About How Eisenman Use Diagram
About How Eisenman Use Diagram
About How Eisenman Use Diagram
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JAN VERWIJNEN
Professor, University of Art and Design Helsinki
email: jverwij @ uiah.fi
In the past five years an increased interest in the diagram has led
to a series of publications and conference presentations. In his
introduction to Peter Eisenman¶s Diagram Diaries Robert Somol
(1999) traces the history of the diagram and states about its
actuality that:
³In general the fundamental technique and procedure of
architectural knowledge has seemingly shifted over the second half
of the twentieth century, from the drawing to the diagram. This is
not to suggest that a diagram of one form or another was not
always constitutive of architecture at various points in its history,
but simply that it has only been in the last thirty years or so that the
diagram has become fully ³actualised´, that it has become almost
completely the matter of architecture. Proceeding with halting steps
through serial obsessions with form, language and representation
« the diagram has seemingly emerged as the final tool, in both its
millennial and desperate guises for architectural production and
discourse.´ (Somol 1999, 7).
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The analytical drawings of the Pavillon Suisse (fig. 2), a dormitory
for Swiss students in the Cité Universitaire in Paris, reveal a
systematic approach to the programmatic requirements ± starting
with a study of what a student room would need to be and how the
circulation system works complementary to that. Thus a volume
emerged that was translated into a steel structure and suitable for a
µconstuction à sec¶ - a (dry) montage of panels. The enclosure and
its opening system follow the potential of the steel skeleton and
become large window panels with floor high sheets of glass. In
other words conceptually the same principles that were
demonstrated at the Villa Savoie had been employed, but because
the notion of composition had partly shifted to a conceptual level,
this consistency was not directly visible. On the outside, stylistically
there is perhaps an unexplainable break between the two, but
conceptually the composition of complementary subsystems as a
relationship of parts that make up the building and bring its
construction, the making of it in unison with the compositional idea,
had even advanced. Le Corbusier himself expressed this in 1928
commenting on his Weissenhofsiedlung houses ³... il s¶agit de
standardiser un système de structures «. r
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déterminer une variété infinie de plans, « répondre à des
programmes petits, moyens ou grands. Créer un système de
structure.³ (Reichlin 1987)
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