The Importance of Data Diagrams in Architecture as a Field of Cultural-Political Plasticity 

The problem that I sought to resolve with this paper started with Rem Koolhaas’s urging to shed the crippling shackles of critical theory and pick up a surfboard upon which to ride the shock waves of the new economy (capitalism). With this, Koolhaas is embracing capitalism, official architecture and the power relations it aims to produce and reproduce. Deconstruction is anti-form, anti-hierarchy, anti-structure, which is the opposite of all that architecture stands for. Architecture that utilizes deconstruction can be a counter-space that carves out new cultural and urban realities against the forces in power. Perpetualization of power in capitalism occurs through the repetition of Bourgeois ideas, projections of commodity fetishism, consumerism, materialism, and class power. In this system, those who are well off obtain power. This system is an apparatus. In a capitalist development, in a disciplinary society, apparatuses create docile but “free” bodies that assume their identity and their “freedom” as subjects in their process of becoming a subject to the apparatus.

The challenge of the discourse of the diagram is to construct a discipline value when architecture has become an instrument to the apparatus. To do this, I considered that this diagram would be one that is an emergence of Derrida’s différance, as well as one that utilizes Charles Jenck’s ideas of contextual counterpoint. Contextual counterpoint, to Jencks, is to achieve neighborhood coherence with transforming continuity, to stress the use of a combination of architectural fragments in order to give memory to the city. Différance, for Derrida, means not only to differ but also to defer the meaning of anything, endlessly, because it is never total or finished, and this open process of meaning is an obvious fact of cultures since they are historical and changing.  De Certeau writes that places and cities are saturated with signification and are reduced to this signification, and are, in the person’s mind, compilations of stories and memories. 

When large commissions and the embrace of capitalism are the only driving factor for architects, environments are constructed that serve no purpose other than to celebrate monopolies and to signify shopping. These environments further entrench the capitalist apparatus. Instead, architectural diagrams can account for the effects of culture on both how we use our senses to understand spatial constructs, and the contents of the memory base used for comparison. Like with Jakob Johann von Uexhull’s Umwelt, the mapping of environmental différances and ideas of perception in species is important to understanding the species. This can be applied the same way to cities and places.

Evan’s concerns with the spatiality of everyday life share certain sympathies with de Certeau, who has also done much work on the radicalism of the everyday. De Certeau speaks of space in terms of the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalise it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. It is the polyvalent realities of architecture as a practice that Evans brings to our attention. The essay, Translations from Drawing to Building demonstrates a shift towards the study of drawing as a device for thinking and imagining. 

 “Architecture is discussed, explained, and identified almost entirely through its representations, and these representations are often treated as though they were the architecture itself,” (Rattenbury, 1). The culture of treating un-built, imaginary designs, as architecture is essential to the design process as taught and used in the Western world. Architecture itself (the buildings as much as the representations) can be considered a medium. The ones who call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. 

Why is the representation of architectural projects more celebrated than the built object? To answer this, we can look at the design process in architecture. Looking at the AIA’s knowledge and resource staff’s outline of the architect’s basic services, we find that the process of design is to establish a program or the basic functions of the project required, which would be to estimate square footage, zoning requirements, jurisdictional restrictions, site plan, floor plan, sections, elevations, computer images, renderings, and models. After the program establishment, there is design development which lays out mechanical, electrical, plumbing, structural, and architectural features. It is finished off with construction documents. This list of basic services fits with the criteria of the process of architectural studios, with the exception of a specific research problem typically focused on along in the process. From this, we can determine that the most important step in the architectural design process is the analysis or research stage, which should fall between program and schematic design, but is not outlined as a basic requirement by the AIA. 

Some, notably OMA with their statistical research that precedes their designs or even takes place of the design, have acknowledged this problem. The purpose behind the statistical research, OMA points out, is that without researching the context of the design, the design will turn into what Rem Koolhaas calls “junk space.” Junk space, to Koolhaas, is a hodge-podge of architectural elements designed and put together by architects who have not researched the context of their design. He explains that this is why he created the Harvard Guide to Shopping, to give context to the biggest architectural commissions in order to avoid junk space. Though the idea that architects should have knowledge of the context in which they are designing is significant, the focus of the analysis could be stronger, instead of the celebration of materialism and monopolies in architecture since that is currently what architecture seems to stand for. 

Other than OMA’s statistical research, the current use of the diagram (the theoretical diagram, concerned with this “extra” analysis step in the architect’s requirements) in architecture is for autonomy in the discipline. We see this most notably with Peter Eisenman, who has influenced many others.

When architects think of diagrams, most often they think of renderings, plans, elevations, and sections. In studio, we learn to investigate within the design process with similar rigor as the AIA’s basic requirements. This leads to designs that are based off of architectural precedents that utilise the latest technology and design trends. The process is as simple as program – schematic design – construction documents or drawings. When the analysis process in architecture is so limited, what results? Architects who emphasise the use of diagrammatic analysis in architectural design stems from Eisenman’s use of Derrida’s work for autonomy in the designed object itself. The statistical research done by OMA represents the most viable option for the resolution of Charles Jencks’s call for contextual counterpoint and an emergence of Derrida’s différance in architecture. Contextual counterpoint, to Jencks, is to achieve neighborhood coherence with transforming continuity, to stress the use of a combination of architectural fragments in order to give memory to the city. Although, as noted previously, the contest that OMA aims to produce is bigness, and guides to shopping, and this is not an example of contextual counterpoint in Jencks’s sense of the word, but is an embrace of architecture and the power relations it aims to produce and reproduce. Why haven’t we seen a mode for contextual counterpoint diagramming? Is it fair to reiterate OMA’s ideas in architectural education without an alternative? Is architecture a discipline that is merely an instrument to the capitalist apparatus? How can this place of architectural analysis transform the discipline and de-center it?

