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LibraryofCongressCataloglng-in-Publication Data
Eisenman, Peter.
Diagramdiaries/ PeterEisenman; introductionby R.E.Somol
p. cm.
ISBN9-7893-0264-0 (alk.paper)
1.Eisenman, Peter-Contributionsin architecturaldesign.I.Title.
II.Title:Diagramdiaries.
NA787.E33A4 1999
720.92-DC21 99-10846

PrintedIn Italy

DesignbyJulietteCeuar
 DummyText,
or The Diagrammatic Basis
6 of Contemporary
Architecture
R.E.Somol

I •
 Peter Eisenman has often remarked that his Ph.D. practices. Just as Robert Venturi summarized the
thesis of 1963, "The Formal Basis of Modern effect of his 1950 M.A. thesis as "one great dia-
Architecture;• was a critical response to Christopher gram," Lawrence Halprin published a book of dia-
Alexander's earlier Cambridge dissertation, which grams in 1970-which he referred to as "scores"-
would be published as Notes on the Synthesis of intended to form the foundation of a renewed
Form.1While the architectural agendas announced design discipline. Significantly, even Klaus Herdeg's
by these projects could not be more dissimilar- critique of the Bauhaus-inspired diagram of peda-
determining the "fitness of form" as a problem of gogy and design at the Harvard Graduate School of
set theory versus releasing the potential for forms to Design proceeded simply through an alternative
notate the forces of their emergence-it should not form of diagrammatic analysis.
be overlooked that the techniques of diagramming It should not be surprising that the discourse of
are central to each. In fact, Alexander begins the the. diagram at this moment has become so con- 7
1971 preface to Notes by baldly stating that the most fused ·given its near-universal use and abuse, its
significant contribution of his book is "the idea of simultaneous promotion and denigration. This was
the diagrams." In some ways, the present collection, less true with the previous trait of disciplinary iden-
DiagramDiaries,advances a related assertion, a post- tity, the act of drawing (disegno),which, as Reyner
facto preface to an unpublished dissertation, though Banham writes, "had such a crucial value for archi-
one that now addresses (and is demonstrated by) a tects that being unable to think without drawing
career-long body of intervening work. became the true mark of one fully socialized into
1
In general, the fundamental technique and proce- the profession of architecture." 2 With the increasing

l\ dure of architectural knowledge has seemingly shifted,

over the second half of the twentieth century, from
inability after the war to link convincingly the for-
mal and functional ambitions of modernism, the
\ the drawing to the diagram. This is not to suggest first appearances of the diagram solidify around two
I
that a diagram of one form or another was not possible axes, which Colin Rowe would later iden-
always constitutive of architecture at various points tify as "paradigm" (the embrace of a prioriideals)
in its history, but simply that it has only been in the and "program" (the empirical solicitation of facts).
last thirty years or so that the diagram has become While Rowe significantly notes that both positions
fully "actualized," that it has become almost com- "condemn us to no more th_ansimple repetition,"
pletely the matterof architecture. Proceeding with he ultimately endorses the side of paradigm (or
halting steps through serial obsessions with form, type) and suggests, true to his predilection for a
language, and representation-though, as will be Renaissance humanism, that it is precisely the draw-
seen, equally with program, force, and perfor- ing that will overcome the diagrammatic alternatives
mance-the diagram has seemingly emerged as the he so ably identifies but too quickly dismisses.3 In
final tool, in both its millennial and desperate guises, lieu of a return to drawing and modified types,
for architectural production and discourse. Relatively however, an alternative version of repetition (a
impervious to the specific ideology being promoted, potentially non-linear mode of repetition) has more

I
the diagram has instigated a range of contemporary recently been pursued by rethinking and extending
 R.E.Somol

the logic of the diagram. Thus, the rise of the dia- repetition (one which deviates from the work of the
gram, a more polemical device than the drawing, modernist avant-gardes and envisions repetition as
accompanies a breakdown of the post-Renaissance the production of difference rather than identity);
consensus on the role of the architect, and achieves and that it is a performative rather than a represen-
its apotheosis with the emergence of the "informa- tational device (i.e., it is a tool of the virtual rather
tion architects" (or architect-critics) after 1960. This than the real). For an early version of this new dis-
latter association begins to suggest that not all recent ciplinary role inscribed in a project, one can look,
uses of the diagram are equally "diagrammatic." for example, to Robert Venturi's National Football
As the dominant device within the hybrid prac- Hall of Fame Competition entry (or so-called
tices of the architect-critics of the neo-avant-garde, "Billdingboard," 1967), which consists of a tripartite
this more specific use of the diagram promises to division of the "billboard" entrance facade, a vaulted
8 elide Rowe's postwar opposition between physique- exhibition shed, and a sloped grandstand in the rear.
form and morale-word.Whereas Rowe would elevate What one reads in section-from the slightly
the former pair over the latter in his attempt to inclined seating, through the arc of the shed's roof,
extend the legacy of modernism (in contrast to his to the armature of the upright facade-is the 90
alter ego, Banham, who would elaborate the impli- degree rotation of a horizontal surface (a table or
cations of the second pair), the architects of the drafting board) into a vertical object. As with John
neo-avant-garde are drawn to the diagram because- Hejduk's Wall Houses, Venturi's competition entry
unlike drawing or text, partispris or bubble nota- describes the transformation of the horizontal space
tion-it appears in the first instance to operate pre- of writing into the vertical surface of the visual,
cisely betweenform and word. For the purposes of Rowe's morale-wordbecoming physiq1Je:flesh,
a
this brief introduction, this attitude toward the dia- process that diagrams a new professional identifica-
gram has several implications: that it is fundamentally tion which collapses writing and design. 4 Venturi's
a disciplinarydevice in that it situates itself on and appropriation of this swinging tabletop-a drafting
undoes specific institutional and discursive opposi- room appliance that evinces the documentary status
tions (and that it provides a projective discipline for of the discipline-recalls Corbusier's similar use of
new work); that it suggests an alternative mode of industrial ready-mades (e.g., the file cabinet, bottle
 Dummy Text,
or the Diagrammatic
Basisof Contemporary
Architecture

