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THE DIAGRAM PROCESS METHOD: THE DESIGN OF ARCHITECTURAL FORM


BY PETER EISENMAN AND REM KOOLHAAS

Chapter · November 2014

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ARCHTHEO ‘14

THE DIAGRAM PROCESS METHOD: THE DESIGN OF


ARCHITECTURAL FORM BY PETER EISENMAN AND REM
KOOLHAAS
Luciana Bosco e Silva, DSc. Professor at Federal University of Viçosa
Andressa Carmo Pena Martinez, DSc. Professor at Federal University of Viçosa
Caio Magalhães Castriotto, undergraduate student
This research aims to understand the methodology of diagrams, as a design
process strategy in architecture which redefines the relationship between form and
space. Through a review of the concept of this device, the diagram process will be
explored not only as a simply pedagogical representation method, but a systematic
design process for researching, communicating and validating ideas in architectural
projects, related to a postmodern and contemporary architectural modus operandi.
Several prominent architect practices are based on diagrams, but this study is
focus especially in the work of Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas, as both use this
method as a language, a grammar for generating the architectural form.
Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas chose to begin his architectural career
through writing. For them, the words became an architectural site for creation.
The critical and conceptual architecture of Eisenman and Koolhaas coincides with
a change in contemporary culture: the advent of language as the dominant model
not only for communicating, but also for its description and creation. Almost
simultaneously they grasped the potential of language as a model for architecture
as text.
Peter Eisenman chased the syntactic mechanisms of architecture through
minimum notational elements as tools generators of form. In this sense, the
diagrammatic method was consolidated in the search for a model design process:
as the object itself did not communicate intentions, it was necessary to show the
process. A mean of documentation, to make visible a process that originates from
a first formal push for a series of transformations and decompositions that create
spaces.
For Rem Koolhaas the representation of the project is examined in detail
through new schemes of design: collages, selection of emblematic images and
graphic notations that explore different layers of contents: programmatic definition,
functional and the aesthetic of the building. Koolhaas’ graphic schemes can be
understood as hyper-active surfaces, which aids the management of the project’s
complexities and allows him to develop the design in an abstract manner.
In this sense, the research analyzes the processes of form generators, based on
the methodology of diagrams and understand how the different procedures and
approaches may be constraints for plastic composite results of the architectural
design. Finally, the diagram is investigated from an analogue deconstruction
method of the eighties to the digital process mediated by computer resources, and
how these changes are related to Koolhaas end Eiseman’s design process over the
last years.

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Keywords: architecture, diagrams, design process, creation

The Diagram
The procedures on architectural design, appears to have shifted from drawing
to the diagram, over the second half of the twentieth century, according to Somol
(2007). That does not mean that the diagram is the only form of architectural design
or that diagrams were not used on the process of architectural design along the
history. However, it was on the lately thirty years or so that the diagram effectively
became an important tool in the design process of architecture.
The diagram as a functional method arises as an architectural design option,
according to Pai (2002), based on two modern precepts. First, the separation of
subject and object, and the subsequent pursuit of their reunification. As Pai defends,
the gap that emerged from the dissolution between conception and execution was
the propelling of the emergence of diagrams as a mechanism of a modern way of
representation. At the same time, it is plausible to say that the same perception
that defends the link between the scientific management to the birth of diagram
as an option to a modern way of representation, can also defines the diagram as
metaphor. The construction, specially, on the modern society, of analogies that
can interpret natural and mechanicals systems, more specifically on the production
of architecture became essential to the gain of significance on the proceeding of
architectural design.
In contemporary, the design methods itself have gained extreme significance,
according to Bun (2008), which means that the theory that revolves around
diagrams as a source of architectural design process have improved their way of
seeing diagrams. Within this context, it is reasonable to say that diagrams are no
longer pure geometry or structure, but rather contained all the meanings that
underline its essence. The very own conception of the diagram it is not unique,
each architect develops its own concept on the use of diagrams in his process of
designing.

