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194 TheDiagrams
of Architecture
TheDiagramsof BernardTschumi
BernardTschumi(BernardTschumiArchitects)
interviewedby MarkGarcia

Bernard Tschumi is the Principal of Bernard Tschumi Architects and the

former Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture and
Planning at Columbia University , New York. Tschumi is an extensively
published theorist , and an internationally recognised architect with an
extensive range of built projects around the world , including the Pare de la
Vill ette in Paris and the New Acropolis Museum in Athens . In this new
essay, based on an interview with Mark Garcia (Royal College of Art,
London), Bernard Tschumi describes the fundamental achievements of his
decades-long research project on the architectural diagram . From the
formative influences of Sergei Eisenstein and Jacques Derrida (among
others) on The Manhattan Transcripts and the seminal Pare de la Villette ,
Tschumi reflects on his continuing engagement with the diagram in his
various new urban and large- scale projects around the world. He recounts
his explorations of the dynamics and effects of diagrammatic and
notational transfers between architecture and other disciplines. He recalls
how this multidisciplinary approach to the diagram led him to a new and
critical conceptualisation of architecture, in terms of its power to
redescribe and superimpose multiple criteria of architecture such as the
body, movement, event and narrative . Through a discussion of
diagrammatic vision, the diagrammatic history of architecture and new,
interactive technologies , Tschumi unfolds his vision of the limits and future
of the architectural diagram in designing programme, envelopes and
vectors, information and the relations between context, concept and
content in the possible futures of the city.

The Ascendance of the Architectural Diagram

The dramatic world stage for the ascendance of the architectural diagram was the
international design competition for the Pare de la Villette, Paris, in 1983 - one of the
most important architectural, urban and landscape projects of the late 20th century. It
resulted in one of the most significant built works of the 1980s and is arguably the best
and largest built exemplar of deconstruction in both urban and landscape design. The
competition was sensational because it included a number of high-profi le and
international avant-garde designers but also because the two rival entries were by none
other than Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. Not only were bot h entries radically and
theoretically driven (Tschumi related his proposal to French theory from Georges Bataille
to Jacques Derrida) but both, to an unprecedented degree, were critically communicated
and conspicuously driven by diagrams.

195 The Diagramsof BernardTschumi

The Manhattan Transcripts
Bernard Tschumi's winning entry for the Pare de la Villette was the culmination and
application of an intense phase of theoretical and design research into the diagram that
was begun through teaching at the Architectural Association in London, continued at
Princeton and Columbia universities in the US, and which finally came to its first fruition
in Tschumi's Manhattan Transcripts, published in 1981. In this book, influenced by
Derrida, Foucault, Barthes and Eisenstein, Tschumi articulated a complex range of
architectural conditions (through the categories of event, movement and space) in a
series of new diagrammatic techniques. He recombined diagrammatic forms and concepts
from cinema and other, esoteric notational conventions (notably diagrammatic
reconstructions of violent criminal acts) and incorporated representations from films, and
complex sequences and series of temporal narratives and storyboards, into new,
architectural diagrammatic systems. Tschumi's Pare de la Villette project was the first
design in which he successfully applied and built the critical new diagrammatic
techniques ; tools and theories he had developed in The Manhattan Transcripts. The
contemporary interest in Tschumi lies not just in the pre-eminent historical impact of his
20th - century work but also in its 21 st-century importance for Tschumi's own, successful
and increasingly larger, more complex building projects. These projects influenced the
development of a diagrammatic sensibility in subsequent generations of architects and in
those who experience his own and other works of architecture.

Describing his achievement in this field and the fundamental innovations and operations
of his diagrams in architecture, Tschumi explained that:

The diagram for me is a graphic representation of a concept. There is no

architecture without a concept. Architecture is the materialisation of a concept .
That first materialisation is often a diagram because I cannot go from the concept
to a building without first going through a whole series of stages; some are highly
abstract and some are very material. The diagram is one of the early steps in the
process. Some of my projects are entirely done through diagrams (like my
Museum of Contemporary Art at Sao Paulo). I sketch the diagram and then the
architects in my office translate the diagram into 3-D and eventually, little by
little, it becomes architectural. You can also use different diagrams throughout the
process. Architects have a very specific mode of giving instructions that is very
different from, for example, a musician or a football coach. At all moments of
dealing with the trajectory from the concept to the building itself, you go through
a set of frozen moments which may have the absolute abstraction of the initial
concept and therefore be very close to the diagram or it may be very descriptive
in the way it presents itself. If I take Mies's Farnsworth House I can say it is a
diagram but I can also say that in terms of the way he treats the corner in IIT there
is also a conceptual and a diagrammatic quality in the drawing. In other words, I
cannot generalise the word 'diagram' as I could generalise the word 'concept'.