Similar to language, architecture can create new ideas and meanings, but it also accumulates parts of other and older languages. Architects are aware of this, and it has affected the aesthetic attitude that some have had toward the creation of the architectural designs. Bricolage can refer to cultural artifacts that in reuse can provide connections to the past and to cultures. In the aim to achieve discursive autonomy, architects wish to reject the use of inherited architectural elements with their associated uses and meanings, and as a result, produce designs that intend to be of their own time, without precedent that embodies only the current societal ideals. Although this is deconstructionist in theory, the architects that do so are still complicit with power. 

Architecture can be a representation of an intervening apparatus, or a diagram. The diagram has emerged as a necessary mechanism for the subject to control its object of knowledge, and has now infiltrated almost every aspect of architectural theory. It has been defined as both an end in itself and as art. Often noted is the paradoxical separation between the artist and the work in architecture, and because of this, much of the foundation of architectural theory is concerned with representation. With this, and from the writings of Walter Benjamin, we find that architectural drawings do not reproduce architecture, but rather, produce it in the first place. A modern mode of representation, the genius of the diagram is its discursive code that organises reality so that it is both visible and usable. From this, we find that the location of this particular diagram type is in the inter-subjective, durational and operational field where meanings are formed and transformed interactively. 

For example, to Peter Eisenman, “the diagram works to blur the relationship between the desiring subject – the design, the user – and the desired object in order to move both subject and object towards an unmotivated condition,” (Eisenman, 211). We find that with Eisenman’s use of the diagram, the diagram can be a means of achieving a place of “writing” that is unmotivated and separate from the design or user, and how a diagram can operate between form and word. What is important to Eisenman is that architecture as a discipline and social project suspends and re-arranges ruling oppositions and hierarchies currently in operation, which suggests that design projects and processes cannot simply be created from their social and intellectual contexts, but must transform them. This makes the diagram a fundamentally disciplinary, performative (tool of the virtual), – rather than representational – device that situates on and undoes specific institutional and discursive oppositions through suggesting an alternative mode of repetition that envisions repetition as the production of différance. Again, the possibility of the diagram operating in such a way occurs “not by representing a particular condition, but by subverting dominant oppositions and hierarchies currently constitutive of the discourse,” (Somol, 90). Diagrams can open new, virtual territories for practice, and for Somol, the emergence of this “other world” is exactly what the diagram diagrams. This process is seen in Eisenman’s process automatism and in Koolhaas’s statistical research in that they are attempts to replace design with the diagram.  

“OMA’s analytical explorations using diagrams do not investigate the state of mind of individual artists/architects but disclose the unconscious, invisible structures of contemporary society, and make ‘systematic idealization, a spontaneous overestimation of the present’ possible,” (OMA, 229). New tools such as sensing, mapping, modeling and communication technologies are creating more complex diagrams of the city. Static diagrammatic tools are being replaced with new tools that allow for the tracing of previously invisible social and ecological processes. “Contemporary GIS and GPS applications alter the genetic code of urban diagrams, shifting from mapping flows in the space of extension to the space of relationship, mapping the space and time in between things, events, people or places,” (Shane, 85). GIS and GPS power the digital diagrams of the city, and new hybrid diagrams that incorporate the shifting, irrational desires of the modern city can be of use to designers in clarifying the city’s structure and to help us see what makes up the city, its complexity. Diagrams can also represent the collective shared maps of the city. The architects who use diagrams now refer to topologies and topographies, and prefer to map than draw, and track movements and events in space. A diagram takes all of this information and compresses the lot of it into a small space. Occasionally, diagrams such as these have the clarity that can arouse public debate and action.

The purpose of this can be seen in Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the diagram, which is a “spatiotemporal abstract map/machine and a ‘multiplicity’ which ‘refuses every formal distinction between a content and an expression,” (Garcia, 24).  In this sense, a diagram differs from drawings in that it represents abstractions symbolically. Diagrams have been used as ways of engaging and researching architectural truths, and like process-based and conceptual works of art and architecture, can be highly obscure, esoteric, and personal. Also, as a result of digital technological advances, the current techniques of architectural diagrams are a revolution in the media and projection systems of architecture. The clearest example of this shift would be “the generation of digital topographies that include in their modeling ‘data’ that would normally be separately diagrammed – the flows of traffic, changes in climate, orientation, existing settlement, demographic trends, and the like,” (Vidler, 61). 

