REPRESENTATION, MODERNISM AND DIAGRAMS

Alicja Kwade Parallelwelt, 2009

"The peculiar disadvantage under which architects labor; never working directly with the object of their thought, always working at it through some intervening medium, almost always the drawing, while painters and sculptures, who might spend some time working on preliminary sketches and maquettes, all ended up working on the thing itself."

- Robin Evans

This week my presentation topic was Representation in Modernism, and it was based in two main texts: Diana Agrest’s Representation as Articulation Between Theory and Practice (2003)  and Anthony Vidler’s Diagram of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation (2000).

Agrest starts her text by explaining how the relationship between drawing and building exceeds its pure notational function since a representation always stands in a symbolic relationship for something else.  She claims that sometimes representation becomes an end itself (detaching itself from object it is representing) and this is an indication, a symptom, of a transformation taking place in in architecture ideology. What allows for this shifting of ideology to exist is “the architect projection of the imaginary and symbolic dimensions through techniques or tools for representation and regimes of visualization”.

The initial movement towards modernism was characterized by the axonometric projection and its self-referential behavior:  by extending the view point to the infinite, the privilege of the observer of a centralized location found in the linear perspectives of the in renaissance period is suspended.  Additionally, the axonometric implies a world in space outside, reflecting the perception of "another space". In this manner, modern architecture perception of image becomes part of a different system of thought: no longer is an object related to representation (as imitation), but it becomes a mental construct - depending of mechanisms of perception, unconscious, and abstraction. 

In opposition, Agrest argues that our contemporary condition questions the dominance of the visual arts, and that networks of information and communication take place in a new “another space”. As a consequence, the current mode of representation needs to be rethought, and parameters such speed, time and movement should be included.

Vidler explains that there was a theoretical revival of the modernist diagram with a wide range of approaches, from Toyo Itos reference to Sejima's buildings (as reductions to diagrams), to more theoretical spheres such as Tshumi’s or Eisenman’s. However, he claims that the apparent contemporary avant gard of the diagram is actually a modernist revival to digital experiment.

According to him, modernist architecture was concerned to represent space and form abstractly, and its diagrams responded to the aesthetics of rationalism and functionalism. As such, the geometrically driven modernism with the use of the pure line (contour) developed a special affection for the utopian (ideological) diagram and represented in this sense a new world of space. For him, the revival of diagrams have turned them from representational to performative, where the drawing is the end object and easily translated into building. Instead of representing the abstract ideas for space of a new world, these images are about mapping and are limited by the aesthetics of our computers softwares. To summarize, from abstraction of abstractions (ideas), they became diagrams of diagrams.

The discussion we had in class raised questions such as: Are the performative diagrams something to be necessarily rejected? When they are used as part of the design process, to better analyze conditions and data gathered, they do not become the end itself as an image, but part of spacial research that can deeply contribute to the building’s designed. However, what we have witnessed in the past years is yet another misleading tendency. Instead of helping in the design process, diagrams have become sly and oversimplified, sometimes even acting as an icon, a logo, produced after the design to sell architecture to the general public.

The image I upload here is actually not related to the topic presented above. Alicja Kwade’s work occurred to me while reading about the image of the city. Cities represent themselves. Almost acting as mirrors, they embrace and confront imaginary and reality. The symbolic dimension is always there, and it is reflected in the collective sphere and in the individual self of each one that perceives them.