Dummy Text, Or the Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture

Art & Arohlr90ture Lib WashlnBton Un1veralt rary Campus Box 1061· y One Brookln~a Dr at L 5 • . OU11, MO .3180-488, First pubLished in the United States of America in 1999 by UNIVERSE PUBLISHING ADivision of Rizzoli International Publications. Inc. 300 Park Avenue South New 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 any means. electronic. mechanical. photocopying. recording. or other wise. without prior consent of the publishers. 99000102/10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eisenman. 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 1999 720.92-DC21 99-10846 Printed in Italy Design by Juliette Cezzar Dummy Text, I or The Diagrammatic Basis 6 1 of Contemporary , Architecture R.E. Somol Peter Eisenman has often remarked that his Ph.D. practices. Just as Robert Venturi summarized the thesis of 1963, "The Formal Basis ofModern effect of his 1950 M.A. thesis as "one great dia Architecture;' was a critical response to Christopher gram," Lawrence Halprin published a book of dia Alexander's earlier Cambridge dissertation, which grams in 197G--which he referred to as "scores" would be published as Notes on the Synthesis of intended to form the foundation of a renewed Form. 1 While the architectural agendas announced design discipline. Significantly, even Klaus Herdeg's by these projects could not be more dissimilar critique of the Bauhaus-inspired diagram of peda determining the "fitness ofform" as a problem of gogy and design at the Harvard Graduate School of set theory versus releasing the potential for forms to Design proceeded simply through an alternative notate the forces of their emergence-it should not form of diagrammatic analysis. be overlooked that the techniques of diagramming It should not be surprising that the discourse of are central to each. In fact, Alexander begins the the. diagram at this moment has become so con 7 1971 preface to Notes by baldly stating that the most fused 'given its near-universal use and abuse, its significant contribution of his book is "the idea of simultaneous promotion and denigration. This was the diagrams." In some ways, the present collection, less true with the previous trait of disciplinary iden Diagram Diaries, advances a related assertion, a post tity, the act of drawing (disegno), which, as Reyner facto preface to an unpublished dissertation, though Banham writes, "had such a crucial value for archi one that now addresses (and is demonstrated by) a tects that being unable to think without drawing career-long body ofintervening work. became the true mark of one fully socialized into In general, the fundamental technique and proce the profession of architecture."2 With the increasing dure ofarchitectural knowledge has seemingly shifted, inability after the war to link convincingly the for over the second half of the twentieth century, from mal and functional ambitions of modernism, the the drawing to the diagram. This is not to suggest first appearances of the diagram solidify around two that a diagram of one form or another was not possible axes, which Colin Rowe would later iden always constitutive of architecture at various points tify as "paradigm" (the embrace of a priori ideals) in its history, but simply that it has only been in the and "program" (the empirical solicitation of facts). last thirty years or so that the diagram has become While Rowe significantly notes that both positions fully "actualized," that it has become almost com "condemn us to no more th,an simple repetition," pletely the matter of architecture. Proceeding with he ultimately endorses the side of paradigm (or halting steps through serial obsessions with form, type) and suggests, true to his predilection for a language, and representation-though, as will be Renaissance humanism, that it is precisely the draw seen, equally with program, force, and perfor ing that will overcome the diagrammatic alternatives mance-the diagram has seemingly emerged as the he so ably identifies but too quickly dismisses. 3 In final tool, in both its millennial and desperate guises, lieu of a return to drawing and modified types, for architectural production and discourse. Relatively however, an alternative version ofrepetition (a impervious to the specific ideology being promoted, potentially non-linear mode of repetition) has more the diagram has instigated a range of contemporary recently been pursued by rethinking and extending R.E. Somol the logic of the diagram. Thus, the rise of the dia repetition (one which deviates from the work of the gram, a more polemical device than the drawing, modernist avant-gardes and envisions repetition as accompanies a breakdown of the post-Renaissance the production of difference rather than identity); consensus on the role of the architect, and achieves and that it is a performative