Diagram on Post-modernism and Deconstructionism


The architects, among other artists, started in the eighties to discuss about
the post-modern era. Post-modern can be described with as the time we have
overcome the structuralism thought and the emergence of post-structuralism
thought. This new phase is characterized by cultural diversity, new interpretations
of an imbalance in the universe.
In architecture, this new phase simultaneously presents a time of permanent
crisis, where there are no more certainties and the doubts about the ability of a
linguistic explanation of the architecture. In this moment of uncertainty that arises
in the panorama of architecture, deconstruction.
Deconstruction is, above all questioning. It inquires about the essence and
structure of conceptual systems, through a critical analysis of language that
permeates from its conception to its formal relational capacity of meanings. (Bun,
2008).
This is a stage Eisenman argues that as the end of three fictions: representation,
reason and history (Montaner, 2013). At that moment, for architecture remains
the search for a discourse itself; the search for this speech would have several

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possibilities, and in pursuit of this new discourse of the possibilities is the use of
diagrams.

The writer-architects Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas


Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas chose to begin his architectural career
through writing. For them, the words became an architectural site for invention.
Eisenman’s first work of architecture is his a doctoral thesis entitled The Formal
Basis for Modern Architecture (1963). Koolhaas’s thesis in the next decade (1978),
Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, is not dedicated
to the study of architectural form, but the numerical and exponential values ​​of
a metropolis like New York City. Eisenman and Koolhaas’ critical and conceptual
architecture grasped the potential of language as a model for architecture as text.
The process that generates their architectural form would not be very different from
that linguists described to establish standards of immanent generational grammar
in language (Moneo, 2008, p. 143).
Both refuse to teach architectural design in the conventional sense, but use
education as a way to analyze the architecture through diagrams - Eisenman’s
students make diagrams from the works of canonical Terragni and other buildings,
while Koolhaas’ compile data about everyday irregularities.
According to Somol (2007), in the way the diagram has become instrumentalized
in architecture over the last few decades, Koolhaas and Eisenman have much
more in common with each other than architects in the same period. Working
diagrammatically (not to be confused with simply working with diagrams) implies
a particular orientation and cannot be accounted by reapplying the conventional
categories of formal or functional, critical or complicit, but by subverting dominant
oppositions and hierarchies currently constitutive of the discourse.
According to Montaner (2009, p.148) fragmentation is the most genuine form of
postmodern condition, and when the starting point becomes this hybrid condition,
it resists the temptation of unity, identity, metaphysics and refers to mechanisms
that recompose the multiple and fragmentary reality, through mosaic, collages,
superpositions and other strategies that potentiates both the complexity and
individualization of each part. In this sense, for him, Koolhaas and Eiseman’s design
process reflects this reality characterized by dispersion and difference, additions,
superpositions and the clash between parts, which is a work of recomposition.
In fact, both understand the design process through the sequence in time and
the architectural representation as not only the definition of a final object, but
a discourse. It is an analogical relationship between language and architecture,
generated through diagrammatic operations. Despite all differences, Koolhaas and
Eisenman are both interested in text and in built form. They built and written in all
the phases of their work and the diagram is the graphic approach.

Peter Eisenman: folding and unfolding diagrammatic operations


Peter Eisenman is an architect and educator. After years of practice in teaching,
research and theoretical work he established his practice focused on the scale of
the building. His first projects include prototype large-scale housing, single family
houses and institutional facilities for education which resulted in dozens of awards
for the relevant architectural production.

