The Activist Drawing Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond edited by Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley THE DRAWING CENTER = MIT Press ge, Massachusetts EnglandBARNE phe) ‘Pik ae : ra ese bon on asa mapa! ede, p67 ew sab209 09Diagrams of Utopia Anthony Vidler Registering the extreordinary historical and polemieal effect of this unique collection of drawings, what first strikes me is the unaccountable veracity uf Constants project for the New Babylon—its sense o 1aving already been constructed. We soar above Its new potential realizability, or even its sense oi trbanjrural landscape, stall through its spaces, inhabit ils psychological aura, manipulate its partitions 10 our advantage, compare its quarters to those of other imaginary habitats we have entered with sim= ilar unquestioning faith—the starship Enterprise, for example. Ths is na doubt the result of Constant’s clever use of already-known architectural parts in order to fabricate a neve unknoven—we recognize the “détourned” elements of the Ville Radieuse, af Chernikov's or Leonidav’s constructivist ideal cities, of Merzbau, and uf mare dawn-ta-earth propositions from Team 10's own rewriting of CIAM=the mats nets, and megastructures of van Eyck, Bakema, Woods, and even the megastructures of Yona Friedman, All utopias have done this to a degree, of course, fram the Renaissance to the present—no place could bbe understood as a potential good place if we did not in some way find our own place in its habits. All visual realizations of the future are constrained to put ta use the existing languages of ther pre ent-and Constamt’s imaginary city is no exception, IF we were not directed to the question of intelligible speech by its title, then, this “new” Babylon would raturally give rise to speculation as to the languages it itself deploys by which to deserine the ingescribable, to plot the scatial and the social in their vet unformed state ina form that provides some sense of solidity, oF potentiality, to this relurn of the mythieal tower. This is of course accomplished in part by the incessant, twenty-year-lang production of drawings and mudels, each lending veracity to the nex, allowing us to see tangible structure grow and change, develop almost organically in the artist's mind; the depletion of inhabitable spaces allowing us to project ourselves into its infinite per spective, to Imagine the realization of the plans. These seem, that is, to make up the concrete speciti- cations for the canstruetian of utopia in the present But the special force af modern urban utopia stems npl only from its century-long tradition of archi- {eclural elements turned from their commercial and technological use to social ends—the transparent glass and iron arcade architecture recognized by Benjamin as the emblem and fabric of modernity’s pre 83 history and given special idealizing force by the avant-gardes of tne twenties-but from something elsethat | would lke to call the representation effect. For itis also true that the more convincing of Constants representations, those that give us @ sense of the unbounded possibilities inherent in the Neve Babylon, are necessarily those that “look like" architectural plans, sections, models~nat those that seem forall the world as if they are about to be presented to the develaner(client, but rather those that in their schematic form leave questions unanswered, at the same time leaving no doudl as to the intended spatial and social relations they describe. Not perspectives, thet is, nor sketches, structural, site, or massing models, but rather what | would call diagrams; depictions, whether drawn or modeled, ‘that look precise and at the same time imprecise, st look tectonic but harbor no tectonies, at least in the traditional sense | want to address here the question of the “diagram,” one architectural circles over the last ten years, from Jepanese architects lke Toyo Ito and Kazuya Sejima, to what one can now call the new Netherlandish schoo! (Ben ven Berkel and Caroline Bas et al, to Peter Eisenman, whose recent Diagram Diaries recasts his entte career as that of a “diagram architect.” The question of the diagram might well be of equal interest to a “Drawing Cente” and especially 0 in the ccantext of this exhibition of work that rises so inarchitecture, end more particularly in what we might cal architectural utopia, | want, that i, to speak about the architectural diagram: not the sketch, the part, the geometrisi projection, oF the various kinds of drawing toward, about, end of arcicecture, but the diagram, AL irst sight, the diagram nas litte piace