rowe (in terms of formal or analytical "truth")and Alexander (operational or synthetic "truth").And it would also be to miss the virtual opportunities instigated by the design-research Eisenman hasconducted for the last thirty years, simply (and brutally) collected here as a catalogue of procedures("functions" or "tensors"), an architecture that hascome to deviate from a priori geometry as well asfrom social accommodation in favor of Bacon's"possibilities of fact."

1. Christopher Alexander, Notes al l the Synthesis of Form(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). For more on the"debate" between Eisenman and Alexander. see "ContrastingConcepts of Harmony in Architecture," Lotlls International 40 (1983).

2. Reyner Banham, "A Black Box," in A Critic Writes (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1996). p. 298.

3. Colin Rowe. "Program versus Paradigm: Otherwise CasualNotes on the Pragmatic. the Typical, and the Possible:' in As IliHtsSayillg. vol. 2 (Cambridge: MI T Press, 1996), p. to.

4. Later, this transformation will become more evident via architectural strategies of "folding," procedures that in part continue thecomplication of vertical and horizontal while exaggerating the dematerialization of "paper architecture."5.This view of repetition follows from Gilles Deleuze's account oftwo ways to conceive difference: "Only that which is alike differs," and"Only differences are alike." In the first version difference can onlyderive from a prior autonomy o r identity (e.g the way a right and left


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Dummy Textor the Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture

shoe are different by their relation to a prior identity, the pair), while inthe second version differences operate horizontally rather thanvertically, in a state of becoming identical (e.g., the surrealist encounterof the sewing machine and the umbrella). See The Logic of SeIDe,trans. Mark Lestor (Ne w York: Columbia University Press, 1990) andDifforence and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1994).

6. Gilles Deleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum," October 27 (Winter1983), p. 56.

7. Colin Rowe, "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa," in TIleMathematics C!f the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MITPress, 1976), pp. 15-16.

8. Colin Rowe, Five Architects (New York: Oxford University Press,1975), p. 8.

9. Rowe, "The Mathematics of the IdealVilla," p. 16.10. For a detailed history of this program from an "insider," see

Alexander Caragonne's Texas Rangers: Notesftom an ArchitecturalUnderground (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).11.This studio problem was paralleled in Hejduk's personal workwith his seven "Texas Houses," a series begun in 1954 and later dedicated to Rowe and Robert Slutzky. See John Hejduk, Mask i fMedtlsa(NewYork: Rizzoli, 1985), p, 197 and pp. 222-37.

12. Rowe, Five Architects, p. 7.13. Peter Eisenman, "From Object to Relationship II: Giuseppe

Terragni's Casa Giuliani Frigerio," Perspecla 13/14 (1971), p. 41.14. While widely deployed by the modernist avant-gardes of the

1920s and 1930s, the axonometric projection virtually disappeared asa graphic tool until the late 1950s, being eschewed by thoseattempting to mimic more pictorial and static media in the postwarreconstruction of high modernism. Rowe and Johnson, for example,have explicitly come out against the effects of "floating," "rotation,"and "the diagonal" associated with the isometric or axonometric. Itwill be suggested later that Eisenman does not recuperate theaxonometric simply as a representational tool, but as a design tool,using its characteristics as a generative device. For a historical discussion of the axonometric, see Yve-Alain Bois, "EI Lissitzky: RadicalReversibility," Art il l America (April 1988), pp. 160-80, and"Metamorphosis ofAxonometry," Daidalos 1 (1981), pp, 40-58, as

well as Robin Evans, ..Architectural Projection," Architecture and itsImage, eds. Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Montreal: CanadianCentre for Architecture, 1989), pp. 19-35.

15. Peter Eisenman, "Post-Functionalism," Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976),p. ii (unnumbered).16. Eisenman, "Post-Functionalism," p. iii (unnumbered).

17. Peter Eisenman, "Notes on Conceptual Architecture," Casabe/la359/360 (1971), p. 55. For an earlier though similar formulation, see"Towards an Understanding of Form in Architecture:' ArchitecturalDesign (October 1963), 457-58.

18. Peter Eisenman, "Misreading Peter Eisenman," HOlms if Cards(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 178 and 181. Seealso Peter Eisenman, "HouseVI," Progressive Architecture (June 1977),p. 59: U [T]he designs for House VI are symbiotic with its reality; thehouse is not an object in the traditional sense-that is the end resultof a process-but more accurately a record of a process.The house,like the set of diagrammatic transformations on which its design isbased, is' a series of film stills composed in time and space." For moreon the idea of architecture as document, see Venturi's similar discussion of the wall in Complexity and COlltradictiol1 in Arcilitectllre.

19. Georges Bataille, "Formless," in VisiollS i f Excess: SelectedWritillgs, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1985), p. 31.

20. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: Tile Time-Image (Minneapolis:University ofMinnesota Press, 1989), p. 100.

21. John Rajchman, Philosophical Events: Essays i f the '805 (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. viii.

22. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesotaPress, 1988), p. 34. For Foucault's discussion, see Discipline and Ptmislt(NewYork: Pantheon, 1977). originally published as Surveiller et punir(Paris: Gallimard, 1975), and "The Eye of Power:' in Powe;IKnowledge:Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon(New York: Pantheon, 1980).

23. Rem Koolhaas, "Revision," in S,M,L,XL (NewYork: MonacelliPress, 1996), p. 241.

24. Gilles Deleuze, "The Diagram," in TIff De/euze Reader,ConstantinV. Boundas, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press,1993),pp.194,199.

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