196 The Diagramsof Architecture

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197 The Diagramsof BernardTschumi

The question of why the diagram, as opposed to other media, became the focus of his
conceptual researchwas then raised. For Tschumi, his diagrams were developed because:

Beforetime and narrative comesthe body and the movement of that body in space.
If I define architecture as space occupied by bodies and the motions of bodies in
that space,then inevitably I need a vehicle, an instrument, a tool in order to describe
the interaction between that space,and the movement of the body. So immediately
the necessityof introducing a mode of notation becomesapparent. What was new
in The Manhattan Transcriptswas to introduce it as an essential part of the
definition of what architecture is. Other people had used arrows in spacein order to
show the choreography of movements in space. It was fascinating and stimulating
in terms of developing an approach towards the relationship between the body,
event and space. At the time of the Bauhaus,when you had this incredible cross-
fertilisation between the dancers, painters, sculptors and architects, some people,
like Schlemmerfor example,had started to look at the idea that movement was like
a vector that was carving a path inside a solid mass.The military and sciencesalso
use these types of diagrams. In the processof the researchI came acrossfar more
sophisticated and complex notations, such as those developed by Sergei Eisenstein
in order to notate Alexander Nevski and to combine several forms of information:
some to do with the visual, some to do with the soundtrack, some to do with the
camera, some with the actors. It was a revelation that you could start to describe
architecture in terms of multiple criteria that all happen simultaneously. That
superimposition was the beginning of the sensibility which led to the Pare de la
Villette, where the superimposition of point, line and surfaces is also the
superimposition of action, movement and space.The Manhattan Transcriptsbegan
as an intuitive exploration. As I was understanding the potential, mechanismand
logic of the devices I had put in place, it became more and more rational and more
articulate. Therefore it could begin to be theorised.

The question of the extent of the diagram's power as a vehicle with which to develop and
transfer or materialise new elements from other disciplines into architecture was raised.
Tschumi's response was that:

It's not only a methodology transfer into architecture becausearchitecture itself has
its own truths and its own history and the truth of diagramswithin these hasexisted
since the beginning of time. The scratching of a surface of sand to indicate the
foundation of a house or a city goes back to my point that a diagram is a concept
inscribed on a space.The danger with the diagram is that you can fetishise the
diagram, where the diagram can be alwaysvisible throughout the whole project or
maybe it would be invisible only to the cognoscenti or those who have read the
story. Take la Villette; the diagram is visible during certain seasons. Right now, it is
not visible when you go into the park. You rarelysee more than four follies at a time;

198 The Diagramsof Architecture

 Bernard Tschurni Architects ,
envelope diagram , Vacheron
Constantin Watch Factory , Geneva ,
2004. © Bernard Tschurni.

you can't follow the logic of the superimposition because you are in it. But in winter
there is not a problem, you get it right away. In a building like my Vacheron
Constantin Watch Factory, the diagram is always visible. It's highly precise: the
envelope wraps around and over the factory and hence is constantly a reminder of
the sorts of processes and uses of the material since the materials themselves are
there to reinforce the difference between the inside and the outside.

The idea of a 'diagrammatic visuality' was raised. I asked Tschumi about the legacy of his
research, in his own experience of space and his design process:

This 'diag rammatic visuality' of yours is interesting because just as X-ray vision
allows you (depending on how you adjust your X--ray machine) to see different
things (the kidneys or the lungs, for example), it's not inconceivable that you can
turn it the other way around. As an architect who enjoys, particularly, the making
of architecture, I will use my diagrammatic visuality not just in retro, analysing an
existing space, but prospectively, futuristically. I can see something, say organic,
in nature, then in abstract, and then I can turn that into the diagram that I will use
for a particular project. My interest, the constant in my work, is to do with the
definition of what architecture is and trying to take it outside the realm of the
history of architecture, because the history of architecture has a whole series of
values, of ideologies, of cliches that I am trying to bypass through my research. I
~ will look at concepts that can help me to understand what is specific to
architecture by comparing it to other disciplines . The legacy of this research is
enormous for me. For example, I am working on a large masterplan for Abu Dhabi,
which is in the middle of the desert. It has a name, Media City, which is already
loaded. In terms of organising a piece of the city, many of the strategies are taking
the approach not about what it looks like, but of the comparative study of
different concepts. I will always bring the concept before the diagram; the concept
precedes the diagram. Occasionally you start in the middle and you go back.
Sometimes it happens that when I am working on something I have the project
but not the concept yet, and I have to take it back to get the concept. Doing
almost what you describe as the diagrammatic visualisation, the X-ray vision, I will
have a project where everything will be right - I have the programme right, I have
the cost right, but somehow the thing has not gelled yet into what I am after. Then
I have to step back and search for the right concept and the diagram.