in architectural practice—indeed, words like “diagrammat- ict have taken on negative connotations with respect to late examples of modernism and postmod- emism=Far its the drawing and its evocative fist step, the sketch, that have been the fetish of archi« tects since the Renaissance. Disegno, after Brunelleschi and Alberti has been the watchword of archi= \ectural telent et least until relatively recently. What | mean by the diagram wil, | hope, become clear uring ths talk; certainly it embraces al the conventional connotetions ofthe word: I select freely from its multiple definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. at has become of some active interest in ‘any immediate questions about the status of drawing Lirom O16 Frere ciagramme, tom Greek dterpaue: vio acressith/ough, gromme semetning written, letter 1 the alphabet, thet whieh is marked out by fines geometries) Figure, written lst, register, the gamut or stale in music (fom Borppawgery to mark out by ies, draw, Sav out, write in a register] (Beom,) A figure composed of ines, serving to Hlustrate a definition or statement, ort aid in the proof ofa proposition. An ilustrauive Figure, which, without representing the exact appeacarce of an objec, gies an outine or genera suireme oft, s035t exhibit (he shape and relations ofits warous parts A set of ines, aks. or tracings wich "epresent symbolically he course oF results of any ation or processor the variations wich characterize it. A {etneation used to symbolize reste! abstrset ropusitions ar mectal processes Reformulated in erchitectural tezms, such deiinitions would immediately take the diagram out of the \domain of the drawing: meny architects, in faet would not want to consider the diagram at all, save, aer- haps for that moment when a client wants to be reassured that all functions are being taken care of and related in proper ways. Hence the “oubble diggram” developed in the 1950s as a corrective to modernist Universalism, and expanded in its role by Christopher Alexander in his early attempss to develop a design method authorized and driven by cybernetic lagi. But, for the rest, a diagram is nota sketch (erefore it evokes nothing, pints te nothing), and a diagram fs nota plan (therefore it cannot be built) [Lisa kind of neitherlnor of delineation, a neutral zone, winere certain relations are mapped precisely but without aura, 84 with no qualitative information; there is, one might say, nothing superfluous in the diagram. Diagrams of utopiaVihar then does a diagram do? If there is no emaathy in the diagram, might there be at least 3 per- formative detinition? Charles Sanders Peres, the doyen of semiotics, defined it as representing a kind of reasoning and placed it arang the kinds of signs he called ico an icon of intelligible retaions in the constitution ofits Object.”"A diagram would incorparate the prac~ tices ef graphic abstractions (geometry sllogisties} and possess what for Feitee was the crucial index ical turetion of “pointing.” Unlike the draing, navtever, it does not provide death of meaning beyans what Gilles Deleuze calls "insight" into its object. Rather, as in itsel? displaying the formal Features of ts object, it substitutes for and takes the place of its object Ik is for this teason that Peirce sees the diagram as eliding “the distinction betvien the real and the cupy" ‘distinction which, Perce claims, dissppeats entirely in the diagram. Here it is that the diagram reveals its fundamental link to utopia. The question it reses~isita real abject or is it a copy af a real cbject?—makes ian instrument of suspended reality. As Price concludes: "Its for tne manent, a pure dream. ‘A Diagram is mainly an tcan, and its surface Indeed it would be @ truism to say that all utopias are, af necess tial relations that embody the ideal society have often been literally described in this way: the ' of Sfarzinds is less a pian, in the sense of an idea! city plan, than a diggram. Similarly the ideal re depicted in the Hypneroamachia Polhill alsa take on diagrammatic form. An, 25 the late Louis Merin hhas demonstrated, the camplex arganization of Thomas More's Utopia 's reve lagram, as iF 7 3 initially eonce ved ay such But these are diagrams thal descrite the symbofe relationsnip of forms ro the'r roles in society: they do not constitute, literally, the spat There isa sense that the ideal, embodies in the symbole form, will aiuays naun itself, be realized. Taus one might be able to diagram the system of Platonic ideals, but never the dea! forms themselves. Here we have nol sa much the fusian of real and copy as the total seperation of the