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Behind his architectural discourse, Peter Eisenman seeks to generate form


without interference from functionalist or constructive issues. The procedures have
a clear syntactic position, ignoring any attempt to “semanticizing” the architecture.
He does not claim a communicative status of architecture and his design process
intended to be abstract, unrelated to any external references, free of contamination
(Moneo, 2008, p. 141). In Eisenman’s words, the beginning, therefore, is not the
actual site, but the traces of the site in the Derridean sense.
His first projects started from an ideal grid, composed by abstract components
such as point, line and plane, minimum elements that generate a Cartesian
space, activated through formal impulses as rotation, stretching, compression,
decomposition, grafting, scaling, superposition, shifting and folding. Eisenman’s
investigations thus required an initial ideal or generic form, which he often located in
the cube, a neutral box that was typically (and somewhat less neutrally) designated
as a ninesquare (Somol, 2007, p. 174). This ideal grid, which basically shows the
neutrality of the space, concepted such as addition and subtraction, rotation and
translation, layers, levels and shifts, give place to an architecture that intended to
be as abstract as unrelated to any possible external references; an approach that
ensure the autonomy and self-reflexivity of the architectural object. And it is the
catalogue of these procedures that becomes the subject matter of architecture, a
disciplinary precondition to a diagrammatic approach (Somol, 2007, p. 173).
However, this geometric and formalistic design process differs from the static
architectural diagram. It does not constitute a representation of all the design stages
based on mental decisions, but it is a reflection of creative impulses, experimental
operations, and the final object is so unpredictable as the whole process. A non-
analog thinking where the input data did not remain a single parameter and the
output object is generated through several numbers of diagrams “in process” that
create complexity.
In this sense, Eisenman’s diagrammatic process, even in the 1980s, could be
compared to the bases of the digital design conception of the architectural form.
His analogical procedures have a parametric logic, whose motions on the grid are
similar to the algorithmic (geometric) combinations in digital fabrication. Advancing
the potential of registering site forces and movement via inflections in generic form,
Eisenman’s transformational diagramming techniques anticipate the need for (and
predict the possibilities of) the later development of 3D modeling and animation
software (Somol, 2007, p. 170).
In a second phase of his work, the geometric or cube operations gave place to
a diagrammatic process that transforms both figure and ground. In the Memorial
to the Murdered Jews of Europe (1998-2005), for example, Eisenman arranged a
grid pattern on a slopping field. The thousand of concrete pillars are the minimum
elements that generate the tension on the Cartesian plane, but on the contrary
of the folding and unfolding operations which could disturb the matrix, the
architect operated the transformations only in the vertical axis of the composition.
The apparent linear model of repetition, which contradicts Eisenman’s work,
is combined to an undulating verticality. This strategy of reduplication produces
something entirely new, an emergent organization that, although formalist, is truly
related to the concept and subject of the memorial. The discourse of absence (The
discourse of absence and presence is a Derridean notion), is explored in Eisenman’s

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ground projects and it reinforces the idea of the trace, a “figure-figure urbanism”
diagram which portrays different layers related to the city.
In the City of Culture of Galicia (1999 - ongoing), the undulating form of all the
six buildings is evolved from the layering of three sets of information: the plan of
the medieval center of Santiago de Compostela, a cartesian grid that represents
the modern city and the topography of the hilltop, which distorts the preview
flat geometries. The superposition of the old and new layers are combined in a
simultaneous matrix which creates the topological surface and the fluid movement
of the ground and rooftops. The “figure-figure urbanism” diagram emerge as a
parametric junction of the patterns of different layers. Once again the concept is
strongest connected to the shape, but the geometry resulted is unexpected and
totally different to the context. The struggle over seemingly disparate paths also
represents a search for an internal disciplinary logic for architecture. This reflection
would be an amalgam of projects and their critical reflections, an excessive
hipertext, as it were combining text and objects beyond their limits of their former
textuality (Davidson, 2006).
More recently, this archaeological path discourse is also reflected on the Yenikapi
Project, in Istambul, designed in partnership with Aytaç architects. Eisenman’s
proposal deals with the site at different scales: the architectural, the site and the
urban scales. The design is based on analysis of the context, identified through
two grid systems which, after rotated, built up a different framework. The same
matrix and logic were re-proposed to the interior of the architecture and connects
virtual and real spaces to different contexts. In fact, this fragmentary approach of
the project pieces, a random collage of seemingly disparate layers of information,
confronts to the nature of the site, but at the same time proposes a transformation
of the place itself. It is a generative operation through the overlapping fragments
from the context and the final result is as geometrically complex as the site, despite
it does not represent it figuratively.
Although Eisenman’s work changed from the first Cartesian experimentations
to a second phase of the crossing layers of the context, the diagrammatic thinking
explores the networking of superposing paths, in which the time becomes a part of
the process. The record of several stages of the design allows it to exist in time, as
precisely a map of the event, a method for architectural generation as a text.