In order to understand how exactly a diagram in architecture can operate as an abstract machine, one must first understand the theoretical foundation that underlies it. To begin with, the abstract machine works to interrupt the flows of the apparatus. An apparatus is a diverse set that includes virtually anything under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on, the apparatus itself is the network that is established between these elements. The apparatus has a concrete strategic function, is always located in a power relation, and as such, appears at the intersection of power relations and the relations of knowledge, (Agamben, 3). Devoid of any foundation in being, the apparatus realises an activity of governance with an implied process of producing its subject. Defining the apparatus’s subject occurs within the set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings. Agamben, through his work What is an Apparatus? proposes that there is a general and massive partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: living beings (or substances) and apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured,”(Agamben, 13). An apparatus can be referred to anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings, and architecture has become an instrument to the apparatus, which is why Eisenman and others seek autonomy for creativity, and the diagram is a method to rid of this control. “Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones, and – why not – language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses – on in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences he was about to face,” (Agamben, 14). The extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live is a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses. Foucault has shown how in a capitalist development, in a disciplinary society, apparatuses create docile but “free” bodies that assume their identity and their “freedom” as subjects in their process of becoming a subject to the apparatus. “This, above all, is the source of the peculiar uneasiness of power precisely during an era in which it confronts the most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history. It is only an apparent paradox that the harmless citizen of postindustrial democracies who readily does everything he or she is asked to do, inasmuch as he leaves his everyday gestures and his health, his amusements and his occupations, his diet and his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest detail by apparatuses, is also considered by power – perhaps precisely because of this – as a potential terrorist,” (Agamben, 22-23).

Derrida seeks to find a way to dismantle these apparatuses. In doing so, he develops a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. Derrida’s main ideas were that the structure of language produces reality, and reality is framed by language. Any sense of our world is determined by the rules that underlie language itself, and rather than the individual being at the center of meaning, it is the structure itself that gives meaning. This structure allows meaning to occur. Derrida takes this idea of the structure and puts it through intellectual rigor. He argues that until the pervasive presence of structuralism, the history of philosophy was the continuous constitution of the central system. From the early Christian era to the 18th century, we had a single god as the center of all things that gave meaning to life. God gave meaning, and was the cause and center of everything. During the 18th century, the human subject becomes the center of the structure, and god becomes marginal. Thought and rationality now becomes the center. In the late 19th century, rationality is kicked out of the center, and Freudian’s theory of the subconscious becomes the center. According to Freud, “we are not creatures of thought; instead, we are driven by irrational, subconscious desires,” (Derrida, 73). 

Structure, Sign and Play was written by Derrida in order to deconstruct the center. In this, Derrida’s argument focuses on the fact that every system contains its own undoing, and it’s “rupture” emerges only in relation to other un-doings of other structures. Ferdinand de Saussure’s work allows us to see the fact that there is a center, and Derrida’s work allows us to see that the center itself is a construct. We now find that the center is a construct rather than something that is an absolute truth. The center makes the system work, holds it together, and gives the system a full presence. To Derrida, the center is the transcendental signifier, or a signifier that transcends and has no equivalence to anything else (e.g. god). The transcendental signifier is the center, but at the same time is outside of it because it gives everything it’s meaning. For example, in some religions you cannot represent or write the word god because he is so beyond everything. Thus, the transcendental signifier is the cause of the system but also escapes the system. We find that western philosophy is based on a fundamental error, which is the belief and search for the transcendental signifier (God, reason, science, humanity, truth, self, etc.), which must be understood without reference to other signifiers.

This is what makes the center and the transcendental signifier coherent for Derrida. It gives the system meaning, but also lies outside of it – it is a contradictory idea. This idea of the center holds the structure together and limits play. The center fixes, stabilises, and controls. Derrida argued that anthropology began as a way for European societies to explain that they are the center of the world, and Europe in this argument is the center (ethnocentrism). When other cultures exist autonomously to Europe, then it challenges Europe as the center, and de-centers it in terms of anthropology. Claude Lévi-Strauss questions anthropology as a discipline, and his anthropological theories allow Derrida to argue this point of undoing the center.

Lévi-Strauss finds that in this fundamental binary opposition, there is a scandal. There is something that intrudes the binary oppositions in cultures – incest prohibition. This is fundamental to the evolution of any community. What he finds is that every single culture has the incest prohibition – it is a universal thing. Every single culture has a distinct and unique way of expressing this. Incest prohibition collapses the binary opposition of nature/culture. This is the heart of deconstruction at the philosophical level: to take binary opposites and see how they fall apart. To Plato, we have the différance between the world of Forms and the material world, and we cannot understand the material world without the world of forms. Although for Plato, the Forms are privileged over the world of material things, but since you cannot understand the world of forms without the world of the material, this destructs this binary. 

The privileged term in the binary is privileged because it has presence and the binary can be seen as: presence/absence. Since you cannot have presence without absence, this collapses the binary. What is devalued is necessary to understand what is valued. Western philosophy is based on the presence of speech, which means it is logo-centric – privileging a presence. Speech and presence are privileged over absence and writing. Undoing this reveals how logo-centric the system is, and how western philosophy is based on a series of constructs. The moment you deconstruct these binaries, you bring them into play, and show that these are not absolute truths. These emerge within the structure of language itself, during the moment of history. The things being handed down are culturally constructed. 

Speech implies presence, and writing implies absence. Writing is a supplement to speech. Derrida shows the inconsistencies in these fundamental givens, and shows logical fallacies of these binary opposites. When you question these binaries, you put them into play. Once you deconstruct a structure by pointing out its inconsistencies, you put them into play. Once you do this, you can substitute the center. But this is a logical fallacy. Or you can keep using the structure, and stop attributing truth-value to the center. It is a provisional center or structure. With this in mind, a provisional center for the architectural diagram is an alternative method for analysis. 

Derrida calls using the provisional structure with the knowledge that it is not an absolute truth bricolage. The person who does this thinking is the bricoleur. The bricoleur is a handyman, uses things at hand to put them together. The bricoleur is making due with what he or she has, but is paying attention to the little pieces and how they fit together. For example, a bricoleur might use the research methods at hand to develop diagrams, or use architectural fragments that are a form of repetition of the structure for an emergence of différance.