rack, ocean liner, briar pipe, etc.) as the basis for other with the constructive swerves, or misreadings,
new organizing systems in the Unites and other of the neo-avant-garde. The first model of repeti-
projects. The drafting board itself (and here Venturi tion can be identified with icons, resemblances, and
refers t<?the front elevation as a "high easel") copies, while the second is aligned with simulacra
becomes used as a diagram,one which mobilizes a or phantasms. 5 The first repetition relies on an
series of relations and forces. Moreover, by proceed- ideal of the origin or model, an economy of iden-
ing through a misreading of Corbusier's proto- tity, and can be thought of as typologically driven
machinic or diagrammatic disposition, the project (the vertical imitation of timeless precedents). In
also suggests that an alternative mode of repetition contrast, the second sets in motion divergent series
might be available to architecture, one distinct from and exists as a continual process of differentiating.
the equal but opposite functional and formal recon- One points back to a static moment of being,
structions of modernism after the war. while the other advances through modes of 9
The history of architectural production over the becoming. Again, this has a direct relation to what
last forty years can broadly be characterized as the Gilles Deleuze also distinguishes as the factitious
desire to establish an architecture at once autonomous (or artificial) and the simulacrum:
and heterogeneousin contrast to the anonymousand
lzomogenousbuilding associated with the interwar It is at the core of modernity, at the point where
rhetoric and postwar experience of the modern modernism settles its accounts, tha,t the factitious and
movement. This quest for autonomy and hetero- the simulacrum stand in opposition as two modes of
geneity-with its fundamental antinomy in the call destruction may: the two nihilisms. For between the
for both identity and multiplicity-has taken several destruction which conserves and perpetuates the
forms in this period, one of which is a continual established order of representations, models and
misreading or repetition of the modernist avant- copies, and the destruction of models and copies
gardes, though now in a significantly transformed which sets up a creative chaos, there is a great differ-
postwar context. Briefly, then, it might be useful to ence; that chaos, which sets in motion the simulacra
distinguish between two kinds of repetition, one and raises a phantasm, is the most innocent of all
associated with postmodern historicism and the destructions, that of Platonism. 6

HouseII
 R.E.Somol

It is now possible to differentiate the repetition of irrelevant). Advancing the potential of registering
the neo-avant-garde (that of the simulacrum) from site forces and movement via inflections in generic
the larger trajectory of postmodern historicism, form, Eisenman's transformational diagramming
which idealizes the work, stabilizes the referent, and techniques anticipate the need for {and predict the
banks on its resemblance. Historicism in this possibilities of) the later development of 3D model-
account has little to do with style, but is more a ing and animation software. Even in this nascent
mode of operating, since historicist work can equally dynamic construction of the diagram (and non-linear
include the modern, as evident in the projects of model of repetition), Eisenman imagined that the
Richard Meier. A particular kind of repetition is at grid itself could move from an analytic tool of
the heart of modernity, however-that of the mis- description-the invisible infrastructure of postwar
reading of the avant-garde-and it is this form of formalism-to a material to be manipulated itself.
10 practice that relies on the diagram in its fullest sense. This approach, of course, was in direct contrast to
Finally,this distinction between modes of repetition that of Rowe, who filtered out the wild element of
provides competing views of"autonomy" as well- time in favor of timeless resemblance vouchsafed by
i.e., there is the disciplinary autonomy that relies on the stabilizing substrate of an ideal grid.
typology,and the alternative call associated with the Rowe's first published essay is a virtuoso perfor-
neo-avant-garde that understands autonomy as a mance in formal architectural criticism; it provides
processof self-generation or self-organization, a a subtle comparison and differentiation of
model that allows for formal-material emergence or Corbusier's Villa Garches and Palladio's Villa
transformation without authorial intervention, where Malcontenta, an analysis that remains both striking
time is an active rather than a passive element. and unsettling even now, almost fifty years after its
As early as his dissertation, Eisenman had implied original appearance. Certainly, one can discern the
that the diagrams of Rowe and Alexander (which influence on Rowe of RudolfWittkower's geometric
are more accurately "paradigms" and "patterns," analysis of Palladio's villas,work which would achieve
respectively) were insufficiently diagrammatic in its definitive statement in Wittkower's Architectural
that they attempt to represent or identify a static Principlesin theAge of Humanism,published two years
truth condition (whether formal or operational is after Rowe's essay.Still, Rowe's lasting contribution,
 Dummy Text,
ortheDiagrammatic
Basisof Contemporary
Architecture

against all previous understandings, was to cross his- on an ideal of"originals." Perhaps more significantly,
torical periods and locate a mannerist-humanist pro- he alludes here to a legal grounding, the "adher-
ject at the centerof the modern movement, thus ence to rules," to adjudicate cases of repetition, the
establishing a discursive frame through which archi- first of many such invocations of the rule of the law
tectural polemics have been projected ever since-an in Rowe's liberal reconstruction of modernism.
act that might be described as one of sheer ideolog- Also, though critical of the immediate postwar ver-
ical hubris. Moreover, even at this early date, the sion of le styl~ Corbu,twenty-seven years later
primary issue revolved around the propriety or Rowe would write a brief in support of th,e New
appropriateness of "repetition," as suggested in the York Five's repetition of Le Corbusier, even if it is,
final two lines of the essay: as he confesses, "a largely negative introduction-
an attack upon a potential attack," a prime speci-
The neo-Palladian villa, at its best, became the pic- men of a slippery-slope logic issued with the sole 11
turesque object in the English park and Le Corbusier intention of getting his clients off: "For, in terms of
has become the source of innumerable pastiches and a general theory of pluralism, how can any faults in
of tediously amusing exhibition techniques; but it is principle be imputed?" 8 And if one equates
the magnificently realized quality of the originals Palladio and Le Corbusier, as Rowe's analysis has,
which one rarely finds in the works of neo-Palladians then it is logical that he remarks-demonstrating
and exponents of"le style Corbu." These distinctions in yet another manner his obsessive attachment to
scarcely require insistence; and no doubt it should analogical reasoning-that the Five "place them-
only be sententiously suggested that, in the case of selves in the role, the secondary role, of Scamozzi
derivative works, it is perhaps an adherence to rules to Palladio."
which has lapsed.7 In the same year that he issued his somewhat
reluctant defense of the New York Five, Rowe
Though Rowe seems to be distinguishing wrote an addendum to his "Mathematics" essay that
between two forms of repetition-since the repeti- further clarifies his position on repetition. Here, he
tion between Palladio and Corbusier is apparently describes his mode of criticism as "Wolflinian in
endorsed-· the model he defends is still founded origin" and says that it "begins with approximate