diagrammatic, The various spa- 1d mast clearly in the ns, in Peiee's (etm ial form itseif—they are mare symbuls than ea) but will meer, ‘two, the symbol as preservation af the ideal, The diagram proper, as Peirce defines it—tne icanie form— is 2 more modern product, a schematic instiument utilized by an age that believed in the realization of tutapia, in the construction of the "gaad place" rather than the imagination of the *no place In this sence itis @ oroduet of the Enlightenment, 2 vehicle of Turgot’s philasaphy of progress, a device temporary with the invention of the axonumetri, the development of the metric system, the refine= invention of what Ing,” oF hospitals ines’ of community, or communes, and ment oF geologies| survey techniques It was inthis form a design technique fur the eighteenth century was pleased ta call spatial “machines': “machines for c “machines” for punishment or reform, oF prisons ar schools; "eng s0 on, Diagrams were essential in this process; al once the determined spatial re'ations of new tune- tonal needs and the calculated specifications of the new building machines, they could be, ard more “often than not were, invented not by architects but by the host of new professionals—octors drew dia grams of hospitals, legal ghilosophers oF prisors (Bentham), social "sclentists’ of communities, Arehiteet-teachers, under the supervision af geometers, even diagrammed architecture ise [Durand But perhaps the most powerful use of the diagram in early mademism is that deployed by ronarchi~ tects—lawyers philosopners, and social theorists—to describe cifferent farms of argeniz ‘on according to spatial relations that would of themselves, it was thaught, support if ni give rise to the sovial orders imagined. Thus Benthern’s Panopticon, vill known since Foucault as an early architectural examole of surveillance culture. Foucault himself uses this pattern 5 an exemplary instance of the performative a5 diagram, a “funetioning ebstracted from every obstacle or friction... and that should be detached tramret loner Benin, Panoetian lon 792 Lomotson soregue om GILES DELEUZE, he Fle 949) any specie use It sa representation at once af 2 “thing® with specific content (the prisoner) and of a "lunetion” with generalized seope over society as @ whole. The gisgram, then, is bath specific, in that it pretisely maps the space of individual confinement, and univers, in that i imprecisey] refers to an Ente social regime. Its as if the diagram ofthe feudal estate, castle atthe center, cultivated strias and jeasant huts around the periphery had been mapped on the organizing system af feudalism asa whale Here | am following the evocative argument of ills Deleuze in ris study of Foucault, where the dia- gram becomes a central phenomenon rot anly in the mepoing of Foueaule’s thought, as vell as Foucault himself, but ako in the understanding of modern social organization in toto For Deleuze the importance of the disgram is that it “speciis* in a particular way the relations between un- formedjunorganized matter and unformalizesfun‘inliced functions that i, that it joins the two pow= erful regimes of space (the visible) and language (the invisible but ubiquitous system). The diagram, then, in Deleuze's terms isa kind of mapjmschinea spatiotemporal abstraction that ‘refuses every for- imal distinction between a content and an expression, between a discursive and a nantiscursive forma- tion” Its, he writes, "an almustsilentfdumb and blind machine, even though it is that which causes sight ard speech Ir there ate mary dlegrammaticfunetions and even materials its because every ciagram isa spatiotemporal multiplicity. Buti 15 also beeause there are as many diagrams a5 there are social “lds in history. When Foucault invokes thention uf the diagram it in elation to our modern esciplnary societies, where power vides up the entre fe in aged if Unere is model for this is he model of tne plogue that seers off Ue ill ey aml extenais co the smallest detail, There ae accordingly sagrams For al socal orters—for fac= Tories, theaters, monarchies, impaal regimes. What is move, these diagrams are all inceretated—neyinter= peretste each othe. This is because the dagram is profoundly unstable or fluid, never ceasing ta churn up rraiter and funetions in such a vay as to constitute mutations Finally, every diagram is interscial and in 8 State of becoming, It never functions ro represen & preesting worl it produces 3 new tyae of eality a nev mucel of trath. I not subject to history, nor does it hang aver histary: It creates history y uomaking prc: ceding relies and signfcations, sersig up s0 