An example of a bricoleur is Joseph Kosuth. According to the Guggenheim online collection, “during the formative stage in his work, Kosuth made the tautological nature of art explicit.” Taking a critical step back, Kosuth resolved that, “art presupposes the existence of an aesthetic entity that fulfills the criteria of artness,” (Spector). With this criteria, as Marcel Duchamp had shown with his ready-mades, art could be deemed art by the declaring “this is a work of art.” With this, we see that the diagram component is not in the object of the diagram itself, but is in the idea or concept of it, or the compilations of the found signifiers and signs. 

“Kosuth used this linguistic approach to explore the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts through which art is presented and thus defined,” (Spector). Investigating the discursive possibilities of art, Kosuth used language itself as his medium, and created a conceptual art where perception was replaced by intellectual provocation, and words replaced images or objects. Kosuth “sought to demonstrate that the “art” component is not located in the object itself but rather in the idea or concept of the work,” (Spector). Kosuth’s art operated to critique the production of meaning, instead of merely representing meaning. 

Through this, Kosuth was attempting to reveal that all ideas or concepts constructed are within cultures. While not working with found objects like Duchamp, but with found signifiers and signs, Kosuth could still be considered a bricoleur. Bricolage, as a philosophical endeavor, is to function within an inherited system that is incoherent with the person being aware of this. In a sense, the bricoleur is building with what is at hand, using the provisional structure with the knowledge that it is not an absolute truth. Everything is provisional in terms of class, history and politics. Discourses in circulation are themselves sites of power and the contest for power. The architectural discourse has created a place of analysis that utilises these ideas for creative autonomy, now it can do the same for différance and for de-centering architectural systems of power.

At no point, can we with any certainty invoke an absolute. Derrida is meditating on this idea, and questions philosophy as a rupture. He also questions philosophy as a discipline as he writes Structure, Sign, and Play. 

For Derrida, undoing does not mean destroying, but analyzing incoherencies. “Such a play, différance, is thus no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general,” (Derrida, 63). From this, we find that the value of a signifier emerges only in relation to other signifiers. The process of meaning is deferred endlessly.  Meaning emerges through deferral endlessly in addition to différance: to defer and to differ. The condition of language is to defer and to differ. Meaning, in language, emerges in the endless deferral of meaning: signifiers and signified. There is an endless deferral; the movement of meaning is a precondition of language. Language, to Derrida, is an endless chain of signifiers, and every signifier leaves behind a trace. Every time there is a deferral, a signifier leaves a trace behind, such as “bottle is not folder.” Even though the signified is not present, it is also not absent. These synonyms exist in this word and thus leave a trace of deferred signifiers in the signified. Signifiers are not present but are not absent either, and help establish meaning. Without the residue of the signifiers, you would not have the meaning of the signified, and Saussere calls this linguistic value. The value is created from the sign as the other signs determine it in a semiotic system, and particular values because they exist in opposition to one another. If two of the terms disappeared, then the remaining sign would take on their roles, become vaguer, less articulate, and lose its “extra something” because it would have nothing to distinguish itself from.

We find that this presence/absence binary is collapsed at the level of signifiers. The corollary to this is that if there is an absence of the signified, there is an over abundance of signifiers. Every utterance always has the potential of more meanings, and there are multiple signifiers.

Deconstruction for Derrida means, “there is nothing outside the text,” (Derrida, 65). That is to say, all of the references used to interpret a text are themselves texts, including the “text” of reality, as a reader knows it. There is no true objective, non-textual reference from which interpretation can begin. Deconstruction, then, can be described as an effort to understand a text through its relationships to various contexts. Likewise, we understand an environment or neighborhood through its relationships to various contexts. 

Diagrams can be modes of becoming an emergence of différance. According to Derrida, “we will designate as différance the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted historically as a weave of différances,” (65). For Derrida, a diagram subverts the dominant oppositions and hierarchies currently constitutive of the discourse, and become representative of this weave.

With this meaning of différance in mind, diagrams can account for the effects of culture on both how we use our senses to understand spatial constructs, and the contents of the memory base used for comparison. There is considerable interaction between perception and culture, and diagrams can be an urban mosaic of perception. For Deleuze, in A Thousand Plateaus, smooth space and a nomadic lifestyle emphasises an aimless life with no points of trajectory because when all fantasised projections of striated space are gone, only the immediate, natural world exists, free of the striation of conceptions of what is reality. Vagabonds and nomads are distinct from ideal, royal, or imperial essences. Conversely, striated space is the place of attachment to material possessions and social conceptions of importance of class, and with this attachment brings suffering. The source of striation is state power, even the mind is striated, and because of this, one must delve into the unconscious to rid of this striation. Within this realm of the striated and the suffering, power is obtained for the state through the need for the obtainment of things, or materialism. 

Perpetualization of power occurs through repetition of Bourgeois ideas, projections of commodity fetishism, consumerism, materialism, and class power. In this system, those who are well off obtain power. For Deleuze, nomadism is continuously inhibited and banned by the state, and the state typically imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of nomadism.