HouseII
I
R.E.Somol

"

configurations and ... then proceeds to identify dif- Thus, while the technical preconditions that would
ferences."9This approach derives from an understand- allow modern architecture to refound itself exclu-
ing of repetition in the first sense described above, sively on the twin bases of stmcwreand spacehad
the one Deleuze associates with the axiom "only that existed for almost a hundred years, the aesthetic,
which is alike ditfers."This mode of identifyingdflfer- philosophical, and intellectual sources-i.e., the
encesrelies on an existing langue,or ideal armature, unique combination of cubism, liberalism, gestalt
against which seemingly disparate instances like psychology, and the new criticism, with a renewed
Garches and Malcontenta can be related and distin- understanding of mannerist organizing geometries-
guished-such that LeCorbusier's emphasis on disper- would not be consolidated as an articulate assem-
sion and Palladio's on centrality can be defined as blage until the 1950s, when it would provide a new
viable and coherent options within a larger para- disciplinary foundation for high modern (or man-
12 digm-and by which derivative bad copies can be nerist modern) architectural design and pedagogy.
dismissed as falling too far from the proper model. As an educational device, the nine-square problem
Such an extension of this model of repetition as a emerged from a collapse of two modern diagrams-
pedagogical project-the intellectual underpinnings Le Corbusier's domino (strudure)with van Doesburg's
of which were largely provided by the "Chicago axonometrics (space)-ftltered through the reductive
Frame" and "Transparency,. essays-would become planimetric logic hypostatized by Wittkower as
officially instituted at the University ofTexas in Palladio's "twelfth villa."What this problem tJrovided
Austin in 1954 with a memorandum ghost-written was a disciplinefor modern architecture, a perverse
for Dean Harwell Hamilton Harris by Rowe and and clever argument for a rhetorical capacity against
Bernard Hoesli. 1O And it is from this curricular those who would understand modern architecture as
framework that, initially in the studios of John simply the literal addition of constructional systems
Hejduk, the nine-square problem would emerge as and programmatic requirements. Further, it assumed
perhaps the most durable and widespread beginning a languageof architecture founded on the articulation
design problem in the postwar period.11 The ele- of a series of dialectics {center and periphery, vertical
gance and ingenuity of this problem lay in the way and horizontal. inside and outside, frontality and
it consolidated a series of discourses and demands. rotation, solid and void, point and plane, etc.), a logic

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 Dummy Text,
or the Diagrammatic
Basisof Contemporary
Architecture

of contradiction and ambiguity. And it is largely to tradition represent a sustained reflection on the
the lessons issuing from Analytic and Synthetic form and content of individual and collective
Cubism (and the compositional models of collage arrangements and an investigation into varied com-
emanating from the latter) that Rowe continues to positional and associative laws in the relation of
return in his pictorial rendering of the language of part-to:--whole.
modern architecture, an optical bias present even in In their dispute with this formalist reconstruction
his assessment of the work of the Five: of postwar modernism, the subject of Hejduk's and
Eisenman's "anxious influence," to borrow Harold
[l]t might be more reasonable and more modest to Bloom's model, was first and foremost a strong critic
recognize that, in the opening years of this century, rather than a strong poet. In other words, all of their
great revolutions in thought occurred and that then productive misreadings of modernist European pre-
profound visual discoveries resulted, that these are decessors can be understood as a "swerve" within 13
still unexplained, and that rather than assume intrinsic and against the production of Rowe's formalism,
change to be the prerogative of every generation, it and it is this swerve that allows them to develop
might be more useful to recognize that certain other possibilities suppressed within that tradition.
changes are so enormous as to impose a directive In this way, one can read characters from Hejduk's
which cannot be resolved in any individual life span. Vladivostokor Eisenman's typological field studies
... It concerns the plastic and spatial inventions of from the Rebstockpark Competition as perverse
Cubism and the proposition that, whatever may be extensions of the gestalt diagrams Rowe and Slutzky
said about these, they possess an eloquence and a used in their second "Transparency" article from
flexibility which continues now to be as overwhelm- 1956. While miming Rowe's sources, however, the
ing as it was then. 12 projects of Hejduk and Eisenman simultaneously
subvert the values of transparency, verticality; opti-
This "flexibility" of Cubism and collage provides cality, and figure-ground definition that the dia-
an institutional and disciplinary basis for architecture grams were initially rostered to support.
beginning with Rowe, while the diverse series of Whereas the separation of space and structure in
ideal villas and collage cities that derive from this the nine-square problem enabled one to articulate

HouseIll
 R.E.Somol

formal-plastic relations, the disengagement of the mechanisms outside form); process(the active pro-