199 The Diagramsof BernardTschumi

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200 The Diagramsof Architect

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For Tschumi, the future of the diagram in architecture, what there is still left for the
diagram to achieve in architecture, is clear:

In terms of my present and future work on the diagram, I am not interested in

the diagram as a short cut towards an icon. I am also fascinated by the idea of
having to diagram something in the small, on a postage stamp. If I don't have
much room to express many ideas, I have to concentrate, to edit the most
important part of what I want to say. Imagine asking a novelist, 'Write the main
ideas of your book on a postage stamp.' The reductioad absurdumis enormously
important in the history of architecture. Whether it is in the dimension of time,
or in the double colonnade of the Louvre, San Pietro in the Vatican or the Villa
Savoye, or the Farnsworth House, every time it is a cartoon but it still contains a
concept, a certain moment in the history of architecture and the ways people
looked at architecture. So because there is no architecture without concept, the
diagram can become central to my discovery of new concepts, three - and four -
dimensional, architectural concepts. If you had asked me, 'Precisely what kinds
of concepts and diagrams?', say 20 to 25 years ago, I would have responded,
'Programme.' Programf!le is a thing that one needed to explore. Now I feel
reasonably comfortable about understanding how it works. If you had asked me
the question 15 years ago, I would have said, 'Vectors and envelopes.' Five years
ago, I would have said, 'The information and the combination between concept,
content and context.' At the moment I am working on very long-term, large-
scale projects. So my interest again is very much about exploring, at the city
scale, those same issues. But now I have to deal with utilities, infrastructure,
financial flows and all of that. You need to conceptualise this because these are
not forms, they are very abstract and complex. The definition of the word 'city'
may have to do with 'a substantial amount of noise'. These days, reducing the
level of pollution, traffic and the level of noise is totally against the idea of cities.

201 The Diagramsof BernardTschumi

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The city has always been the place of congestion and always been the place
where it was noisier; it was always the place that was more polluted; it used to
stink of shit and piss. The point is that the inherent purity of architecture is
always there and tries to reduce those dimensions.

Describing the subject of the future of the diagram and new technologies, of diagrams in
softwares, interfaces and in their parametric and interactive forms, Tschumi concludes that :

For me the diagram is a device, a tool that I am always using, that I am improving,
that is an extension of my mind . Whether that tool is used with digital techniques
or as a scribble, that is still just the graphic extension of my brain . New
technologies are very important and not just in architecture. New technologies
and visualisations can completely change, not only what a city looks like but the
way it works, land values, the economy, lifestyle, everything . But the inventor of
the light bulb or of electricity also completely changed it all. These are things
that happen in the realm of architecture which are part of an overall, wider
research project. However, I can't see the diagram disappearing, as it is a
mediation and you need to go through that mediation. But architecture is also
about sensation, physicality, experience. For example, the Gothic cathedral is

202 The Diagramsof Architecture

Bernard Tschumi Architects, combined macquettes/ diagrams, Pare de la Villette,
Paris, 1982. © Collection FRAC Centre Orleans. Photos Philippe Magnon.

simultaneously a very complex set of mathematical and geometrical diagrams

and an extraordinarily powerful experienti al state . In this sense, it shows that if
you just had t hose circles a Gothic cathedral is made of, you would not go very
far in your religious or metaphysical experience. At present the diagram is more
in the conceptual, and not so much properly in the experiential, realm. Some of
Nigel Coates's drawings had an amazing way of being simultaneously a diagram
and atmospheric - in other words, loaded with an incred ible amount of
intensity that is communicating a concept through something that is both
abstract and representational at the same time. So coexisting w ith these new
technologies , I may have an absolutely rigid prison - cell-like space which has
absolutely no interact ion whatsoever and which is aggressive against you but
which is somet hing that might expand the boundaries of architecture, and
therefore I would also support that. There are many people who are trying in
their own way to expand, th rough t he diagram, the boundaries of what
architecture and cities may need to be. I try in my own way, with my own
interest , which is to explore those limits and boun daries and try to find new
alternatives and intelligence in architecture.

© 2009 Mar k Garcia .

203 The Diagramsof BernardTschumi