Within this examination of the smooth, the striated, and the nomad, we find the binary of the war machine and the state apparatus. The exteriority of the war machine to the state apparatus is attested by the existence of the nomad, and the war machine follows nomadic ambition against the state. Deleuze writes that the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the state apparatus. We find that there has always been a state, and to Deleuze, the state is what makes the distinction between governors and governed possible. The state seems to rise up in a single stroke, in an imperial form, and does not depend on progressive factors. Appropriation only occurs in the form of military institution for the state, and within the state, collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that reconstitute equivalents of the war machine. These groups on the margins of society serve as war machines within the state apparatus. For Deleuze, collective bodies, namely those of the state, are “differentiated and hierarchical organisms that enjoy a monopoly over power or function. 

The collective body of the state is sovereignty, and this sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing. Deleuze writes that the war machine is a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking. Diagrams that operate as a war machine can go against this habit of thinking. 

Therefore, in a never-ending field of co-existence and competition, we find the exterior and the interior, the war machines of emancipation and change, and the state apparatuses of identity and power. To Deleuze, thought is in conformity with a model in that it borrows from the state apparatus, and that the apparatus defines for it goals and paths, conduits, and channels. Ultimately, from this we find that ideology forms identity. Thought is striated, and it is the necessary condition for the thought to be a form of interiority as a stratum. 

The state exists because its power operates through the striation of thought, which seems inherent in nature to those being striated if one does not question the nature of their reality. What thought gains from this is a gravity that it would never have on its own, a center that makes everything, including the state, appear to exist by its own efficacy or on its own sanction, and through this, the state gains a whole consensus in that only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a state that is universal by right.

The less people take thought seriously, the less that one is aware that freedom is in thought, and the more they think in conformity with what the state wants. Thought can be smooth space, a force that destroys the symbols and its copies, the model and its reproductions, and every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the state. Through this, one can denounce the central interiority of the state as a means of control – the control of speech, language, and its affects. The state gives thought a form of interiority, and thought gives that interiority a form of universality. With this, we find that all varieties of the “real” and the “true” find their place in a striated mental space, and the nomad rejects this image and does things differently. The architectural diagram can operate in the same way.

Influenced by Derrida, Peter Eisenman reveals the critical power of the diagram, focusing on the importance of the postmodern discourses of historicism, place, and the linguistic turn in architectural theory. To Eisenman, the importance of the architectural diagram is the différances in the way that the diagram signifies, instead of signifying the diagram, or he uses signifiers to construct new meaning instead of adhering to societal parameters. Eisenman is more concerned with how architect’s designs “externally motivate architectural signs through their desires when they apply an artificial set of signifiers that move an architectural sign beyond its architecturally structuring or internal motivation,” (Eisenman, 205). Diagrams work to separate or distance the architect from the design process, and blur the relationship between the object/place and the subject, moving toward an unmotivated condition – ostensibly, according to Eisenman, producing random relationships between form, function, and meaning. Otherwise, the column has to be ‘column’,  as in the columns on the far right and left in figure seven. When I think of Eisenman’s explanation of “form, function, meaning,” I think of the La Strada Novissima, at the 1980 Venice Biennale. The columns on the far left and right in figure seven are ‘form, function, meaning,’ the column with the human form beneath it in figure seven is ‘form, meaning,” the column in figure six is ‘function,’ as well as the building and tree columns in figure seven. 

To Eisenman, in order for an architect to work diagrammatically, the diagram has to overcome the motivated conditions that are the root of architectural discourse, which introduces the strategy of the diagram as a negative or resistant agent that separates the architect from the process of design. Through this, the diagram then blurs the relationship between the desired subject (designer and user) and the desired object in order to move both subject and object toward the unmotivated condition. 

“Therefore,” Eisenman writes, “if a diagram can write architecture or act as a writing, this writing could be something different from the column as having an explicit and external sign function, the idea of writing as a diagram is a means of potentially overcoming the question the question of origin (speech) as well as the metaphysics of presence,”(208). Thus, for Eisenman, by focusing on the presence of the diagram as the primary condition, the diagram would be a means of reversing the motivated design process.

Here, we find the ideas of Deleuze, that free action resides within the smooth space or war machine, and that the opposite of this would be striated space or the repetition of the current state apparatus (Deleuze, 476). The diagram works as a war machine to reverse the motivated design process (state apparatus), or the repetition of ideas that produce relations of power.

Similarly, Bernard Tschumi’s multi-disciplinary approach to the diagram led to a new and critical conceptualization of architecture, in terms of its power to re-describe and superimpose multiple criteria of architecture such as the body, movement, event and narrative (Garcia, 195). Also important to Tschumi were relations between context, concept, and content in the possible future narratives of the city.

The diagram for Tschumi is a graphic representation of a concept, and for Tschumi, there is not architecture without a concept. Here, we find similarities with the art of Joseph Kosuth. The architecture component for Tschumi is located not in the “object” but in the idea or concept. The production of meaning or concepts is important to Tschumi, and concepts are best represented by diagrams due to their ability to blur the distinction between subject and object, of being in and out, or to operate as an abstract machine.

Ultimately, through his architectural diagrams, Tschumi is attempting to bypass the history of architecture and its values, ideologies, and clichés. Here we see an influence from Derrida as Tschumi tries to re-configure what the definition of what architecture is. In order to do this, Tschumi – through the diagram – explores, at the city scale, the information and combination between concept, content, and context.  The mention of context is important here, as context in diagrams provides a foundation for the interweaving of différance, although Tschumi’s diagrams and designs are not representative of contextual counterpoint. 