rather than a represen its apotheosis with the emergence of the "informa tational device (i.e., it is a tool of the virtual rather tion architects" (or architect-critics) after 1960. This than the real). For an early version of this new dis latter association begins to suggest that not all recent ciplinary role inscribed in a project, one can look, uses of the diagram are equally "diagrammatic." for example, to Robert Venturi's National Football As the dominant device within the hybrid prac Hall of Fame Competition entry (or so-called tices of the architect-critics of the neo-avant-garde, "Billdingboard," 1967), which consists of a tripartite this more specific use of the diagram promises to division of the "billboard" entrance facade, a vaulted 8 elide Rowe's postwar opposition between physique exhibition shed, and a sloped grandstand in the rear. form and morale-word. Whereas Rowe would elevate What one reads in section-from the slightly the former pair over the latter in his attempt to inclined seating, through the arc of the shed's roof, extend the legacy of modernism (in contrast to his to the armature of the upright facade-is the 90 alter ego, Banham, who would elaborate the impli degree rotation of a horizontal surface (a table or cations of the second pair), the architects of the drafting board) into a vertical object. As with John neo-avant-garde are drawn to the diagram because Hejduk's Wall Houses, Venturi's competition entry unlike drawing or text, partis pris or bubble nota describes the transformation of the horizontal space tion-it appears in the first instance to operate pre of writing into the vertical surface of the visual, cisely between form and word. For the purposes of Rowe's morale-word becoming physique:flesh, a this brief introduction, this attitude toward the dia process that diagrams a new professional identifica gram has several implications: that it is fundamentally tion which collapses writing and design. 4 Venturi's a disciplinary device in that it situates itself on and appropriation of this swinging tabletop-a drafting undoes specific institutional and discursive opposi room appliance that evinces the documentary status tions (and that it provides a projective discipline for of the discipline-recalls Corbusier's similar use of new work); that it suggests an alternative mode of industrial ready-mades (e.g., the file cabinet, bottle Dummy Text. or the Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture rack, ocean liner, briar pipe, etc.) as the basis for other with the constructive swerves, or misreadings, new organizing systems in the Unites and other of the neo-avant-garde. The first model of repeti projects. The drafting board itself (and here Venturi tion can be identified with icons, resemblances, and refers t<? the front elevation as a "high easel") copies, while the second is aligned with simulacra becomes used as a diagram, one which mobilizes a or phantasms. 5 The fust repetition relies on an series of relations and forces. Moreover, by proceed ideal of the origin or model, an economy of iden ing through a misreading of Corbusier's proto tity, and can be thought of as typologically driven machinic or diagrammatic disposition, the project (the vertical imitation of timeless precedents). In also suggests that an alternative mode of repetition contrast, the second sets in motion divergent series might be available to architecture, one distinct from and exists as a continual process of differentiating. the equal but opposite functional and formal recon One points back to a static moment of being, structions of modernism after the war. while the other advances through modes of 9 The history of architectural production over the becoming. Again, this has a direct relation to what last forty years can broadly be characterized as the Gilles Deleuze also distinguishes as the factitious desire to establish an architecture at once autonomous (or artificial) and the simulacrum: and heterogeneous in contrast to the anonymous and homogenous building associated with the interwar It is at the core of modernity, at the point where rhetoric and postwar experience of the modern modernism settles its accounts, tha,t the factitious and movement. This quest for autonomy and hetero the simulacrum stand in opposition as two modes of geneity-with its fundamental antinomy in the call destruction may: the two nihilisffiS. For between the for both identity and multiplicity-has taken several destruction which conserves and perpetuates the forms in this period, one ofwhich is a continual established order of representations, models and misreading or repetition of the modernist avant copies, and the destruction of models and copies gardes, though now in a significantly transformed which sets up a creative chaos, there is a great differ postwar context.

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