I sign from the box in Venturi's "decorated shed" ulti-

mately suggested that these manipulations were
cedures within formation); and usage(form's rela-
tion to a subject). With the neo-avant-garde, then,
unnecessary,as all such relations would be con- form would be precisely subjected to the functions
sumed by surface noise. While Rowe and company of its linguistic descendants: informing, traneforming,
attempted to replace the neutral, homogenous con- and performing.
ception of modernist spacewith the positive figura- For his part, Eisenman develops one of his earli-
tion of form, the neo-avant-garde began to question est and most extensive analyses of form by rewrit-
the stability of form through understanding it as a ing two structures by the Italian architect Giuseppe
fictional construct, a sign.This semiotic critique Terragni-the Casa del Fascio and the Casa
would register that form was not a purely visual- Giuliani-Frigerio-having first encountered this
14 optical phenomenon, not "neutral," but constructed work in the summer of 1961 when he traveled to
by linguistic and institutional relations. Assuming Como with Rowe. Previous to Eisenman's writings
multiple directions, this agenda was first broached in on Terragni, in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
Venturi's particular deployment of a collage practice Rowe had already developed the terms for a high
that was not merely compositional but which would formalist interpretation of modern architecture, pri-
include both text as well as "low" or base references marily through his elaborate readings of Le Corbusier.
(specific iconic representations). Subsequently, Eisenman's contribution to that discourse would be
Eisenman's deviation of form would move not to to suspend formal analysis on a structuralist base, a
information or the sign (as didVenturi's), but to the seemingly slight shift in emphasis that would ulti-
trace, the missing index of formal processes (thus mately undermine the way American formalism
stressing absence and the conceptual). At the same had institutionalized modernism in the postwar
time, Hejduk would investigate the theatrical con- context. In other words, Eisenman was able to
struction of form through highly orchestrated rela- transform the discourse from within by appropriat-
tions and instructions, both linguistic and contractual ing the term "formalism" and deploying it to regis-
(i.e., the symbolic).Thus, this three-pronged critique ter the more polemical idea of"work on language"
would variously foreground context(the framing in the Russian formalist sense. This move began to

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ortheDiagrammatic
BasisofContemporary
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displace the aestheticization of the unique art work By 1970 Eisenman would distinguish the prac-
that accompanied the Anglo-American version of tices of Corbusier and Terragni (and, indirectly,
formalism present in the work of the New Critics, Rowe's formalism from his own) by incorporating
Clement Greenberg, and even Rowe. More gener- terminology from the structural linguistics of Noam
ally, Eisenman 's project has always entailed a return Chomsky. While Corbusier's architecture remains
to the critical aspects of the historical avant-garde, committed to creating new meaning through
aspects that had been repressed in theory and prac- iconography, through the semanticsof the object,
tice precisely through the formalist reconstruction Eisenman claims that Terragni's work is concerned
of modernism after the war. As Eisenman wrote in with revealing a syntacticsof the architectural lan-
one of his early essays on Terragni-indicating his guage. This shift represents a move away from a con-
intent to use these strategies as prescriptive design cern with the perceptual-aesthetic
qualities of the
tools-"while formal analysis is a valuable art-histor- object toward an attempt to mark the conceptu'al
rela- 15
ical method, in itself it can become merely descrip- tionshipsthat underlie and make possible any (and
tive-an exercise in intellectual gymnastics." 13 every) particular formal arrangement. Thus,
Not only was the history of form rewritten, but Terragni's work is said to mark the relationship
Eisenman would subject "form" itself to perpetual between "surface stru'cture" and "deep structure"
revision through an exhaustive sequence of opera- through transformational methods that Eisenman
tions: transformation, 9-ecomposition, grafting, scaling, attempts to disclose via a series of axonometric dia-
rotation, inversion, superposition, shifting, folding, grams and projections. It should be noted here that·
etc. And it is the catalogue of these procedures that the axonometric technique (or parallel projection)
becomes the subject matter of architecture, a disci- was one of the historical avant-garde devices recu-
plinary precondition to a diagrammatic approach. perated by this generation, especially Eisenman and
Through an extreme logic, Eisenman engaged in a Hejduk. 14 In contrast to the other dominant mode
critique both throughand of calculation (or mathe- of three-dimensional drawing, the central projection
matics) in the alternate senses of both Rowe's ideal or perspective of Renaissance humanism, the
geometries and Christopher Alexander's "goodness axonometric favors the aut011omy of the object by
of fit." conveying measurable or objective information over

Frankfurt
Rebstockpark
 . R.E.Somol

the distortion created by a vanishing point oriented templation of the high-art object. In this way,
to the viewing subject. Where Rowe's analyses were Eisenman's "drawing on modernism," the diagram-
undertaken separately in plan and elevation, the matic supplements of his American graffiti, places
axonometric simultaneously renders plan, section, the architectural object under erasure and initiates
and elevation, thus again collapsing the vertical and the process of its disappearance.
horizontal-an act that has been noted earlier, for Contemporaneously with the critical-historical
example, as one aspiration ofVenturi's Billdingboard. work on Terragni, Eisenman was beginning a series
Moreover, unlike Corbusier's "regulating lines"- of architectural projects that would develop many of
geometric descriptions appended to their objects the transformational strategies he was "finding" in his
after construction-the three-dimensional device of analysis of the modern canon. The serially numbered
the axonometric enables analysis and object to transformational diagrams for Houses I and II, like
16 become congruent. the retrospective diagrams created for Terragni's
Through his .axonometric diagrams, Eisenman work, suggest that the "final" built structures are
argues that Terragni develops a conceptual ambiguity merely indexical signs that point to a larger process
by superimposing two conceptions of space-addi- of which they are only a part. Not only is movement
tive/layered and subtractive/volumetric-neither of generated across the series of individual frames-for
which i'S'dominant, but each of which oscillates with the whole process most resembles a cinematic opera-
the other indefinitely.The effect of this dual reading tion with its montage of stills-but, given the nature
is not primarily aesthetic, but operates as an index of of axonometric projection (exaggerated here by
a deep structure: that is, it investigates and makes being rendered transparently or as a wire frame),
apparent the possibilities and limitations of the archi- there is also constant oscillation and reversible move-
tectural language itself. Eisenman's attention to form, ment within· each diagram: the observer is now
then, can be seen as a means to advance this transfor- inside, now outside; now under, now over. Recalling
mational method as both an analytic and synthetic the new hybrid role of the architect-critic, this effect
design tool. It is an attempt to fulfill the historical suggests the coincidence and complicity between
avant-garde program of a temporal and spatial move- "internal" formal condition and "external" construc-
ment or dislocation that precludes any static con- tion of subjectivity. In addition to the transforma-
 Dummy Text.
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Basisof Contemporary
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tional process effacing the object, this process also somewhat less neutrally) designated as a nine-square.