According to Tschumi, “You need to conceptualise this because these are not forms, they are very abstract and complex. The definition of the word ‘city’ has to do with a substantial amount of noise, (Garcia, 201)” When conceptualizing Derrida’s différance, it is important to use the means at hand in order to concurrently question the discipline and examine the signs and signifiers presenting the perception of the concept, as well as to work and be aware of working in a position that is both in and out of socially constructed centers and structures. 

For Bos and Berkel of UNStudio, the importance of the diagrammatic technique is its introduction of unspoken qualities that are disconnected from an ideal or ideology into a work. We find an influence of Deleuze when they write, “the diagram is not a metaphor or paradigm, but an ‘abstract machine’ that is both content and expression,” (Bos & Berkel, 224). Their abstract machine is not representational, and its meanings are not fixed. Their diagrams are only valued for their production of new objects and situations – not those that already exist. Drawing from Derrida, Bos and Berkel write that “diagrammatic practice delays the relentless intrusion of signs, thereby allowing architecture to articulate an alternative to a representational design technique,” (Bos & Berkel, 225). From this, we find that the problem with architecture that is derived from representational concepts is that it cannot escape existing typologies, and that the diagram is the method for Bos and Berkel for delaying typological fixation and not producing work that proceeds from signs.  

These architects aim to produce a period of analysis in the design process that operates similarly to an abstract machine, but we find that they are not too concerned with context, and it seems that what is pushing them within the analysis stage is not an alternative method to architecture’s embrace to the capitalist apparatus, but to produce designs that emerge from a place outside of the design status quo, only not the status quo as in the state apparatus or the status quo itself, but just the design status quo. These architects are not rejecting the reproduction of the apparatus’s power relations, but are producing more and new signs within the system of the apparatus. Instead, diagrams that focus on différance and contextual counterpoint rejects this, and focuses its analysis on the importance of place to the individual. This presents an alternative to the architecture that works as an instrument to the capitalist apparatus.

The role that the diagram as abstract machine plays is that of which works as a synthetic explanatory device that opens up space through which a perceptibly reality may be related to the formal system that organises it. Jakob Johann von Uexkull had an important role in doing this when he invented the term Umwelt, or that subject and object, perception and reality, and schema and senses are all inseparable from each other. The diagram represents the plastic aspect of reality where subject and object can virtually masquerade as one another. Deleuze’s abstract machine isolates the diagram from the concrete events that it generates. According to Kwinter, “abstract machines are precisely what they claim to be: they are abstract because conceptually and ontologically distinct from material reality yet they are fully functioning machines nonetheless, that is, they are agencies of assemblage, organization, and deployment,” (124). Architects have to understand their role as intermediaries, and to occupy the interstitial space to become diagrammatists.

From Agamben’s critique on capitalism as an apparatus, and Derrida’s theory on de-constructing the apparatus through considering ideology as a set of signs and signifiers, we see a connection to De Certeau when he says that places and cities are saturated with signification, and are reduced to this signification. This is important when considering the narratives of a city for a culture with Derrida’s ideas of différance in mind. De Certeau suggests that the view from skyscrapers overlooking the city creates a “god” out of the viewer, and alienates the viewer from their daily behavior, from their sense of self. The walkers below cannot have this all-seeing “power,” and walk blindly through the streets without a sense of what is known, and without a perception of what is to come. De Certeau says that this is “atopia-utopia of optical knowledge,” and that this manages the growth of human agglomeration and accumulation.

Analyzing the configuration of the city further, de Certeau writes that the functions of the relations between spatial and signifying practices are indicated through street names, that the city is the legend, the memory, the dream, and that this allows a play of sorts within a system of defined places. To de Certeau, this causes places to be saturated with signification that reduces them to this signification; meaning that places and cities are, in the person’s mind, compilations of stories and memories. According to de Certeau, totalitarianism attacks these superstitious semantic overlays that refer to a past and poetic realm.

The practice of signifying places and cities with signs composed from memories, legends, and dreams authorise the production of an area of free play on a checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities. Traveling, while thinking in this sense, is the uprooting in one’s origins - one’s origins being the body of legends. Through travelling, a person compiled of the signifiers that construct their past and identity are lacking their own vicinity, or compilation of self, which leads to the effect of displacement, which I will explain further later on.

Signifying practices used while traveling are practices, which invent spaces, practices that bring meaning to space for a particular person. The contents and meanings of a space are products of people attempting to reveal to themselves what is unknown to them about the space. Thus, stories about places are makeshift things that are “heterogeneous and contrary elements that fill the homogeneous form of the story,” and are “the world’s debris.” Due to this, stories are comprised of things that are extra and other, details and excesses coming from elsewhere that insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imported order, resulting in stories articulated by lacunae.

For de Certeau, “objects and words have hollow places where the past sleeps,” and memory is subjective. Hints of what is known but unrevealed are passed on through memories that tie people to a place, and this is what makes a place “haunted.” There is a pleasure in detachment caused by travelling, for people to be the other and more toward the other. The relationship of otherness to oneself governs how one materialises internal alterations of the place where they travel, the relations among the places lead to different levels of interpretation, or the unfolding of stories accumulated in a different place. The identity shaped by childhood experiences determines spatial practices within a person that create a metaphorical city within the planned city.