many points of emergenee or creativity, of unexpected con Junetuces of improbetle corsinuums ft doubles history with # becoming [avee un deve ILis this potential of mutation, of endless transformation andi becoming, that makes the diagram for Deleuze, a5 for Guattari an especially transgressive device. As Gary Genosko has recently nated, the dia- gram organizes an escape from gure linguistics into a deterritorialized spatial zone: ‘Diagrammatic machines of signs elude the territorializing systems of symbolic and signifying semiologies by display- ing a kind of reserve in relation to treir referents, forgoing polysemy and eschewing lateral signifying 146 effects” Diagrams then av i-behaved, they “do not behave lke well-formed signs in a universal sys- Diagrams of Utopiaoases Fou 1 Bagram ofthe Plenty 880 ttanauis 2 Sane, Digrom of an Ayam bri «808 ‘em of signification fal to pass smoothly through the simulacraldialogism ef ideal madets of com ‘munication.” In this way, what might seer to be *an arid algebra of language” in diagram form active- iy serves Guatlar'’s "pragmatics of the unconscious" and thence his insurgent social practice: the dia gram, in this sense is utopian by definition. In this contest we might point to one of the more badly Uchaved of early modern diayrams, sketched iby the Marguis de Sade #9 @ kind of courter-panopticon—the House of Lubriity This is so to speak, the instieutional form of the endless pornographic narratives ofthe 120 Doys af Sodom, themselves given the- trical staging ina "Scene" that, 2s Roland Barthes noted, was a veritable diagram of language itself. Weve de Sade negative references to existing institutions—theaters, hospitals and prisons—are evidently the fotmal basis of nev, purportedly utopian, institutions; and it & here tha we can see the intimate relation is by referring ta what its Hefintely not st the same time as/t shapes iis ovn diagram with reference to 8 mutation ofits anti-mode! ba utopian giagram to its predecessors: it gains its ieanie significance, th Equally, and closer to the soir of Constant’s New Babylon, Charies Fourier diagramed his ideal et community by adopting the model of the palace [Versailles to be precise). In these sketches, betweer 1808 and 1825, Fourier constitutes his commune in glagram forn—that is, 4s he himself admitted, a as Godin and later Le Corbusier were to demonstrate, the "salace" is @ spatial type to which the aha lanstery ought to be compared, not a made! lv emulate, Psinstakinaly he warked out the mathemti~ cal and spatial details of sociability and pleasure, sexval freedom and individual liberty in community Taking the passage and the palace as his ‘negative’ mode's, so to speak, he transformed them int engines for machining social intercourse, on every level and in every sense of the word. Writing of this ‘machine in 1971, while providing his own diagram of Fourie’s diagram, Barthes characterized the phta- lenstery in similar terms to that of Foucaull’s “panopticon’ The topography of the phalanstery tages an orginal glace, which is in sum thal of palsees, monasteries, fanar houses and "grands ‘ensembles in which an ergenization ofthe building ana sn urgaization ofthe tarvitary are boughs together [se confendent in suche vay Una fan entire y modern view) architecture and urbanism bath withdrane in favor af @ general sclence of human alec, the primary eharaeter oF which i no longer protection but cieulation: the ahatznsery isa seclusionfonfinement atthe intrir of whieh one culotes [there exist nevertheless trips autside the pilanstory these ate ine great voyayes of “hordes” the moving “narty) This space evidently funetonl zed, a te following reconstitution shows (very apnraxi- mative, since the Fouriristeliscourse ike all iting, i reducible Ir the same 1, Stendhal, @ contemporary of Fourie, illustrated his autobiographical Lite of He 7 Brufard with spatial diagrams that at ance mapoed his living spaces and acted as icons of his states of Anthony viderpeecaries ot iH Peto orem f i ft Plan of Sector2p 999 ehcn get 6195/8965 en Genatnrusn, Te Hane mind and social and sexual relations. More recent examples of the "Fourier" diagram, and cantemoo- ‘ary with Constant's New Batyion, would be those of Georges Perec, who insistently mapped every aspect of his and his neighbors’ es of dreamwork vetsion of whet socialagists like Chambart de Lauwe, whose disarams were used in tum bby Debord and is friends, were undertaking with scientific interest for the inhabitants of Paris Perhaps here, in Perec and Chombart, Foucault and Barthes, all characterizations af the utopian dia~ gram roughly