' '
begins to displace the subject (as both designer and Unlike the initial premises of the nine-square prob-

if client) since the remaining architectural index is no

longer dependent on the iconography or functions
of man. This relates to Eisenman's argument that
lem as articulated in Austin (and as continued in
Hejduk's private research into the theme through
his seven Texas Houses from 1954-63), Eisenman
modern architecture was never sufficiently modernist does not privilege "space" (of the van Doesberg
due to its functionalism, that it amounted to nothing variety) as the dominant dynamic element to be
more than "a late phase of humanism." 15 Shifting . read against the stasis of structure (of the Dom-ino
architecture from a formal to a structuralist base, or type). Instead, in House II (1969), for example, mul-
from an iconic or semantic to an indexical or syntactic tiple traces of column and wall systems are regis-
one, would enable architecture to finally register the tered, traces which provide the overall spatial effects
insights of the modernist avant-gardes, an account of the project. Thus, the activation of the structural 17·
i which suspends classical-humanism's centrality of the grid or frame engenders the spatial event of the
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•.. subject and proposes architecture as "the abstract object-a kind of objectification of the structure, , .
'II i
mediation between pre-existent sign systems;-16 or, similar to Eisenman's association of architecture
,if
)
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as he would write later of Corbusier's domino, as a inore with the study of ~anguage than with language
'
"self-referential sign." itself. This tactic will reappear in the later work ·
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I\ In displacing the author-subject (and, ultimately,
the static object), Eisenman's early "cardboard" or
when there is a becoming-figure of the structure
(see, for example, the Aronoff Center) or a manner;"'.'
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"conceptual" architecture was designed "to shift th~
primary focus from the sensual aspects of obje<;:tsto
ism of the grid which will finally manifest itself
through the organization of the fold (e.g.,

~I the universal aspects of object" and "to investigate Rebstockpark).

iiir the nature of what has been called formal universals In House VI (1973-76), the classical nine-square
which are inherent in any form of formal con- organization initially deployed in the.earlier houses

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struct." 17 Eisenman's investigations thus required an comes to be seen as a more modernist four-square,
f. initial ideal or generic form, which he often located an organization that will become more evident in

:i
! in the cube, a neutral box that was typically (and the subsequent houses.Across the entire series.of

FrankfurtRebstockpark
 R.E.Somol

projects, however, Eisenman works within the stric- independently perceptible within the house. Thus the
tures of the high modern diagram only to undo its object not only became the end result of its own
fundamental principles and values, subverting the generative history but retained this history, serving as
classical-humanist logic of the nine-square. In other a complete record of it, process and product begin-
words, Rowe's mannerist-modern conception of ning to become interchangeable. 18
form as the relation of spaceand structureis now
understood as the more provisional outcome of time Described through serially arranged axonometric
and movement.In House VI specifically,the facades diagrams, Eisenman's houses are conceived as part of
are no longer the primary vertical data for the read- a cinematic movement, arbitrary stills translated into
ing of phenomenal transparencies, but are pushed to three dimensions from a potentially endless series.

I -18
the interior such that the periphery now crosses at
the center of the structure. Floating above the
ground with no visible·entry, it is a house which for
all practical purposes could be upside down and
Whether understood as a move from ambiguity to
undecidability or from binary oppositions to micro-
multiplicities, Eisenman's more recent work insists
upon a surface reading that questions the possibility
inside out. Here, the va~ue of frontality that had, .. of the embodiment of meaning, and seems to oper-
accompanied the flat, pictorial associations of plan ate only as an endless chain of conjunctions-and,
and elevation in the writings and analyses of Rowe and,and ... one thing after the other. Th~re is here a
and Slutzky is undermined by the temporal and literal repetition (like that eschewed in Rowe's dis-
cinematic displacements provided by the axonomet- missal of the Bauhaus or in Michael Fried's rejection
ric. With Eisenman, the nine-square is no longer of minimalism} that wagers on the chance for an
thought through the logic of painting, but through other condition to emerge through the machinic {in
film, and it is this conception that enables it to exist a broadly bio-mechanical sense) process of iteration.
as simultaneously experience and-representation. In fact, the projects that have been evolving since the
Wexner Center cannot really be discussed as "works"
House VI ... ~ists as both an object and a kind of . or "objects" or "forms" or even "structures"--all
cinematic manifestation of the transformational these terms being too aesthetic or technical, too well
process, with frames from the idea of a film being· demarcated and defined. Rather, they really seem to

