Diagram, architecture, and autonomy

Abstract

To what extent can design practice inform a new aesthetic agenda in architecture? Does the rationality inherent to the design process trigger the emergence of symbolic content? If architecture is an autonomous disciplinary field, to what realm does this autonomy belong - to the built work, to the project, or to the moment of creation? This article discusses the role of the diagrams and the diagrammatic process in Peter Eisenman’s theoretical work. It is argued that, because Eisenman formulates his diagrammatic project on the frontiers of semiotics, phenomenology, cognition, and philosophy, his approach to the diagram represents autonomous aesthetic design architecture. The diagrammatic process, singularized in a strategy of opening up the design process, engenders a disciplinary and political purpose. The terms under which diagram and diagrammatic process carry through this disciplinary agenda are here problematized by the confrontation of his discourse on the diagram with his formal experiments. The assumption is that, with Eisenman, the specificity of the diagram, neither merely confined to the employment of new technologies nor to the structuralist discourse of postmodernist architecture, breaks down the critical and political project of modernity. Although semiology and theoretical appropriation of the iconic diagram have become a reference in postmodern architecture1, deeper understanding of Eisenman’s diagrammatic theoretical project has exposed conceptual shifts in the status of what is usually understood as a diagram, shifts that are now widespread in the technological cutting edge in contemporary architecture. With emphasis on the phenomenology of the diagram, we attempt to understand the aesthetic sense of this reorientation in designing with diagrams by the architect Peter Eisenman. Research into the aesthetic role of the diagram ultimately seeks the relationship between a diagrammatic expression that singles out the modernity of the 20th century and the establishment of a cultural autonomy formulated within the architecture.