Going back to Agamben, while reading his work What is a People?, we find the essence of Derrida’s writings on différance, as well as de Certeau’s ideas of the city. Agamben says that the interpretation of the political meaning of the term people is the fact that in modern European languages, this term always indicates the poor, the underprivileged, and the excluded. “The same term names the constitutive political subject as well as the class that is excluded – de facto, if not de jure – from politics,” (Agamben, 29). People in the sense of the word is not unitary, but a dialectical wavering between two: the People as a whole inclusive integral body politic of sovereign and integrated citizens, and the people as a subset as an exclusive fragmentary multiplicity of needy and banished excluded bodies of the wretched, the oppressed, and the vanquished. The constitution of the human species is thus a body politic that comes into being through a fundamental split, and the concept of people we recognise as the aforementioned conceptual pair is the defining category of the original political structure, as identified by Agamben: naked life (people) and political existence (People) – an exclusion and inclusion (as noted above). The pure source of identity in this sense has to redefine and purify itself continuously according to exclusion, language, blood and territory. Naked life identity needs to constantly redefine itself with its territories of memory against political existence. “As a matter of fact, what Marx calls class struggle – which occupies a central place in his thought, even though he never defines it substantially – is nothing other than this internecine war that divides every people and that shall come to an end only when People and people coincide, in the classless society or in the messianic kingdom, and only when there shall no longer be, properly speaking, any people,” (Agamben, 32). Today, poverty and exclusion are political categories, as well as economic and social concepts. Those who refuse integration in the national body politic are the naked life that modernity creates within itself but cannot tolerate, and in the capitalistic plan to eliminate the poor, the people of the excluded are reproduced further within it. From this, we find that identity must be recognised and honored.

According to Charles Jencks,  “since post-modern communication was simultaneously putting them in touch and flattening différances, the large world cities were becoming much more homogenous,” (Jencks, 53). It was from this realization that it became morally compelling to nurture plurality in architecture. Modern history, to Jencks, suppressed the history of the city into a depthless present, or an ‘empty landscape of psychosis.’ There was thus a need for post-modernists to layer the urban realm as if it were a manuscript on which different generations write their identity. For Jencks, time is the architect, the nation is the builder, and these ideas enacted the instant building of différance within the city by Post-Modern architects in the 1980s. Architects use the computer to present complexity as the juxtaposition of différance, instead of pursuing seamless continuity [complexity theory]. These designs dramatise identity and the complexity of the past. The difficulties architects faced were that of celebrating whisky, airplane, and soap monopolies, architects struggled to find more important content to signify than shopping, to find better commissions than commercial ones. The failures of modern architecture were the reductive nature of building types carried out in dull, neutral style with little iconography beyond emphatic size that Modernists designed for Lever Soap, Pan American World Airways, and Seagram Whiskey. With Post-Modernism are its rhetorical means: ornament, color, wit, metaphor, signs, and material exaggeration. Post-Modernism is a subversion from the power elite that utilises conscious and conventional signs that aim to portray deeper, underlying meaning – depending on interpretation In order to not be seen as complicit with power, according to Jencks, architects dramatise their risk-taking creativity. With a diagram that not only maps the identity of the city, but works also as an emergence of différance, contextual counterpoint can be more easily achieved. 

Most buildings are related to some sort of narrative, and narratives, the stories of places and people, are the raw material of everything that an architect does. Perception is strongly influenced by prior experience. Preference is the result of cultural and ethnic patterns, personal experience, and is influenced by prior experience as manifested in memory. Cultural modifiers are shaped by both culture and position in regard to contextual codes. What is critical in understanding preference is to account for the effects of culture on how we use our senses to understand spatial constructs, and the contents of a person’s memory base used for comparison. There is considerable interaction between perception and culture, and sensory modalities are fundamental to this. “The range and intensity of sensory data should be of prime importance to designers generally, and urban planners particularly,” (Malnar & Vodvarka, 119). This makes the knowledge of the characteristics and the narratives of an area critical to designers in the pre-planning stages.  In order to nurture plurality, design the most local contextual counterpoint, and truly allow the diagram to be an emergence of différance, architects need standards to research the city, as it is perceived to those whose identities are constructed by it. Defining, collecting, cataloging, and analyzing artifacts, using archival and secondary data in ethnographic research, and mapping spatial data, can gather information. 

“Artifacts become cultural when they acquire meaning or significance because of how they relate to history, behavior, practices, and the values and beliefs of the groups that produce and use them,” (LeCompte, 1). Artifacts evoke the identities, concepts, and values to which individuals and members of a culture adhere. “The enactment of social roles is enhanced by markers that people adopt and ‘put on’ to signify their identity and enhance their performance of a given role, these markers are referred to as an identity kit, which consists of and is expressed in types of clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, hair styles, housing, interior decorations, tools people use, the leisure activities and foods they prefer, their modes of movement, speech codes and styles,” (LeCompte, 9). Additionally, the purposeful set-up of a map from a community, in this example a tourist map in particular, can reveal how the map might promote commodification of the local environment and history through critical analysis. In the process of making sense of artifacts, researchers can learn about the ways in which people construct, maintain and even transform their identities. To triangulate the accurate portrayal of an object, information from various sources should be compiled and analyzed, which may include photographs and drawings, stories told and recorded about them, video and audio recordings of the objects in use or field notes and drawings made during use, and historical material on use in the past and changes in manufacture over time. Sometimes, the process will result in a consensus on or a composite sense of the artifact; other times it will produce several stories because creating a consensus or identifying a uniform “truth” about it may not be possible. Artifacts can signify cultural identities, and can present what who people are, and how they wish to present themselves. The concept of the identity kit in ethnographic research is the adornments people put on their bodies and enact in behavior to signify their identity, which can also serve as markers of status and culture.  For our purposes, we are most concerned with the housing portion of the identity kit.