contemporary 10 che beginnings of the New Babylon, we might identity 2 potent Of thinking through the dilemma characterized by Hilde Heyren with respect to Constant's utopia, For her, what she calls the “real problem’ of the New Babylon is synonymous with thal oF utopis: as she puts it, "he tension between the larger structures that are fixee and the smaller-scale interior struc tures that are fexible and laoyrinthine Is not always fully warked out** This would then be the tension identified by Adore in all modern utopian thought—that between the desire of art to be utopian in the face of an obstructive social reality, and the de-and that art should precisely net be seen as tap fan, so as “not to be foune guilty of administering comfart and illusion.” Thus, Heynen conciuses, Constant's New Babylon isa project that strives “to he an embodiment of the utagian end situation of histary, its based on the negation af all that is false and fraudulent in the present societal condition,” but “ts truth lies in its very negativity and in the Gissonances that pervade the images of hermon; But if we see Constant's utopian machine as & complex, three-dimensional diagram, these “contradic- as cons" are ance move placed in flux and interdeoendenee rather than apposition. Constant himself, writing ryday life in ane kind of disgram after another. These farm 2 kind way ingame of Utopiain the Internationole Situationist in 1959, speaks of the early stages of his New Babylon in terms th remind us of Deleuze on Foucault aver twenty yeats later iti he says, the construction af “an ambience in space junction af the psychological regimes and the spatial His description equally evokes Fourier: ‘Tne futur ees we envisege sl fer a original variety af sensations inthis damain, nd unforeseen games sl become possible rough the inventive use af materal eandtiars, fae the consitioniny ofa, Sour, ona light. Harrorizing cacephuny ... space voyages... reduction of wor necessary far procuction.-. maximurr of socal space... ground free for creulstion ol walic... aecessole terraces... nfnite wa feeltating she driv ofthe inhabitants and their frequent chance encounters” of ambience, In these terms New Babylon follows all the logic of diagrams: as he writes in “Neve Babylon: Outline of 2 Culture" from 1860-1965, itis at once a social model (\udie society). a network (freedom for play adventure, mobility, 2 topography (of displacement, slow and continuous flux, rap circulation, 2 sec tor (the basic unit) a labyrinth (dynamic) @ technology (to alter the ambience, and an intensification of space (lived more intensely=seems to ciate). * Recent interest in the ides oF the diagram as taken @ new turn, séhich at Fist sight seems less Ltopian than the tradition we have been looking at. Toyo Ito, writing in 1996 of the architecture of Kazuyo Sejima, coined the term “diagram architecture.” “In other words” he wrote, "you See a building a5 essentially the equivalent of the kind oF spatial diagram used to describe the daily activities For which the bullding isintended in abstract form, At least it seems as if our objective isto get as close a5 go3- sible to this condition” For Ito, if not entirely for Sejm architecture itself becomes joined! tots cia- ijram—diagram soatial function transformed transparently into bul spatial function with hardy @ hie- cup. The wal, which technologically takes on all the weight of this tensletion, thus carries the freight of the line, or | should say “the burden of linearity” to use Catherine Ingraham’ term in her baok of the same ttle, Such a materialism of the diagram certainly finds a ready instrument in digital repre- sentation, notably in the deterritorializing aractices of Sen van Berkel and Caraline Bos and other new European regionalist architects, who exploit all the ambiguities of lagramsin their “plans® ¢nat at the same time ere maps af bul ors and economic and demographic plans Opposed to this is what one might call the formal” current of diagramming, ta distinguish it from the more "functional" tendency we have been examining, Rob Somol, in his introcuctory essay to Eisenmart’s iogrom Diories,ctaims thatthe diagram has achieved a peculiarly new status, ina gradual shift aecom- plished over the lat thirty years from drawing to diagram for the frst tire in the moder period, indees, he matter of architecture” itself, 35 opgosed ta its representation, “The dia- gram," he writes, "has seemingly emerged as ihe final too), in both its millennial and desperate guises, for architectural production and discourse. practice (such a8 that of Eisenman) thats digaremmatic, Sool