Rem Koolhaas: the diagram as infographics


Rem Koolhaas is one of the most significant contemporary architects who best
theorized and consolidated the culture of the fragment - with influences of Peter
Eisenman (who systematically questions the certainty of a place), ingredients of
pop culture references and also the architect Robert Venturi. His journalist initial
training, before the completion of studies in architecture, has great influence on
his career, which begins, coincidentally, at the time the criticism of Modernism
strengthens (1960). Similar to Peter Eisenman, his professional practice matured
through theoretical foundation and dedication to the academic career. Currently
he has an office for the production of architecture (OMA), parallel to a theoretical
knowledge production (AMO).
His work as a whole has great influence of poststructuralist philosophers,
particularly those gathered in the exhibition entitled deconstructivist. His

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theoretical approach is usually a non-linear narrative composed by several small


stories that can be read separately without prejudice to the understanding. It is not
necessary to follow an unrestricted reading order, in the sequence of texts, since
the narrative, and also his work, are a mosaic of fragments. This collage reflects
this fragmentary and scattered condition of the contemporary city and all these
information are unraveled by the reader from the set of texts and images.
For Koolhaas, the form is of paramount importance for the success of the project,
but it is never a stable or eternal solution to an architectural problem. Rather, it is a
temporary and elastic resolution to a complex situation. This attitude also shows his
concept of town: the contemporary urbanism is characterized by more malleable
processes that less facilitate the consolidation of definitive forms, and Koolhaas is
well aware of the constant changes occurring in the cities, feeling often seduced by
these mutations. This is an attitude from the nineties that transfer the essence of
architecture from form (aesthetics) to the event.
According to Montaner (2009) the ideals of Koolhaas evolved gradually from
the New York model, through other American cities like Dallas and Houston, to the
generic Asian city, or chaotic ones like Lagos. However, Koolhaas’ design process
has no concern with the historical situation of the contemporary city, but an
overall understanding for the project. His architectural or urban projects has also
sub​​-themes, which link architecture to politics, media, math or globalization, for
example, and his diagrams illustrate these approach as info graphics. Koolhaas is
also interested in mega structures, singular objects obtained by heterogeneous
fragments.
Besides Koolhaas’ design process is the organization of the context data, it does
not have a parametric logic. The recombination of information and the consequent
generation of architecture is related to the event, and in this sense, the diagram is
an organizational and strategic tool for developing the program. They are catalysts
that helps to crystallize forms and spaces able to contain the programs and functions
the contemporary life asks. In Koolhaas’ words “Content is Form”.
In this sense, Rem Koolhaas became known by the original language of
representation, characterized by metaphors and analogies, through graphics and
diagrams which contain factual information. Obsessed with statistical and numerical
data, the diagram translates and simplifies concepts through satirical and critical
photomontages. Collages, images and functional graphics assist the programmatic,
functional and aesthetic decisions of the projects. As they are also related to the
context and numeric issues of big cities, some authors compare Koolhaas’ schemes
as hiper-active surfaces.
Moneo (2008) argues the architectural sections (elevations) are important
media for Koolhaas’ diagrammatic thinking. For the architect, the elevations are
as important as designing the building, as it helps to think the density of the
metropolis. This diagram approach acquire the shape of the building according to
the scale of the city. This way of understanding leads to recover the importance of
iconography in architecture and, as in Eisenman works, it constitutes hypertexts.
In the Universal HQ project, in Los Angeles, for example, OMA proposed
a building that is in flux. A conceptual model of a “structure” that could, if not
anticipate, at least accommodate almost any eventuality and actuality exploit the
given instability to define a new territory for architecture (Koolhaas, 2004). The