  Archival data is material originally collected for bureaucratic or administrative purposes that are transformed into data for research purposes, and secondary data is raw data that is transformed into data for research purposes. “The U.S. Census, other national census data, and many other such data sets provide demographic, health, housing, and other important information about the population of a study before entering the field and can be a useful supplement to primary data collection during post-field analysis. Researchers also can find many sources of information about local communities in the form of reports, fact books, and maps. Local archival data is available on general demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the research community, as well as a specific aspect of the population of interest such as educational achievement levels. 

People of all cultures classify the world around them in cognitive domains, and how this is done affects their interaction with the world. Not all cultures classify things the same way, and cultural domains are not about a person’s particular preferences, but are about their perceptions. “Cultural domains are experienced as outside the individual and shared across individuals,” (Borgotti, 82). The communities, villages, schools, and other social settings the ethnographer studies exist in particular environments that are both natural and human made, and the daily activity patterns of individuals are often constrained by the contemporary geography of the community – the culmination of earlier human-environment interactions. To the individuals that live in the community, the attributes of its environment are fixed. “The spatial view of data contributes information that cannot be obtained in any other way, and cartographic representation and analysis of spatial data make it possible to go beyond tabular and statistical views of data,” (Cromley, 117). Spatial analysis reveals the importance of neighborhood or environmental spatial-contextual influences. 

Cognitive maps, as used in geography are long term stored information (stored in the heads of individuals) about the relative location of objects and phenomena in the everyday physical environment. The environments that are the basis for the individual’s cognitive map may be known to exist or may be imagined, and they often represent a mix of information drawn from different periods of time. “Both cognitive and developmental approaches have been applied to the study of spatial cognition,” (Cromley, 135). With developmental approaches, with the awareness of perceived objects, spatial perception begins. Other attributes of perceived objects that contribute to spatial perception are the location of the object in time and space, the recognition of attributes of the object, and the attachment of meaning to it. The neighborhood is a physical area, readily identifiable on a map, and many cues such as housing types, land use, and density signify neighborhoods. The social component of the neighborhood consists of local interaction, social class, ethnic and racial origins, life cycle characteristics of the population, length of residence, and place of work. Also, the level of education and social class can be used to identify a neighborhood’s perceived size and complexity. The image-ability of the environment, to ethnographic research, is the recognition of physical features, but more importantly, is the individual’s perception of the form of physical features in the landscape, as well as the social or behavioral significance that the individual attributes to the feature.

Sense of place also develops as a deep attachment through experience and memory to the places where we have lived. Objective aspects of location are combined with subjective experience, direct or indirect. “Attention has been focused on how sense of place is created by intention in contemporary architecture and planning,” (Cromley, 137). Geo-referenced data based on the built environment, are now available on the internet, and are becoming a part of an individual’s experience of places. Perceptions of places in neighborhoods are no longer based simply on a person’s sensory experiences or cognitive map, but are also based on the geo-referenced information that one chooses to look at.

Cognitive mapping is crucial for navigating the cultural logic of late capitalism, and its close-up processes of social observation and rich ethnographic description can complement the synoptic GIS maps of an area. “Diagrams are used by both scientists and designers throughout such integrated work to help uncover the relationship between the various disciplines, to communicate complex scientific concepts to lay audiences, and to assist people in making design decisions based on performance rather than aesthetics,” (McGrath, 159). In order to nurture plurality, design the most local contextual counterpoint, and truly allow the diagram to be an emergence of différance, architects need standards to research the city, as it is perceived to those whose identities are constructed by it. Defining, collecting, cataloging, and analyzing artifacts, using archival and secondary data in ethnographic research, and mapping spatial data, can gather information. “Artifacts become cultural when they acquire meaning or significance because of how they relate to history, behavior, practices, and the values and beliefs of the groups that produce and use them,” (LeCompte, 1). Artifacts evoke the identities, concepts, and values to which individuals and members of a culture adhere.

How do you begin to diagram différance and contextual counterpoint within the analysis stage? You can use the ethnographic research methods to look up geo-referenced data, compile information from Arc GIS, or complete neighborhood architectural summaries. Like the other de-constructivist Derridean diagrammatic architects, this de-constructivist Derridean diagramming method emphasises the analysis stage as the most important part of the design process, but instead of focusing on creative autonomy, focuses of différance. These diagrams would aim to compile as much ethnographic cultural information as possible to frame the beginnings of a schematic design. For example, looking at architecture as a cultural artifact, I analyzed the architectural summaries for each neighborhood of the city of Buffalo, New York, and came up with the most prevalent residential building types in the area. The previous diagram would be just one of many that would contribute to this analysis process that would precede design, or take place of the design altogether. By utilizing architectural fragments of those facades to achieve a design ‘counterpoint,’ you can see where the diagramming technique would begin to give a memory to the identity of the city, allowing for a more purposeful design, rich with enigmatic signifiers. 

The greater force of architecture comes from deeper linkages to the cultures that underlie businesses, nations, and religions. Today, technology faces the problem of emerging identity. If all architecture begins to resemble too closely with the industrialised buildings of the West, a local identity will not be represented. Places and cities emerge as distinctive cultures, not of the just industrialisation. Architects should be able to support complex readings specific to where the designs are built, and must be able to manipulate this formal language in a knowledgeable way.

Works cited, in order of occurrence 

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