ruminations about architecture and design

Sunday, May 15, 2011

the value of diagrams

This is not architecture. Nor is it a cheap knock-off of Mondrian. It is an effort to begin a discussion about diagrams, which are essential to architectural representation and potentially valuable to pure art.

Architectural documentation--plans, sections, elevations, renderings, models, specifications--are abstract diagrams that at some fundamental level distort the finished architecture. This distortion is necessary in the design and building process because the complexity of a building overwhelms the human senses. Even the new computer software (which is not new at--it is merely an extension of older software) is geared towards abstraction and diagrammatic information organization. An effort towards hyper-realism in architectural presentation is counterproductive and at odds with the descision making infrastructure of the human brain.

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