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diagrams of the project show four layers of functions, each one corresponding
to a tower of an specific activity: a tower of a laboratory (thinking), an elevator
core (circulation), a stack of meeting rooms (community), a tower of accountants
(money). The sections combine graphics and words in an architectural discourse of
assembly of information through the shape.
In the same programmatic logic, the project for LACMA Museum Competition
shows how the scale shifts from architecture to urbanism. Simple diagrams
demonstrate “layer-by-layer” numeric solutions for the architectural problem.
LACMA’s collection planes illustrate significant connections between the old
buildings and also the paths into the exhibition. Colorful pieces split different
programs, cultures, departments and ages and the diagrammatic sections are able
to reflect, in the shape, the historic convergence and rupture through time.
In the Seattle library project, the sections illustrate platforms as programmatic
clusters and the spaces in between function as trading floors, interfaces where the
different platforms are organized (spaces for work, interaction and play). These
schemes helps to understand the complexity of a “mass-building”, to split and
combine different layers of contents. For Koolhaas, the iconography is an important
tool for the design process.
But, besides this creative intent, some critics argue that the diagrams do not
have logical relationship to the final architectural object. For them, the content is
not related to the generated form and the process is an autonomous entity, later
illustrated by these graphs.
Despite all discussions about the validity of these graphics to the design
process, the ideograms of Rem Koolhaas are indeed interesting narratives related
to the project. They are creative approaches to communicate the concept and for
the comprehension of the complexities of mass-buildings related to contemporary
cities.

Conclusion
The practice of the diagram as graphic notation method to generate form
is different in Koolhaas and Eisenman’s practice. But, despite of all difference
between the architects’ design process, the inspiring force of the diagrams, reflects
not only their descriptive or explanatory capacity, but their generative architectural
possibilities and also the multiple associations of ideas they allow. More than
expose, the diagram stimulates creativity; more than “explain” situations, it
presents possibilities.
But, despite the operation through layers of contents or geometric notations
reveals unexpected situations, in some cases, the final object may be similar to
each other. The design of Peter Eisenman’s Max Reinhardt Haus Project, in Berlim,
and Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV Headquarter, in Beijing, for example, are very similar in
form, scale and in their relation to the city. Maybe, the result of the diagrammatic
process is somewhat predictable in both, or their reciprocal influences are deeper
than the use of this diagrammatic language.

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References
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DAVIDSON, C., 2006. Tracing Eisenman: Peter Eisenman Complete Works. New
York: Rizzoli.
KOOLHAAS, R., 2004. Content. Köln: Taschen.
MONEO, R., 2008. Inquietação teórica e estratégia projetual na obra de oito
arquitetos contemporâneos. São Paulo: Cosac Naify.
MONTANER, J.M., 2009. Sistemas Arquitetônicos Contemporâneos. Barcelona:
Gustavo Gili.
__________________ 2013. Arquitetura e Crítica. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.
PAI, H., 2002. The Portfolio and the Diagram – Architecture, Discourse, and
Modernity in America. Cambridge: MIT Press.
RAUTERBERG, H., 2008. Entrevista com arquitetos. Rio de Janeiro: Viana &
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SOMOL, R.E., 2007. Dummy Text, or The Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary
Architecture. Risco – Revista de Pesquisa em Arquitetura e Urbanismo. N° 5,
1° Semester. [pdf] Available at: <http://www.revistas.usp.br/ risco/article/
download/44701/48329> [Accessed 05 October 2014].

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