J
 Dummy Text,
orthe Diagrammatic
Basisof Contemporary
Architecture

be just "things:' with all the formless and transforma- self-evident such that it induces immediate faith and
tive possibilities of the monstrous and grotesque that conviction. In this way, Eisenman's use has more in
the term implies. These recent rhizome-worm common with the perpetual reframing and temporal
"things" seem to frustrate and defeat formal analysis limitlessness of minimalist work that Fried was argu-
and indicate a transition from the clear structuralism ing against. In fact, minimalism operates precisely in
of the early Roland Barthes to the base materialism a di,igrammaticmanner in that it solicits and under-
of Georges Bataille, theorist of the excess. In his dic- mines a key opposition of formalist modernism-
tionary-like entry on the termjormless, Bataille namely, that between painting and sculpture--as it
writes that "what it designates has no rights and gets can be seen as emerging in response to developments
itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earth- in either medium (which, of course, would be
worm."1 9 In the post-vermiform projects since the impossible from the high modernist dicta of medium
Columbus Convention Center, the theoretical inves- specificity and boundary maintenance). Finally, 19
tigation of form has increasingly moved to an whereas Fried's "presentness" relies on a condition of
embrace of the ieforme,or a condition that Eisenman timelessness, Eisenman's is involved with the state of
and his colleagues have referred to as "weak form." "singularity"-i.e., a specific moment in a phase
For Eisenman, architecture- unlike writing-must transition where diverse forces acting on matter
struggle against its literal presence, which has tradi- induce the emergence of unforeseeable traits.
tionally been reinforced by the icons of "strong An early form of this singularity can be glinip'sed
form." To articulate this non-dialectical condition in a project like the Rebstockpark proposal for the
between presence and absence, Eisenman posits the development of 200,000 square meters of offices
term "presentness" as one possibility for a "weak" and housing in Frankfurt (l 991), an urban analog to
practice, the hazard of architecture as event. While the cinematic chronography of Alain Resnais and
both he and Michael Fried are opposed to literal Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at ?vforienbad.lfere, the ·
presence, Eisenman 's use of the term must be distin- between-condition of presentness requires a consid-
guished from Fried's usage of the concept. For Fried, eration of the arbitrary, the accidental. Rather than ~
presentness implies a bounded object of depth and narrative (strong-time) succession of presents (as,
plenitude, the quality of which is instantaneously perhaps, represented in the Wexner Center), these

FrankfurtRebstockpark
 ,·
~E.Somol

event-folds inhabit "peaks of present," where there is Muybridge-lik:e dependent-variable of movement) has
a coexistence of a present of the future, a present of been displaced by a "time-image:' Curiously; as intensi-
the present, and a present of the past. In describing fied field conditions rather than distorted generics or
the time-image found in the work ofRobbe- ideals, these projects resemble more Rowe's denigrated
Grillet, Gilles Deleuze writes: diagram, "program without plan:• than they do "plan
without program:•
An accident is about to happen, it happens, it has hap- In distinguishing "the event''. from a narrative
pened; but equally it is at the same time that it will take sequence organized by plot, John Rajchman main-
place, has already taken place and is in the process of tains that it is "a moment of erosion, collapse, ques-

I
taking place; so that, before taking place, it has not taken tioning, or problematization of the very assumptions
place, and, taking place, willnot take place ... etc. 20 of the setting within which a drama may take place,
20 occasioning the chance or possibility of another, dif-
In the undecidability of whether the Rebstock site ferent setting."2 1 Events are not in themselves acci-
has contracted to absorb a neutral exterior net or is jn dental so much as the fact that their occurrence
the process of expanding to unfold its information. . engenders the realization that what has been taken to
across.- larger area, the project offers an urban version be the necessary and natural is accidental. The
of pe.eksat presentness,similar to the literary and cine- Rebstock project directs an architectural "event," a
matic visions of Robbe-Grillet and the mathematical manifestation of"weak time," to the extent that it
models of Rene Thom. In both large- and small-scale elicits an active reframing of typology, context, func-
episodes there is ;i niultiplication of tenses: already tion, and archaeology. Neither historicist nor pro-
folded, folding,.not yet folded. Beginning with gressive-and therefore other than the category of
Rebstoc~-:-and continuing through the Church for the possible-this kind of time can be thought of as
the Year 2000, Bibliotheque de L'IHUEI, the Virtual "virtual," that which is merely an historical impossi-
House, and the IIT Campus Center--the "movement- bility, not a logical or necessary one. As an investiga-
image" of the earlier projects (where the diagram was tion of the virtual, the Rebstock proposal performs
limited to a linear unfolding of time. the recuperation an experimentation rather than an interpretation.
of a genealogy for the work, such that time existed as a And it is through this experimental quality-
 DummyText,
orthe Diagrammatic
BasisofContemporary
Architecture

presentness as the untimely or singular--that the For Eisenman, then, the instrumentalization of the
scheme projects a "virtual reality." It is from this fold-translating this operational figure into a tech-
point that it might be possible to begin an evaluation nique now made available to the repertoire of archi-
of the fold in Eisenman's most recent work, for the tectural production-resolved many of the dilemmas
fold is precisely a map of the event, a geometric (and incompatibilities) internal to the two phases of
description of the unexpected, a diagramof the virtual. his earlier work. In other words, while the house
Certainly, in the trajectory from Venturi's series developed through the manipulations of internal
Billclingboard to Eisenman's mannered manipulation of structure, the archaeological projects·were engen-
the ax:onometric evidenced in House X and Fin d'Ou dered by the external contingencies of the contextual
T Hou S, the fold is perhaps the most advanced and field. Inaddition to providing a means to negotiate
economical device for collapsing vertical and horizon- the relations between the internal frame structure
tal, reversing inside and out. As an emblem for the and the external urban grid, the fold enabled the 21
hybrid activities of the architect-critics (and their privi- development of figural effects (which had been pre-
leged metierof paper), the fold is simply the shortest eluded by the earlier house processes) as well as
distance between two disciplines, two incommensurate complex sections (which were hindered by the plan
discourses.As a figure, the fold immediately indexes a orientation of the larger scale archaeological work,.
process, an activity.Unlike the secondary transforma- Moreover, since the informeis not simply the nega-
tion or decomposition of an ideal or generic form tion of form, but a more complex maintenance and
such as the cube, a fold is at once a thing and its subversion of it, the fold allowed a relaxation of
process. It is the operation
of folding that generates the homogenous or hierarchical organizations without
form, before which the thing simply did not exist. In completely abandoning a geometric rigor or disci-
this way the fold is not a mere distortion
of or opposition pline. Given that the fold exists as one aspect of an
to a clear formal type (e.g., as with the erosion of a alternative (or topological) mathematics, in this way, ·
cube), but evinces a repetition that produces something too, it promises to overcome not only the formalism
entirely new, an emergent organization that, in its most of Rowe's classical mathematics but also a faith in
successful actualizations, is not simply dismissible as a the efficient functionality of Alexander's cybernetic
"fallen" or debased ideal. version. In the movement from structuralist forms to

