urban occupation : berlin

Diagram

A diagram offers an abstract rendition or symbolic representation of a complex concept or situation. A diagram represents, using simplified visual cues, a complex state of affairs or a set of relations, that is, something that has happened, or even some event that is being planned. In order to do this, decisions concerning the selection of relevant information, and the elimination of irrelevant information have to be made. A diagram can be considered distinct from a plan or from orthogonal architectural representation as it is generally not to scale, and does not necessarily have an explicit relation of resemblance to a represented object (or building) located in the world. Where a plan (horizontal section) and a cross section, etc, ‘look like’ you have sliced through a building, a diagram does not necessarily ‘look like’ whatever it is referring to. Nevertheless, architectural drawings are sometimes referred to as diagrams. A diagram can also be a map, for instance, a subway map (which is not to scale, and does not ‘resemble’ what it refers to, but instead focuses on relationships between stations), or even a cartographical map that does bear a scalar relationship to some terrain (urban or otherwise), but which emphasises some features of that terrain and de-emphasizes others. A diagram can be helpful as it can explain relations between humans and things, as well as directionality, and movement in a projected or given scenario. A diagram can also help visualise a complex concept, and so it can be illustrative of an argument, an idea or a theory.

Collage

Collage is a technique that combines different scraps of coloured, textured and/or patterned paper to create some visual (even haptic) effect. Collage comes from the French word, coller, to glue. Generally the materials collected to create a collage are found materials, or anything that is ready-to-hand. Collage can also be related to the technique of montage, which can be distinguished from collage in that it generally combines (photographic) images rather than coloured and textured paper and other found materials. Montage, or ‘photomontage’ is a technique that creates effects of juxtaposition. Montage is more generally associated with the moving image or film and the way moving images are sequentially juxtaposed to generate visual cues to the development of a story, a passage through time, or to the arousal of some affect (or ‘emotion’).

Storyboard

A storyboard is a visual device regularly used in the planning process of a film. A storyboard sequentially unfolds the planned action according to a series of image captures, or framed moments that depict a temporal or narrative sequence. The idea is to establish when key shifts in action or narrative occur, and describe these with simple images. The difficulty of relating this to architecture is that the storyboard assumes the fixity and control of the device of a frame, and the frame’s relationship to the screen upon which a film will eventually be projected. Nevertheless, it is a useful technique to explore, as it allows a designer to describe action that is taking place in a given spatio-temporal context. The Architect/theorist Bernard Tschumi famously improvised the use of the storyboard for architecture (see The Manhattan Transcripts), in order to examine relationships between built object and event, building type and program, and so forth.

Through a series of essays architectural theorist (and anti-theory representative!), Michael Speaks draws out a distinction between innovation and novelty, or originality. Where innovation, which is part of a process that contributes to what Speaks calls ‘design intelligence’, assumes that architecture is a research-based business, originality and the avant-gardist pursuit of the novel or original assumes that architecture is a medium of artistic expression. Speaks elaborates on innovation as resulting from an approach to problems (let’s say a given architectural brief) that does not take the problem as a given, but adds something more to the problem, or elaborates upon it. Here a distinction between mere problem-solving and innovation comes into play. By augmenting a design problem, and by seeking solutions to the problem through proto-types, material tests, and so forth, design intelligence is gradually, incrementally, increased. The idea is that each time a new [design] problem is addressed, the design intelligence that has been accumulated from past, hands-on experience places the designer in a better position to address the problem. In contrast the myth of the creative genius, and the figure of the architect as author is challenged. Instead the architect can be seen to always act within a greater, more complex network that includes a number of actors, other architects, engineers, materials specialists, local council, clients, users, etc!

The now rather controversial essay by Somol and Whiting, Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism, which has stirred a considerable amount of debate since its publication in 2002, seems to argue with Speaks in forwarding a projective approach to architecture. They counter criticality with projective architecture and build their argument around a series of binary pairs: index vs diagram; dialectics vs Doppler hot vs cool. The latter term in each of these pairs is the one they wish to argue for, and in making their argument they call on such diverse theorists, thinkers, and philosophers as Gilles Deleuze (diagrammatics) and implicitly, C. S. Pierce with respect to their account of the index; Marshal McLuhan (hot=high definition vs cool=low definition); and so on. Rem Koolhaas is exemplary in the context of their argument for the Doppler effect, as he employs force and effect with the promise of forming new forms of collectivity, as distinct from Peter Eisenman and K.Michael Hay’s different arguments addressing the autonomy of the discipline of architecture (is architecture a cultural product or a discrete autonomous discipline?) and concerning process, as well as issues of representation.

Some terms we had to disentangle in Somol and Whiting’s article included the difference, after semiotician, C. S. Pierce, between sign, icon and index. Where the sign always has some relation to a referent in a world, but does not necessarily resemble the thing out their that it signifies (also, the sign may refer to an idea, and not  thing as such ‘out there’; the icon is a sign that bears a discernible resemblance to the referent it refers to. Finally the index, which is the term that Somol and Whiting are using to discuss critical architecture and its failings, is, in their terms, a physically driven sign that combines materialism with signification. So, for example, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion is both a material work of architecture (a reconstructed version of which you can visit in Barcelona), but at the same it signifies ideas or concepts about architecture that seem to escape the given material of the building itself, potentially displacing our attention from the pavilion to a history and theory of architecture, processes of design, and questions of representation, and so forth. Of course, you could probably suggest that any built form also operates as an index, but what Somol and Whiting what to do is counter this effect with the action of the diagram, or diagrammatics. Where the ‘index’ is the trace of the real the ‘diagram’ is the force of the virtual, Somol and Whiting suggest. By forwarding and argument for the diagrammatic Somol and Whiting are wanting to demote (critical) architecture’s fixation on representation, and consider an architecture that acts into the socius opening up the possibility of new modes of behaviour, new ways in which multiplicities of actors connect up, and new forms of collectivity. The risk of this is an insidious slide into a repressive biopolitics whereby architecture comes to operate as a device that imposes forms on the socius, considered as clusters of docile bodies.

The concept of the diagram is being drawn explicitly from the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze, who discusses the diagram in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, and in Foucault, amongst other places. Deleuze and Guattari frequently use diagrams in their books to elaborate on concepts, but the concept of the diagram or diagrammatic action needs to be distinguished from diagrams as we commonly understand them. The diagram activates the virtual in that it does not attempt to represent what is already known (or the ‘real’), instead the diagram as a process opens up the potential of unexpected forms and concepts; it is an activating force that resists cliché, illustration and mere habit. Perhaps this is a concept we will need to elaborate upon further?