claims, stands against 2 tecitional tectorie practice; he saeaks, in Deleuzicn terms, of "s dlagrammatic avactice (owing around obstacles yer resisting nathing)~as opposed to the tectonic isin of architec- tureas the legible sign of construction Operating between form and word, space and language, the de- cram 's both constitutive and orojectve, performative rather than representational, this way itis, Somel concludes, a taal ofthe virtual rather than the eal, and a means of tulding (in both senses of te term) 8 virtual architecture, of proposing a world ather than thet which exists Here we are returned ro @ less material view ofthe diagram than It's one that coincides with thar of PleruigiNicatin, who has revent- Iv token ise with Ito's interpretation of Selim’ translucent and transparent “membranes” as a velec- 88 tian ofthe high-speed media metropolis, proposing an alternative reading of deceleration ar siovidown, the diagram has become thong idlerGules sf ol SSS Tha hsql Pet 4 a 3G Fie Phim on Ppl hom = (Sal ol iy = Decent (od mpegs) Pam See tees wok? lenaaso recuum Competton far the Hew seu of orn At, New York, 397 wich information processing, co 2 scientific, philasophical or mystical phase." Here, in the shift from infor= mation to what Nicolin sees as 2 rarefied, esoteric content in the diagrammatic fore, we arc led hack to Charles Sanclrs Peirce's characterization af the diagram’ as something beyond the icone Perhaps the most convincing contemporary exemplars of the tradition aut of which Constant worked and who themselves work out of the episteme Forged by the 1960s critique of CIAM functionalism, 3 critique that so powerfully welded social utopianism to a renewed vision of modernist form and tech~ nology, ae architects like Rem Koalhaas and Bernard Tschumi whose diagrams not only pretigure their ‘buildings nut incorporate their qualities. Thus in Koolnaas's competition project for the French National Library, the diagram, three-dimensional and evoking a complex 3-D circuit analysis, projects the spatial layering and volumetric suspensions within the cube and acts 35 the territorial mapping of farm and functian, Sinilarly in the competicion project for the Museum of Modern Art extension, Ischumi used 2 sequence of diagrams to develop @ montage narrative of the site, envisaged as a kind of magma as it, so to speak, cauled and hardened into the controlled volumetric system of architecture, \We have brie ly traced the fate of the diagram in architecture, irom Fourier to Constant and beyond Perhaps, in corelusion, | would want simply to nate that the diagram properly deployed in architecture ‘can be @ potent politcal device, whether internally acting on the formal and technological devices of political and psychological program of 2 new social Nicalin might representa shift from “2 sociological, or mimetic, phase, elated ta the world oF architecture ise, or externally, working with th ‘order, In this sense, the term ‘utopian’ with respect to the work of Constant, and perhaps in later instances, signifies not only @ world apart but, more than that, a world co be made by social, political, and intellectual endeavor. The slagram in this context ean act to galvanize the discourse only if bath 30 political form andl architectural form are entered into its equation. Diagrams of Utopiates 1. The Compost tion of he Daf Engish Viton: 1 afore Oxtrs Uiersty rss, 197 714 2 Chars Sanders Pic, Te Caeced Fagor ed, Charles Hatsune sn Pal Wiis [artvige:Heatd Unies Press, 1895+ 1968), 485), 9987; cited in Giles Delve, Fo Pars Earns dy rut, 1984) 86, sibe. {veh Foucault, Sure tau: Gall, 1978), 207; ted in Deeaze, Fu 5 Deleuze. Fost, a, Gary Gera, “Guattt’s Sciaceralc Semitcs” a Fanor Gutman and Kenn an Hele, es, Geuze ond Suatine Ne Inoppinge i Pines Posopny, and Culture Winesgos Lnberty of nese Pes, 199), 175-190, Fotos, 188 8 toe, 175 Rola Bathe Sou; Foies Laat Pars: Eons Seu 1970, 116 10. Hige Heyer, New Baton: re finales of Una” Assert, ro 79 (Ap 1998), 3. 1. Teodor Arne, Athen Tori (1970; Hanstur: Sabra, 1873), vars a Aesth Jicary Landon: Routledge sn Kegan ul 1985) 47;cted in Heme, ew Bobor,"#2 12 eye Ne byl 38 11 Cansten “Une ate ile pour une str shy-tnrodonae Stumiconne na [verb ws 37-40 14. Constant, “Mew dabyler 1960, repintedir Mark ge, Constants Mew Boyion: The Hyperstiteruve of Des Rotel wie oe With, Center or Contemporary A1Y00 Publshers, 1998), 165 15 Tyo le “lara Archicectate” Crus 77 [9918-24 1 RE Soro, "Durem Texto he Diagram Bass of Crear chest in Pier Een, ayn Dares hes Yr Uvivse Pubic, 1980, 28 17 Pieri Mien "Te Tan ot Sra” tons ne. 96 (1996), 3 Antronyviaier