deL'IHUEI
Bibliotheque
R.E.Somol

textual grafts to folded singularities, Eisenman has and Deleuze. For these thinkers, panopticism exists as
provided a coherent program for the dual project of the diagram of modern disciplinary societies, one
dismantling the classical-modernist object and the which underlies multiple institutional types (prisons,
liberal-humanist subject. While the house series hospitals, schools, factories, barracks, etc.), and one
focused on processas a way to displace the designer as that can be most abstractly characterized by the
an authoring agent, the archaeological projects (from attempt "to impose a particular conduct on a partic-
Cannaregio to Wexner) sought new definitions of con- u1ar human multiplicity."22 Not since Piranesi have
text that would destabilize the static identity of place. prisons provided such an opportunity for extreme
As a continuation of these reconfigurations of process architectural speculation, and soon after Rem
and context,the folded projects have added a concern Koolhaas's "Exodus" project, he and his Office for
with sectionas a critique of the planimetric decidability Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) had the chance to
of typology,which tends to contain objects through a engage directly the panoptic diagram in a design
limited logic of extrusion. , study for the renovation of Koepel Prison in
For the two decades following its introduction in Arnheim (1979-81), originally built according to
1957, the nine-square served as the discipline's for- Jeremy Bentham's principles in 1787. Rather than
mal introduction to itself, establishing the discourse attempting to formalize any current (but soon to be
on space and structure, and providing a series of obsolete) vision of prison management, OMA pro-
solution sets through the allied design research of poses in a sense to stage various diagrams of power:
Hejduk, Eisenman, and others. In advanced academic
and professional contexts after 1974, however, that If prison architecture today can no longer pretend to
epistemology of space was rapidly replaced by a prag- embody an "ideal," it could regain credibility by
matics of force, such that the high modern diagram introducing the theme of revision as raison d'etre. A
of the nine-square-which had served the formal modern prison architecture would consist of a
·purposes bf the first generation's semiotic critique- prospective archaeology, constantly projecting new
came to be supplanted by a very different kind of layers of"civilization" on old systems of supervision.
diagram, a diagram that took its historical form in The sum of modifications would reflect the never-
the discussions of"panopticism" by Michel Foucault ending evolution of systems of discipline. 23
 Dummy Text.
BasisofContemporary
or theDlasrammatic Architecture

Thus, the importance of the lesson of panopti- of postmodernism) or append a "kick me" sign to its
cism is not simply to appropriate that figure as the back (the apparently critical gesture of early decon-
new organizational system, but generally to under- structivism now institutionalized in a few Ph.D. pro-
stand (and configure) society as a plastic entity, grams throughout the country). Diagrammatic work is
susceptible to multiple (virtual) diagrams and pos- projective in that it opens new (or, more accurately,
sibilities for arrangement. "virtual") territories for practice, in much the way that
Having identified this connotative shift in the way Deleuze describes the diagrammatic painting of Francis
in which the diagram has become instrumentalized in Bacon as overcoming the optical bias of abstract art as
architecture over the last few decades, however, one well as the manual gesturality of action painting:
should not mistake this transition for some essential
opposition. Despite the posturing by several critics and A Sahara, a rhinoceros skin, this is the diagram sud-
architects alike, Koolhaas and Eisenman, for example, denly stretched out. It is like a catastrophe
happening
have much more in common with each other than unexpectedly to the canvas, inside figurative or proba-
either the former has with Jon Jerde or the latter has bilistic data. It is like the emergence of another world.
with Frank Gehry.Working diagrammatically-not to .... The diagram is the possibility of fact-it is not the
be confused with simply working with diagrams- fact itself.24
implies a particular orientation, one which displays at
once both a social and a disciplinary project. And it This "emergence of another world" is precisely
enacts this possibility not by representing a particular what the diagram diagrams. This begins to explain
condition, but by subverting dominant oppositions and why, almost alone among those of their respective
hierarchies currently constitutive of the discourse. generations, both Eisenman and Koolhaas-.. teachers
Diagrammatic work, then (and this includes the pro- and critics as well as designers-persistently and cu.ri-
jects of Eisenman and Koolhaas), cannot be accounted ously eschew design(and, along with it, that post-
for by reapplyling the conventional categories of for- Renaissance trajectory of architecture obsessed with
mal or functional, critical or complicit. It operates as an drawing, representation, and composition). This dia-
altemative to earlier attempts to put "architecture" in grarnmatic alternative can be seen initially in
quotation marks (the compensatory or affirmative sign Eisenman's process automism and, more recently, in

StatenIslandInstitute
 R.E.Somol

Koolhaas'sstatisticalresearch: complementary attempts rather as a discursive-material field of cultural-politi-

I
I
to supplant design with the diagram, to deliver form
without beauty and function without efficiency.
A diagrammatic practice (flowing around obstacles
cal plasticity.To do otherwise would be to return to
the inadequately diagrammatic options first outlined
by Rowe (in terms of formal or analytical "truth")
yet resisting nothing)-as opposed to the tectonic and Alexander (operational or synthetic "truth").

