mari

método e exercício

"Diagrammatic technique provides a foothold in the fast streams of mediated information. The meaninglessness that repetition and mediation create is overcome by diagrams which generate new, instrumental meanings and steer architecture away from typological fixation.

What is a diagram?

In general, diagrams are best known and understood as visual tools used for the compression of information. A specialist diagram, such as a statistics table or a schematic image, can contain as much information in a few lines as would fill pages in writing. In architecture, diagrams have in the last few years been introduced as part of a technique that promotes a proliferating, generating, and instrumentalizing approach to design. The essence of the diagrammatic technique is that it introduces into a work qualities that are unspoken, disconnected from an ideal or an ideology, random, intuitive, subjective, not bound to a linear logic - qualities that can be physical, structural, spatial or technical.
There are three stages to the diagram: selection, application and operation, enabling the imagination to extend to subjects outside it and draw them inside, changing itself in the process. Diagrams are packed with information on many levels. A diagram is an assemblage of solidified situations, techniques, tactics, and functionings.(...)

The diagram is not a blueprint. It is not the working drawing of an actual construction, recognizable in all its details and with a proper scale. No situation will let itself be directly translated into a fitting and completely correspondent conceptualization. There will always be a gap between the two. By the same token concepts can never be directly applied to architecture. There has to be a mediator.
The mediating ingredient of the diagram derives from its actual format, its material configuration. The diagram is both content and expression. This distinguishes diagrams from indexes, icons, and symbols. The meanings of diagrams are not fixed. The diagrammatic or abstract machine is not representational. It does not represent an existing object or situation, but it is instrumental in the production of new ones. (...)

Why use diagrams?

Diagrammatic practice delays the relentless intrusion of signs, thereby allowing architecture to articulate an alternative to a representational design technique. A representational technique implies that we converge on reality from a conceptual position and in that way fix the relationship between idea and form, between content and structure. When form and content are superimposed in this way, a type emerges. This is the problem with an architecture that is based on a representational concept: It cannot escape existing typologies. Is not proceeding from signs, an instrumentalizing technique such as the diagram delays typological fixation. Concepts external to architecture are introduced rather than superimposed. Instances of specific interpretation, utilization, perception, construction and so on unfold and bring forth applications on various levels of abstraction.

How is the diagram chosen and applied?
The function of the diagram is to delay typology and advance design by bringing in external concepts in a specific shape: as figure, not as image or sign.

But how do we select, insert and interpret diagrams?

The selection and application of a diagram involves the insertion of an element that contains within its dense information something that our thoughts can latch onto, something that is suggestive, to distract us from spiraling into cliche. Although the diagram is not selected on the basis of specific representational information, it is not a random image. The finding of the diagram is instigated by specific questions relating to the project at hand: its location, program and construction. (...) diagrams are essentially infrastructural; they can always be read as maps of movements, irrespective of their origins. They are used as proliferators in a process of unfolding.

How do diagrams become operational?

(...) It has to be set in motion so that the transformative process can begin, but where does this motion originate? (...)

What exactly is the principle that effectuates change and transformation?

How can we isolate this principle and give it the dimensions that make it possible to grasp and use it at will?

The insertion of the diagram into the work ultimately points to the role of time and action in the process of design. Interweaving time and action makes transformation possible (...) the project is set on its course. Before the work diverts into typology a diagram, rich in meaning, full of potential movement, and loaded with structure, which connects to some important aspect of the project, is found. (...) the work becomes un-fixed; new directions and new meanings are triggered.

The diagram operates transforming and liberating architecture."

_The Artificial Landscape "techniques network spin/diagrams"_ben van berkel&caroline bos

Publicado por Susana Neves em agosto 4, 2004 08:39 PM