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8/12/2019 Dumm Text Presentation

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Dummy Text, or the Diagrammatic

Basis of Contemporary ArchitectureR.E. Somol


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over the second half of the 20th century, the diagram has taken the place of the drawingas the

nal tool for architectural production and discourse.

unlike drawing or text, the diagram appears to operate precisely between form and word.

Somols thesis:


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a disciplinary device: undoes specic institutional and discursive (reasoned or argued) oppositions.

Three main characteristics of architectural diagrams:

suggests an alternative mode of repetition, envisioning repetition as the production of difference,

not identity.

performative rather than representationaldevice (a tool of the virtual rather than of the real).

old mode = icons, resemblances, copies of timeless precedents; static being.

new mode = continual differentiation; advancing through modes of becoming.


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the architect becomesorganizer and channeler of information.

forces no longer limited to the vertical (gravity) but emerge as horizontal and non-specic (economic

political, cutural, local, global).

the diagramis what relates and makes visible these new forces.

Result:

End thesis.


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What is a diagram?

working diagrammatically [is] not to be confused with simply working with diagrams.


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Lawrence Halprin: scores - symbolizations of processeswhich extend over time.


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Robert Venturi: building as billboard

transforms horizontal space(writing

surface) into vertical visual surface.

collapses writing and design into a single

diagram.


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Colin Rowe vs. Peter Eisenman:

diagram as mode of repetition.


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old mode = icons, resemblances, copies of timeless precedents; static being.

Rowe represents the old mode of repetition, that of a static, universal truth condition.

Eisenman represents the new mode of repetition, that of perpetual revision through a sequence

of operations.

new mode = continual differentiation; advancing through modes of becoming.


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Rowe: the ideal villa casts Palladio

and Corb as pursuers of a universal,

mathematical truth.


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transformation, decomposition, grafting, scaling, rotation, inversion, superposition, shifting,

folding, etc.

Eisenman: a diagrammatic approach through an exhaustive sequence of operations.

nal built structures are merely indexical signs that point to a larger processof which they are

only a part.

part of a potentially endless series.

emergencethrough the process of iteration.

simultaneously exists as experience and as representation.


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application of (diagrammatic) sequence of operations to the work of Giuseppe Terragni.


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a fold is at once a thing and its process.

it is the operationof folding that

generates the form.

a repetition that produces something

new, an emergent organization.


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transformation, decomposition, grafting, scaling, rotation, inversion, superposition, shifting,

folding, etc.

a sequence of operations.

products are merely indexical signs that point to a larger processof which they are only a part.

part of a potentially endless series.

emergencethrough the process of iteration.

generative diagram to algorithm:

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