I vision of architecture as the legible sign of construc-

tion (which is intended to resist its potential status as
either commodity or cultural speculation)-multiplies
signifyingprocesses (technological as well as linguistic)
And it would also be to miss the virtual opportuni-
ties instigated by the design-research Eisenman has
conducted for the last thirty years, simply (and bru-
tally) collected here as a catalogue of procedures
within a plenum of matter, recognizing signs as com- ("functions" or "tensors"), an architecture that has
plicit in the construction of specific social machines. come to deviate from a priori geometry as well as
24 The role of the architect in this model is dissipated,as from social accommodation in favor of Bacon's
he or she becomes an organizer and channeler of "possibilities of fact."
information, since rather than being limited to the
decidedly vertical-the control and resistance of
gravity, a calculation of statics and load-"forces" 1. Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). For more on the
emerge as horizontal and nonspecific (economic, "debate" between Eisenman and Alexander, see "Contrasting
political, cultural, local, and global). And it is by Concepts of Harmony in Architecture," Lotus International 40 (1983).
2. Reyner Banham, "A Black Box," in A CriticWrites(Berkeley:
means of the diagram that these new matters and University of California Press, 1996), p. 298.
activities-along with their diverse ecologies and 3. Colin Rowe, "Program versus Paradigm: Otherwise Casual
Notes on the Pragmatic, the Typical, and the Possible:• in As I lillas
multiplicities-can be made visible and related.
Saying,vol. 2 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. 10.
Against some of the more currently naive extensions 4. Later, this transformation will become more evident via archi-
to the legacies of Eisenman and Koolhaas, it is thus tectural strategies of"folding," procedures that in part continue the
complication of vertical and horizontal while exaggerating the dema-
important to avoid confining a diagrammatic terialization of"paper architecture."
approach to architecture as the expression of either 5. This view of repetition follows from Gilles Deleuze's account of
two ways to conceive difference: "Only that which is alike differs,"and
presumed bio-mathematical imperatives or socio-
"Only differences are alike." In the first version difference can only
economic inevitabilities, and understand architecture derive from a prior autonomy or identity (e.g., the way a right a11dleft
 Dummy Text.
or the Diagrammatic
Basisof Contemporary
Architecture

shoe are different by their rel.ation to a prior identity, the pair), while in well as Robin Evans," Architectural Projection," Architectureand its
the second version differences operate horizontally rather than lmaJe, eds. Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Montreal: Canadian
vertically,in a state of becoming identical (e.g., the surrealist encounter Centre for Architecture, 1989), pp. 19-3S.
of the sewing machine and the umbrella). See The Logicof Sense, 15. Peter Eisenman, "Post-Functionalism," Op/Miti,ms 6 (Fall 1976),
trans. Mark Lestor (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1990) and p. ii (unnumbered).
DitfereHCe and Repetitron, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia 16. Eisenman, "Post-Functionalism," p. iii (unnumbered).
University Press, 1994). 17. Peter Eisenman, "Notes on Conceptual Architecture," Casabella
6. Gilles Deleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum," October27 {Winter 359/360 (1971), p. 55. For an earlier though similar formulation, see
1983), p. 56. "Towards an Understanding of Form in Architecture;' Architectural
7. Colin Rowe, "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa," in TIie Des(~ri (October 1963), pp. 457-58.
Mathematicsof the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: M[T 18. Peter Eisenman. "lv1isreading Peter Eisenman." Howes of Cards
Press, 1976), pp. l 5-16. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 178 and 181. See
8. Colin Rowe, Five Architects(New York: Oxford University Press, also Peter Eisenman, "House V[," ProgressiveArchitecture (June 1977),
1975), p. 8. p. 59: "[T]he designs for House VI are symbiotic with its reality; the
9. Rowe, "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa," p. 16. house is not an object in the traditional sense-that is the end result
10. For a detailed history of this program from an "insider," see of a process-but more accurately a record of a process. The house,
Alexander Caragonne's Texas Rangers:Notesfrom an Architectural like the set of diagrammatic transformations on which its design is 25
Underground(Cambridge: Mff Press, 1995). based, is·a series of film stills composed in time and space." For more
11.This studio problem was paralleled in Hejduk's personal work on the idea of architecture as document, see Venturi's similar discus-
with his seven "Texas Houses," a series begun in 19S4 and later dedi- sion of the wall in Complexity a11dContradictionin Arc/1itect1ire.
cated to Rowe and Robert Slutzky. See John Hejduk, Afask of MedtJsa 19. Georges Bataille, "Formless," in Visiom ~fExcess: Selected
(New York: Rizzoli, 1985), p. 197 and pp. 222-37. Writi11gs,1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
12. Rowe, FiveArd1itects,p. 7. 1985), p. 31.
13. Peter Eisenman," From Object to Relationship II: Giuseppe 20. Gilles Ddeuze, Cinema 2: T/ie Time-Image (Minneapolis:
Terragni's Casa Giuliani Frigerio," Perspecta13/14 (1971), p. 41. University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 100.
14. While widely deployed by the modernist avant-gardes of the 21. John Rajchman, PhilosophicalEve11ts:Essays of the '80s (New
l 920s and 1930s, the axonometric projection virtually disappeared as York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. viii.
a graphic tool until the late 1950s, being eschewed by those 22. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
attempting to mimic more pictorial and static media in the postwar Press, 1988), p. 34. For Foucault'.~discussion, see Disciplinea11dPimis/1
reconstruction of high modernism. Rowe and Johnson, for example, (New York: Pantheon, 1977), originally published as Surveilleret ptmir
have explicitly come out against the effects of"floating," "rotation," (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), and "The Eye of Power:' in Powet/Knowle~re:
and "the diagonal'' associated with the isometric or axonometric. It SelectedInterviewsand Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon
will be suggested later that Eisenman does not recuperate the (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
axonometric simply as a representational tool, but as a design tool, 23. Rem Koolhaas, "Revision," in S,A1,L,XL (New York: Monacelli
using its characteristics as a generative device. For a historical discus- Press, 1996), p. 241.
sion of the axonometric, see Yve-Alain Bois, "El Lissitzky: Radical 24. Gilles Deleuze, "The Diagram," in 111eDeleuze Reader,
Reversibility," Art in America (April 1988), pp. 160-80, and Constantin V. Boundas, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press,
"Metamorphosis of A.xonometry," Daidalos 1 (1981 ), pp. 40-58, as 1993), pp. 194, 199.

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