Diagram of Exteriority

Writing this narrative text of the diagramming process is a retrospective act. It takes a process that did not have an inner trajectory and forces it to obey such a narrative structure. The first diagrams in my Ph.D. thesis were never intended as the beginning of such a process. Rather, that work intended to distinguish my idea of the formal from other interpretations of the time. It proposed a relationship of built work to an interiority of architecture, something that seemed to be absent from other formal discourses. Most formal studies at the time concerned an analysis and explanation of buildings. My use of the diagram, therefor, was fairly innocent. It was a way of opening up the relationship between an interiority and individual buildings. As the idea of interiority began to develop in my own work, the diagram also beacme more implicated: it was not only explanatory but also generative. however, when the diagram became a generative device – when it was not merely used to explain the relationship between a building and interiority – it introduced other concerns. It suggested an alternative relationship between the subject/author and the work. Such an alternative suggested a movement away from classical composition and personal expressionism toward a more autonomous process. Diagrams became a means to uncover something outside of my own authorial prejudices. In this sense, diagramming was was potentially a more rational and quasiobjective means to understand what I was doing. It was also a means to move away from a subjective consciousness to an unconscious diagramming apparatus. Second the process suggested that the built work could manifest the traces of the diagramming process as a means of relating built work to the interiority of its discourse.
As the diagrams progressed through the houses, two issues concerning interiority became clear: (1) the diagrams assumed that interiority was an “a priori” condition of value, that is, a stable set of geometric icons, and (2) in transforming the geometry of the diagram into architecture, it was realized that geometry does not merely transform itself from a diagram to become architecture. Architecture is something more than geometry; walls have thickness, and space has density. Thus the value placed on any geometry – euclidean or topological – as a prior condition of interiority would always be contingent on some architectural interiority. Thus, as the diagrams shifted from Euclidean to topological geometry, it was seen that this substitution of one geometry for another merely displaced the value given to Euclidean geometry without displacing geometry itself. This raised other questions: Why did the diagram necessarily evolve form some preexistent geometry? Why did the diagram begin from an architectural interiority that was not seen as a stable condition of essences? If interiority was unstable, was it possible that some other process other than transformation was appropriate to diagramming? As an initial answer to these questions, the idea of a process of decomposition suggested that the interiority of architecture could be seen as a complex phenomenon from which a less complex condition of the object could be distilled. Interiority in this sense was no longer seen as either pure and stable or necessarily geometric. But because architecture is always based in geometry, the value of a formal universe as an embodiment of architecture was still present. In order to displace these embodied values, a series of other diagrams was introduced into the diagrammatic process that were not based in geometry, which could be seen in some way to relate to, but at the same time be distanced from, an interiority as it had been previously defined. Thus, a series of external texts was introduced in an attempt to displace that which seemed embodied, immanent, and ultimately motivated in architecture’s interiority. [...]
(P. Eisenman)